In 2023, generative artificial intelligence company Runway launched an AI film festival and received approximately 300 short film submissions. A year later, the festival attracted more than 3,000 applicants and 10 finalists premiered his May 1st at the Orpheum Theater in Los Angeles.
AI has also been a major issue in Hollywood over the last year, with several labor strikes and panic-inducing headlines. Meanwhile, filmmakers also use it.
“The reality among my colleagues is that more people use it than we would like to admit,” IndieWire Editor-in-Chief Dana Harris said during a panel discussion at AIFF on Wednesday. said AI filmmaker Paul Trillo, who was hosted by Bridson. “I've seen people pretending to be anti-AI. They're using Midjourney and ChatGPT and trying to take a stance, but they don't know that people are using something. Masu.”
Trillo's panelists included Emmy Award-winning animator Joel Kwahara (The Simpsons, Bob's Burgers), tech writer, artist and musician Claire L. Evans of the indie rock band YACHT; It was Cristóbal Valenzuela, the founder of Runway.
Kuwabara said that every time he posts about AI on his Instagram, he is met with a flood of vomit emojis.
“In certain sects on the internet, it’s almost becoming cool to hate AI,” Trillo says. “Part of me thinks, 'Oh, it's great to hate AI.'”
“I always imagine people who hate AI smoking cigarettes and saying, 'Fuck it,'” he added. But I feel like the more I hate something, the more scared I become of it…If you're scared, I encourage you to get your hands on it and experience it for yourself. ”
Harris-Bridson asked the panel what, as a filmmaker, he believes generative AI can do that cannot be done otherwise. The answer wasn't about storytelling possibilities or visual innovation, but rather about process. AI allows you to constantly iterate on new ideas and quickly try things that might otherwise be too ambitious or too expensive.
“You learn about yourself and also get to step outside of yourself in an interesting way,” Evans said. “I have always taken a discursive approach to AI, looking at a dataset, considering what I can input into it, what I can get out of it, and where I stand in relation to its output. Does it have any meaning? Are you projecting meaning onto it?”
Evans also said it allows her to examine her own history and find ways to “redirect and creatively course correct” in response to her past. Trillo tried to summarize the idea in a different way.
“More than anything, it gave me a new process. It doesn't matter what the tools are. Fundamentally, the way I do my work will change forever,” Trillo added. He said it's important to have more of those “aha” moments, which sometimes don't happen often enough when you're staring at a blank page. “The great thing is that you can fail faster.”
Kuwabara is rather introverted when he works, using generative AI tools as a way to sit in front of a computer and generate ideas, tinkering and refining the model until it spits out the image he's looking for. he said.
“You can only push people back before they start to rebel,” Kuwabara says. “Here, I can be just as critical of myself and repeat and punish myself until I see what happens or if I'm going in the wrong direction.”
Trillo said he likes to “lean into the weird,” such as the installation “Thank You For Not Answering” and the band Washed Out's new music video, the first to be produced entirely using OpenAI's Sora. Projects that try to get too close to reality can be very boring, he argued. He would rather find something that is unlike anything else.
Evans, who used generative AI tools to create melodies and new sounds with his band YACHT, is trying to find something on the edge of generative AI models to create something unusual or creative almost by accident. “I'm looking for strangeness,” he said.
That feeling was reflected in the 10 short films from the finalists that were screened after the panel discussion. There were also some surreal montages of completely generated, impossible images. Films like the top prize winner “Get Me Out” combine live-action filmmaking with generative creation to help actors battle their inner demons, literally battling red neon monsters and warping walls. , which told the story of a man battling agoraphobia. his house.
Valenzuela said that within a few years, AI could become an art form in itself, with interactive experiences where people watch something being generated in real time. We don't have the language yet to describe what it is, but it doesn't necessarily compete with or replace movies.
Kuwabara said he sees AI as a tool that requires talented people. “I think there's quite a bit of tension and fear. That was one of the main reasons I wanted to get this tool,” he said. “Is this fear justified? Is it justified? And we're seeing what it really takes to create something that can actually be used. I think we need to play with it and experiment.”
