Today, the ability to create videos using artificial intelligence is available to anyone with a computer and the internet, and the entertainment industry is catching up. But this has sparked debate about what such a program would mean for the creative industry, and whether it could really replace writers, artists and animators.
Last month, viewers in Israel began watching digital animation on their screens with the arrival of the new TV series Red Skies. Its introduction is an AI-generated mosaic of Israeli and Palestinian experiences, all set to a wistful, sad melody.
The intro depicts young people swimming in the sea. A guitarist who transforms into a heavily armed soldier. Flying birds and falling stones. Burning buildings mixed with luxurious skyscrapers. Sirens, rockets, tanks. And a coffin covered in flags flashing from the green, red, white, and black of Palestine to the blue and white of Israel.
The jumping footage is a fitting introduction to the show’s story of two friends, an Israeli (Sahl) and a Palestinian (Ali), and their relationship with each other and the girl they love, Jenny. there is
Running in the shade for a minute, this animated opening heralds a new era of artistic expression created entirely by artificial intelligence.
Red Skies came out two days before another series that also used an AI intro, The Secret Invasion, produced by Disney’s Marvel Studios and starring Samuel L. Jackson.
The greenish opening reflects the incoherent and confused nature of the show, where anyone can pretend to be someone else and no one really knows what’s real and what’s fake. But it has sparked widespread debate about the potential for creators to lose their jobs and be replaced by machines.
AI-generated videos have been around for several years. Perhaps they first entered the public consciousness in 2018 when he posted a video purporting to be from former U.S. President Barack Obama, warning of the dangers of what has come to be known as “deepfakes.” it was done.
beyond the curve
Merav Shacham, the artist who created the Red Skies intro, tells NoCamels that he realized last year that he had to navigate this new phenomenon as generative AI platforms like Midjourney and DALL-E grew in popularity.
In addition to owning his own animation and design studio, BANANAMOON, Shacham is a lecturer in the Visual Communication Department at Shenkar University of Engineering, Design and Art outside Tel Aviv.
So Shacham, a seasoned TV designer (she also created the intro for the Israeli global hit TV show Fawda), did what she called “really large-scale research,” I started exploring the medium of generative AI.
“I had a meeting with the dean and he said that students are going to use it and we need to know what it is because we are lecturers. We have to, because next year we have students using it, and we have to join the club,” she recalls.
“The results were pretty amazing,” she says, comparing the input method to inserting a coin into a casino slot machine.
“You just give it a prompt, a line of text, a few parameters and it’s like magic. Everything comes to life,” she explains.
Shacham was so impressed with what he could do that when Red Skies co-creator Ron Leshem asked him to create an intro for the series, he suggested using artificial intelligence to do so. .
Red Skies executive producer Daniel Sinner said the show’s production team was initially cautious. Based on his best-selling novel.
“We were intrigued, but a little worried. [What] We hear a lot of negative things about AI, but will it replace us?” he tells NoCamels.
However, the actual intro creation process turned out to be “interesting” and smoother than expected, says Shinar. The series production team will explain the concept, and Shacham will work on it.
They then go through the results together. What I found there wasn’t necessarily what I expected, but the surprise wasn’t necessarily unwelcome. In fact, Sinner says it can be very different from what you asked for, but it’s still “very beautiful.”
“I have two kids watching the sunset on the beach, a girlfriend and two best friends, but the machine spits out a sea of sand instead of the ocean,” he says.
“Wherever there’s a boat, that boat isn’t in the ordinary sea. It’s in the sandy sea, but that’s what we didn’t have as an input — it’s kind of imaginative. Or Jordan If you say you want to see a demonstration on the West Bank, you will see a demonstration with a coffin, and the coffin will be hoisted with the Israeli flag and then the Palestinian flag.”
The flag-bearing coffin has been preserved, and Sinner likens the image to a “political statement made by computers and AI.”
Shacham also got unexpected results for the instructions he put into the program, likening the work process to a collaboration between an artist and a machine.
“Once you start using it and interacting back and forth with the machine, you realize that there’s a lot more unpredictable visuals in it than just prompts and different styles. And I’m very attached to this interpretation. I was intrigued,” she says.
Nor was it just a case of typing in a few instructions and hoping for the best. Throughout the process, Shacham made over 100 different versions before being satisfied with the results.
And despite the debate about the potential threat posed by AI-generated content, neither writers nor artists believe AI will replace humans.
Shacham sees AI as “just another tool for experimenting with visuals” and “needs further development to become more sophisticated and professional.”
For Sinner, the core of the work is humanity, “the magical part that brings people together emotionally.” And this, he says, can never be replaced by artificial intelligence.
“I don’t think people will cry when they see the AI opening sequence. There needs to be a touch of magic there. In my opinion, it’s the secret ingredient that needs to be human.”
