France's Annecy Animation Festival kicked off on Sunday, with a screening of the competition's films as one of the event's first activities. During the screening, Sian Méchain's French-language music video for “Etoile Fillante,” created with generative artificial intelligence software, had the unusual honor of being booed by the Annecy crowd.
According to the French VFX, Animation and Games website 3D VF“Etoile Filante,” which was being shown, and all the other films shown during the event were met with varying degrees of applause. When the video for “Etoile Filante,” directed by Kerzan Lavac and produced by Temple Cachet and Mélusine Cailleau, finished, a few people clapped, but the majority of the audience remained silent, and “some of the audience began booing the video.”
Filled with students from Europe's top animation schools, the Annecy audience, made up mostly of animation students and professionals, is generally quite cynical towards the films shown at the festival. The audience applauds almost every film shown, if only to show their support for the immense amount of work that goes into making an animated film.
So for a tournament title, especially a French one, to be booed by a large section of the home crowd is an exceptional event, one that could be repeated throughout the week.
When the Annecy Film Festival announced this year's lineup in late April, it quickly became known that it would be screening director Ryo Nakajima's “Who Said Death is Beautiful?”, a 68-minute Japanese film that used Stable Diffusion AI software during development, as well as other technologies such as VR, motion capture, and tablet-based virtual camera filming.
After the film's selection became a hot topic, Annecy's artistic director Marcel Jean released a statement about the decision to select an AI-made film, explaining that “it is important for us to pay attention to how things evolve and to react with the discernment, sensitivity and artistic flair that deserves our participation on the selection committee.”
Critics of the ruling argue that image-generating software is illegally trained using copyrighted material, and therefore showcasing titles that used those programs in their development or production is no different than celebrating theft.
Whether Annecy audiences will buy into the festival's legitimacy remains to be seen, but judging by Sunday night's screening of a commissioned film, that doesn't seem to be the case.
Read Jean's full statement (translated from French) below:
First, we have no rules that prohibit the use of artificial intelligence. As with many other things, it is important to pay attention to how things evolve and to respond with the insight, sensitivity and artistic flair that we deserve on the selection committee. Rules prevent us from thinking further, but the addition of AI to creativity raises a series of questions that truly require reflection.
Last year, we selected Australian filmmaker Vladimir Todorovic's short film “Algodreams” in the Off-Limits competition, a prize he also won in 2021 for his previous work “Tunable Mimoid.” Todorovic used AI in the film in a smart way, highlighting the mechanics of creation.
This year, unsurprisingly, we see more works using AI. Most of them are not deceptive. It is immediately clear that the use of technology is without vision, thought or special sensitivity. But a minority of these works try to follow a fruitful path. These works provoke questions that we must share with the public, the industry and the jury. That is why we have selected the works that we believe to be the most relevant and have the most potential to stimulate or provoke discussion.
We also realized that music videos are ideal ground for AI, due to the fast production speed and often modest budgets allocated to their production. Artists turn to technology because they are constantly being asked to propose new images and do so quickly and at low cost. In the end, this produces very outdated images, revealing limitations and making it possible, in a few years' time, to tell in which quarter of 2023 this music video was made…
Marcel Jean – Artistic Director of the Annecy Film Festival
