I find the edit video with text the most fascinating aspect. I can see this being used for indie films that doesn’t have a CGI budget. Like the scene with the movie theater, you can film them on lounge chairs first and then edit it to seem like a movie theater.
100% agree, the background replace that puts the guy into a stadium would be fully usable as a cut in a movie/tv show, and the background is believable enough that no one would bat an eye. If you use it properly, I expect a quality uplift on indie films/shorts. Your limit is your creativity
I personally expect a decrease in quality. Without limits people tend to get less creative. Sure, there is some balance here in that tools also enable new things to be done which are not possible without tools but working around limits has often inspired some of the most creative works.
I don't think that is necessarily true. Right now movies are so expensive that they can be created only by a few handfuls of people. But those people might not be the most creative people around. If thousands of people can create movies, we might find out that some people we didn't know of are far more creative.
Also "creation by committee" isn't a thing when somebody can produce a movie in their basement.
Anyway, I look forward to people using this tech to create alternative endings of existing movies.
So expensive? It has never been cheaper to create movies thanks to digital cameras and non-linear editors, digital audio workstations, etc. You are no longer encumbered by the costs of film, development, renting an edit bay, requiring an audio editing studio to mix audio and maintain a tape library of special effects or hire foley artists, no need for an optical printer to layer visual effects, etc.
You already can produce a movie in your basement, many of which can be found on YouTube.
Like with all generative AI this comes down to how specific you can get, and how consistent you can be. If you can art direct each element of the frame, down to the design of the individual props and scenic items, and have those items remain consistent from shot to shot. Then do the same with lighting, actors, camera characteristics (eg lens, focus, position in the scene, framing), etc, etc, etc, then maybe you’ve got a chance of making a ‘high budget movie from the early 2010s’. But I haven’t seen any generative ai that comes even close to this level of control or consistency… They’re closer to slot machines than anything consistent…
Yup, you can notice some issues even in their picked example. e.g. the prompt for the video of the painting woman says "there is a bear cub at her feet" and it quite clearly is not "at her feet" in the video.
And without being forced to interact with other people. The movie made by one creative and 100 automatons does not ai all compare to the one where there are multiple brilliant creatives butting heads and personalities and choosing never to work with each other again but the show must go on.
How many movie lines have been adlibbed but are absolute classics? Sonofabitch, he stole my line!
What a bizarre statement in an age when the phrase "executive meddling" can describe the sameness of so much content output, and most of the greatest flops have a story which goes "yeah there were too many people involved".
Like the second Avengers movie had this problem in spades.
It's not a bizarre statement at all. An executive meddling with something because X or Y element of a piece of art doesn't align with A or B market trend is not the same thing as people working together and sometimes clashing due to creative differences. You'll find that most works that you, or other people, like weren't the result of a sole individual's creative decisions going completely unchallenged. Others suggested, or revised, or fought. There can be too many cooks in the kitchen, of course, but that's an entirely different issue from executive meddling.
I'm not sure why you jump to executive involvement when I specifically stated two creatives butting heads. There's all sorts of stories where execs or someone came in and forced a movie to have, eg a giant robot spider in a wild west settint that didn't make sense but they really wanted one in some movie so they forced it to happen in one of the projects they were overseeing. but the sum of us is better than individual, so while there are solo artists out there, they're the exception rather than the rule.
The era of easily available game engines have brought to live hundreds of thousands of garbage games, but that doesn't matter. What matters are hundreds of really innovative ones that we wouldn't get otherwise.
In the professional creative tools business, "Now the only limit is your creativity" has been a popular marketing tagline for decades, especially for products based on new enabling technologies. It's common enough that a wry corollary has developed in response, which goes: "Unfortunately, for a lot of people that's a pretty big limit."
You’re not wrong, but the comment somewhat misses the point. A shot like that would require you to rent a stadium (generally not cheap) along with paying for a believable number of extras. That would put the shot out of budget for most indie filmmakers. Spending $20 on tokens to get “good enough” is totally worth it, and allows you to get shots that were previously out of reach.
Why bother? Actors cost money and scheduling is difficult. Do the whole thing in AI - the model will be trained on better actors than your indie cast, anyway.
It will be a loong time before AI can produce lead actors that are believable, act exactly the way you as a director want and tell the story you want to tell, so I think at least for now you'll still need the actors for the lead roles. But I can totally this being used for generating people/stuff in the background of certain shots in a low budget movie.
> It will be a loong time before AI can produce lead actors that are believable.
A "loong time" will be sooner that most of us think.
The way this is done currently is similar to motion capture except that the tools are gradually becoming democratized: A single actor can act all the roles you need (You could even act the scenes and roles yourself). That footage is then fed into a model that generates an actor with the appearance and voice that you desire.
As a random on the internet, my prediction is that within a year, you'll be able to produce lead actors that are believable using movie generation plus smartphone footage of yourself acting the scene.
Initially it will be expensive to make a feature length film. But from 2025 onward, the cost will come down as the tools improve. These will be a different type of movie for sure, but every advancement in film technology has always led to films that seem strange compared to what came before.
You're getting downvoted, but I agree with you except for your timeline. This won't be possible in a year. What's here is a concept demo, but the gulf between "that's neat" and "you can make a decent 10 minute short film" is pretty vast.
> But the gulf between "that's neat" and "you can make a decent 10 minute short film" is pretty vast.
Agreed. I expect the tools I described to be prohibitively expensive for the average person for some time. By the end of 2025, probably only well-funded studios will be able to use such tools and probably not economically.
But I'd be quite surprised if Hollywood studios/publishers aren't using their immense back catalogue to train private models right now. I don't think they'll ever allow royalty-free movie generation tools to be used that were trained on their catalogues. So perhaps there'll be a cottage industry of stock footage by amateur and professional actors for training/augmenting the movie generation models and tools that will be available for general use, royalty free.
Or perhaps these tools will simply emerge as just another TikTok filter and we'll see goofy couples who filmed a skit in their living room presented as gladiators arguing on the surface of Mars while their dog runs back and forth between them unable to choose a favourite.
Isn't that a core problem now. Getting actors to act exactly how you want was never a solved problem.
But this limits promotion where actors do interviews and sell the movie to the public. It also limits an actor doing something crazy that tanks a movie like a tweet.
The answer is that it depends on the director. For David Fincher or the Coen brothers, having this level of exactitude and precision is what their craft is all about.
But for plenty of other masters - think Cassavetes, Mike Leigh, even PTA - the actor's outstanding talent and instincts bring something to the script and vision that is outside of their prescriptive powers. Their focus is essentially setting up a framework for magic to happen inside of.
> Getting actors to act exactly how you want was never a solved problem.
As a choreographer myself, that's not necessarily a problem but rather a feature: it depends on how the director creates. Often you want what's unique to the performer, you don't want them to do something that's exactly like what you envisioned but whatever their interpretation/vision of it is, the "imperfectness" is what makes it interesting and rich.
> Getting actors to act exactly how you want was never a solved problem.
Also, some great lines in movies came from actors ad libs.
I hope there will always be some space for mild hallucination; without improvisation we wouldn't even have jazz.
