One thing I want to be clear about is that all appearances are to the contrary. A face that only a mother could love It wasn’t shot by Charlie Kaufman or Michel Gondry or Wes Anderson. It was not shot by a famous filmmaker. In fact, it wasn’t shot at all.
This eight-minute short story about a disfigured Parisian man named Marcel who dances in hope every night in his apartment, waiting for a companion who doesn’t exist, was actually the brainchild of Robert Gaudette. Focus on the brain. Or, more accurately, intelligence. An artificial kind of thing.
And I’ll focus on that one.
Without the use of a single actor, producer or crew, Gaudette used an array of AI tools to tell the tender story of a man who, despite all his hardships, barely hangs on inside his station. On the contrary, he maintains an irresistible optimism that, even in these days of AI takeover of cinema, we can all benefit from it. Watching this film and Marcel’s precarious faith in a world so cruel, you can feel the growing potential of humanity. It also leaves me with more mixed feelings about our AI creative future.
Depending on how you look at it, Gaudette is cinema’s great hope in this automated age. No one can look at what he created and call it anything but art. Or he poses the greatest threat. Once you can do it that What does the introduction of AI mean for traditional film sets? Or will the original director take the original shots? Gaudette represents the future of filmmaking: brave, daring, and on the back burner. There, one person with a great idea and free time can conjure up what we’ve waited years to find by scouring festivals (or YouTube). Or, many visionary types like him were never found at all due to lack of resources.
Or perhaps even worse, “Gaudette” represents a brave, bold, back-patting future for filmmaking. Time, money, actors, and all the other human things that lubricated the process quietly disappeared. This is what happens when movies become extremely populist, when literally anyone can make a movie without building a set, leaving their house, or answering the phone.
Gaudette has no formal film training, is self-taught in editing, sound engineering, and other technical skills on the side, and has never had a story published. But he was writing scripts and stuffing them into drawers one after another, and the number soon grew to over 25 or 30. To the utter indifference of Hollywood, which had never even heard of him.
Robert Gaudette
Robert Gaudette
“No one was funding the short films I made,” Gaudette said in a phone interview. hollywood reporter The voice sounded a little like his grumpy protagonist Tuesday night from his home in Toronto. “But with AI, I think that will no longer be necessary.”
Gaudette, a soft-spoken man with a heavy Canadian accent, worked in the tech industry early in his career, recruited a few crazy people to try photography full-time, and then pivoted to nonprofits. When Midjourney and other image generation tools arrived in 2022, he started a side hustle using AI to generate shots, which has now become his full-time job. Let’s say you’re an agency pitching commercial ideas to brands and you need to show them what the vision will be. Gaudette comes in and crafts the vision you can present with next to no production costs. Need a pickup or difficult shot for a TV show but don’t have the budget? Dr. Bob is here again to provide the cure for several Canadian TV series.
Gaudette is one of the first people who can legally say he makes a living solely from AI video generation. AI filmmaking in the 2020s is to social media what Jeffree Star was to 2000s-inspired social media. YCan you make a living from it?
And as of last Thursday, Gaudette has also produced perhaps the most moving human film ever produced by AI. Admittedly, this is a very short list. Then again, the mere fact that the words “inspiring humanity” and “AI-generated” can exist in the same sentence is worthy of some kind of award.
In fact, he won the $50,000 “Grand Prize” at the Runway AI Film Festival in New York last week. The annual gathering, Runway, a video generation startup with more than $800 million in funding, has rented out Alice Tully Hall for the occasion. When Gaudette’s film was shown, there was genuine outrage among the audience, which was primarily AI filmmakers. There were certainly other notable films as well. A summer movie about French childhood. costa verde They were indulging in hallucinations that had magical effects, suggesting that the company had improved significantly in the year since it last held a gathering. (The LA installment airs Thursdays.)
However, Gaudette was operating on a different plane. The crowd almost erupted when Runway co-founder Chris Valenzuela called out the winner. Not only was he happy for his colleagues in this still small community, but he was probably also happy for the moment he crossed the chasm. Whatever happens from here, Gaudette has proven one thing that many in the traditional entertainment industry said would never be proven. That is, LLM-generated films can be inspiring. “I was hopeful we could do that,” he said. “But I didn’t know if I could do it.” (You can read more about the film and its moving story, along with Kaufman and Anderson, as well as the work of Guillermo del Toro, Gaudette’s talents, and/or how AI models can synthesize the work of major directors, further down.)
Until a few months ago, Gaudette had never really gotten into filmmaking. But he kept thinking about the idea of A Lonely Man in Paris, so he started writing it. And now, after two weeks of work (admittedly 17 hours a day), he’s here with one of the most remarkable works of early aesthetics.
Paris in his films feels stylized and idealized. There may be a good reason for that. Because he has never been to Paris. Instead, Gaudette relied on a number of scrapped directors via AI. Probably as well. If they showed up to film in person, they would just ruin the city with their realism.
Generating shots is…not easy. This model can actually only process 5-8 seconds at a time. In other words, you cannot take very long shots. Filming will not take place immediately. And, more importantly, it means spending a lot of time scrapping what you had and starting over to make sure the new shots match the old ones.
You see, most of the models don’t remember the last shot – their coverage as assistant directors is greatly exaggerated – so each time they start from scratch, spin the roulette wheel and hope that the new generation looks like a continuation of the last scene.
This causes many AI filmmakers to shorten shots and scenes. NBA Finals directors who are paying attention to Chalamet have little insight. But Gaudette worked the hard way by putting together scenes that lasted more than 30 seconds. This meant that the model required a surprisingly large number of generations to work properly. Or an amazing number of gallons of water. On the other hand, production vans aren’t running around polluting everything.
The whole process feels intense. Also, crapshoot. “There’s a lot of gambling and slot machines,” Gaudette admitted. Again, if something goes wrong, you haven’t wasted half a day of shooting. Just press delete and start over. Plus, he says, “The more you do it, the more you learn the language that helps you get what you want.”
You can watch face And I continue to believe that it is impossible to truly create works of art with the help of such machines. Or you can get so moved that you completely forget that what you’re watching is created by an AI, and you ask yourself who these actors are and what they’ve been in before remembering they don’t exist, and only when the credits roll do you ask yourself all those uncomfortable moral and spiritual questions like what is a movie anymore, or what’s the point of movie sets and the movie industry? If you’re a studio executive trying to save money, like I am, you definitely do.
Gaudette doesn’t have high hopes for the film to be shown at any festivals, including the local TIFF. But he heard rumors that a Rhode Island festival had an AI filmmaking section, and that another festival might have one.
He says it would be “awesome” if a traditional Hollywood studio discovered him through this short and brought him into a traditionally shot project or development. face As a feature (there’s a lot of backstory to explore). But strangely, or refreshingly, he has no specific desire to transition, and is content to continue making AI movies. He is already developing his next short story. He believes the entire process can be shortened to 10 days.
