Affleck issued a lengthy statement to fill in the story and also participated in a five-minute video conversation with Netflix’s chief content officer Bela Bajaria and chief technology and product officer Elizabeth Stone.
Watch the video above to hear Affleck tell “the story of Interpositive’s birth and his vision for creative-first technology,” as per the release from Netflix.
In 2022, I spent a lot of time observing the early rise of AI in production. As a filmmaker, I see how inadequate these models are. For artists to apply these tools to tell the stories we dedicate our lives to, they must be purpose-built to express and protect all the qualities that make great stories: the nuances of filmmaking, the predictable and unpredictable challenges of a production environment, the distortion of a lens, or the way light changes shape across a scene.
We also need to maintain what makes storytelling human: judgment. It takes decades to build and hone experience, something that only humans can possess. I knew I had a responsibility to my colleagues and the industry to protect human creativity and the people behind it. In creating InterPositive, I sought to do just that.
Together with a small team of engineers, researchers, and creatives, we began filming our own dataset in a controlled soundstage, with all the familiarity of a full production. I wanted to build a workflow that captured what was happening on set, using a vocabulary that matched the language that cinematographers and directors already spoke, and included the kind of consistency and control they expected.
Intensive research and development has resulted in the first model trained to understand visual logic and editing consistency while maintaining cinematic rules even under real-world production challenges such as missing shots, background substitutions, and bad lighting. It also includes built-in limits to protect creative intent, so the tool is designed to enable responsible exploration while keeping creative decisions in the hands of artists, ensuring the benefits of this technology are directly reflected in the stories artists are trying to tell. The result of this foundational work has been the creation of intentionally small datasets and models that focus on filmmaking techniques rather than performance, and tools that artists can use, control, and benefit from.
From the invention of video to the transition to digital, from motion capture to virtual production, technology has evolved along with the artists who use it. Our shared commitment to continuing this tradition, coupled with Netflix’s decades of experience responsibly applying and extending technology, makes working together a natural next step. Our combined values and complementary strengths ensure that these tools are used with the same care and responsibility with which they were built.
I couldn’t be more excited to continue this work with the team at Netflix. We’re also looking forward to providing the broader creative community with access to what we’re building and the future we’re working on together.
