Pressman Film CEO Sam Pressman is diving into artificial intelligence (AI) to explore the use of technology in storytelling.
Pressman’s (Daliland) short films looking for time Co-produced by Pierre Zandrovich and Matthew Tierney, the film premiered at the Tribeca Festival on June 8, making it the first AI-generated film to screen at a major film festival.
Combining iPhone imagery with the open source AI platform Stable Diffusion, we create a meditation on memory and loss in honor of Pressman’s father, Ed Pressman (american psycho, The Crow, Wall Street), a pioneering independent producer who died in January at the age of 79.
Pressman and Tierney also develop immersive experiences Humans After All: A Surreal Matrix of AI, Art, and CinemaA symposium on the intersection of AI, art, and cinema, you can watch it at The Canvas 3.0 at The Oculus, New York City until June 12th. The symposium will feature conversations, events and installations, including roundtable discussions on the potential of AI in cinema with pressmen, academics and researchers. Conversations with other filmmakers and talks about AI, law and intellectual property.
Pressman Film also produced a feature-length thriller film catch the dustThe film, starring Erin Moriarty and Jai Courtney, will premiere at the Tribeca Festival on June 11th. The company is currently in post-production to rethink the film. of Crow Directed by Rupert Sanders, starring Bill Skarsgård and FKA Twigs.
What appeals to you about AI?
Sam Pressman: Above all, I want to understand. To completely reject this new space feels like a huge loss to me. As an artist, this really inspired me, and the more we talked about AI and its actual technical capabilities, the more we talked about how it would completely transform idiosyncratic creators. [the more we wanted to experiment]. Created by Matt and Pierre, this film is the first to be produced using AI and shown at a major film festival. This alone shows how uncharted territory can be reached using AI to create art.
“why” [of exploring AI] It’s about seeing what positive work can be done and accepting that as scary as it is, it’s still the artist who is involved with the machine. But the only way to really understand what it is is to play with it.
how looking for time break out?
Tierney: Sam introduced me to Pierre [Zandrowicz] He was the founder of French VR, XR and AR company Atlas V. Atlas V has his two other projects in Tribeca Immersive and Pierre has been involved in immersive spaces for a long time. Sam and I have had many long conversations over the course of his year and a half about AI and the possibilities of cinema. Five minutes after they met, Sam and Pierre said, “Let’s make a movie,” and for no other reason.
Our intention behind it was to avoid the tropes that people have adopted for AI by exploring sci-fi. We wanted to tell the most human story we could, so we decided on the theme of memory, then childhood memories and how we have to deal with aging and the time we are fading from our lives. I made a story about
Pressman: My father was in the hospital when we started this job. There were previous cuts, but in the end, it was a child’s point of view and did not step into aging. It’s only six minutes of his life, but it’s a part of life, like a poem I’m immersed in.but in many respects looking for time Another possibility opens up. There is great potential to carry out a series of projects, as they bring us to the universal through shared memories, especially great films. This technology is actually a utility that allows for more democratic and open production by someone’s imagination.
Please tell me about the image
Pressman: We use the tree stump metaphor at the beginning of the film to express how the complex layers of our memory resemble tree rings. And then there’s his iPhone footage of a boy playing with a tree stump, using steady diffusion and text prompts to create what he wants. A tree stump becomes a full painted forest. A hole in a tree stump becomes this beautiful waterfall, where characters begin to live, you see squirrels running around, and as soon as you realize this beautiful painting unfolds, the image is like a memory. disappears into Small ideas evoke memories. Six months ago, it would have been impossible.
What camera did you use?
Tierney: We used iPhones. We wanted to prove we could do it, so we wanted to do something similar for kids in Oklahoma who have computers and camera phones and want to learn a little bit. rice field. that was our goal. To prove that you can make a movie with an idea and a few tools.
Did you shoot the original footage?
Pressman: we didn’t shoot [content] for the movie. It was a digital memory. We all have this canvas that is sinking into the cloud underworld. So we wanted to know how we could bring it to life, make it art, give it that spirit.
In doing so, it felt elusive, and in many ways it was a meditation on loss. Both the loss of the simple and beautiful childhood experience of running on the beach and the feeling of losing the people who loved it. If you have a computer and photos, the memories of those days will be revived.
How does the AI pervasive model work?
Tierney: The tool we used the most is called Stable Diffusion, and the advantage is that it’s open source. It has built a wonderful community of people who share everything they learn and build. It can draw from different models built by different users and authors. You can go to the community and say you need this or that tool.
Pressman: Take each frame and process it the way you want to augment the image. But often the result is a very heterogeneous experience from frame to frame, very realistic in nature but not very coherent. Therefore, a lot of effort went into the anti-flicker finish product. Frames A, B, and C are fundamentally different. This is because the subject is lit in a completely different way here than in the previous frame, and the machine-learned model doesn’t know how to make them consistent, so it reprocesses and looks like this: In engraving, keep polishing it.
And what’s interesting is how far it’s come in six months. Because the first version we made was beautiful and surreal, even though it felt like a mechanical hallucination.
what is the idea behind Humans After All: A Surreal Matrix of AI and Art and Oculus New York?
Tierney: It was based on all the conversations Sam and I had. We’ve found great technologists, scientists, materials scientists, artists and filmmakers talking about these things. They may be on his Twitter, they may have conversations, but they are rarely in the same room. Sam and I said the best thing we did together was going out into the world and talking to people and learning from different fields. And we figured we should hodge it together and invite people we know to see who’s coming and put creators and technologists in the same room. I think we all learn something from it and much builds on the connections that really exist.
What are your next plans for AI?
Pressman: There are several filmmakers that we develop projects with. [AI programmes and deep learning models] DALL-E and Midjourney create storyboards and previs. I think this is immediate and has already shown value. I think people working in VFX and post-production already rely on a lot of AI built into their editing and post-production software, such as motion tracking and other applications.
There are so many questions about how AI will affect Hollywood and its creators. It’s a big part of Hollywood Guild contract negotiations, but what do you think the AI will be used for?
Pressman: What is not defined is the question of how the actors are assigned. It’s a very dangerous area, and there’s a good reason SAG-AFTRA has a lot of questions about it. Because likenesses of actors can be reproduced so easily that the ownership of the actors themselves is questioned. So the question is how filmmakers use these different tools, how artists are respected, and how film subjects are respected as human beings.
Tierney: Our main intention is not to rely on these tools to save you writing time or get you to build something, but instead write everything yourself and direct everything yourself. Then we would do the sound design, write the score, and just do the rest. Choose one of these tools.
Let’s take the basic stuff that everyone has on their phone and use tools to anonymize it and make it a universal story.His one of Sam’s ideas was about Coachella [the annual US outdoor arts and music festival]. People have millions of memories they have recorded on their phones, but they just live on the drive somewhere and then they are lost. It takes a major festival, takes all the footage that’s dropped on Instagram, and uses tools like Stable Diffusion to create beautiful new memories and data maps of what this festival really was. , is an example of how to create art from all your footage. Whether the cutting room floor is a cell phone or a studio, anything that will be on the cutting floor. Everyone captures memories throughout their lives, but we have a great opportunity to really expand and explore all of them.
