By Michaela Gordoni
Despite all the backlash for AI, it may be helping the industry more than hurting it, some say.
“The whole industry is going through a transformation, and it’s not because of AI,” said Andrew Hevia, head of film and TV at Fabula North America (Pablo and Juan de Dios Larraín’s production company). “Theatrical is being challenged and audience viewing patterns are changing…The outsized blockbuster budgets aren’t sustainable.”
“You have all these other, way bigger forces. If this is a tool that allows us to increase our ambition while still allowing the industry to survive and thrive and make stories engaging in a way that hadn’t really been possible before, that feels like a net good.”
Hevia helped create AI startup Runway, which has partnerships in place with Lionsgate and EDGLRD. Sundance prize-winning director Cutter Hodierne is also using the tool for his upcoming film, THE SHEPHERD.
“It’s not a one-size-fits-all opportunity. It’s still a very human-driven process,” Hevia explained. “You really have to refine it and speak to it to understand what you want to get out of it that’s really meaningful. That’s where there’s opportunity.”
Many of the AI concerns are regarding copyright, but Asteria, a company that creates AI tech with Moonvalley, says its model, Marey, is “the first clean and ethical AI model.”
“We’ve trained it only on data that we have paid filmmakers or rights holders to license,” said producer-director Bryn Mooser. “Nobody else is training a model like this.”
Related: Are Hollywood’s AI Concerns Reasonable?
Mooser says the model is filmmaker-first and eliminates concern for Hollywood copyright issues.
“If we can come out with a model that’s as powerful as everything else, but is trained ethically and legally, then we can get that model through the [Hollywood] legal departments,” Mooser says. “And on the studio side, we hope Marey can become the foundational model for the industry.”
When Marey is applied to live-action scenes, it can generate sequences that the camera didn’t capture.
“We want to work with studios to take their dailies, after they’ve wrapped production,” said Paul Trillo, Asteria’s strategic partner and senior creative director. He says Marey can create “an insert shot, get B-roll shots that they couldn’t have gotten on set, impossible camera angles, whatever, on top of the filmmaker’s [original] material.”
Adobe recently made a commitment to keep its AI software ethical, and theaters are also using AI in their business practices. Regal Cinemas uses AI to adjust ticket prices, using factors like demand, time of day and seating preferences for best occupancy rates. AMC uses AI to suggest films by analyzing past movies watched, Forbes reported.
It will be impossible to keep AI completely out of cinema. We need to learn how to cautiously integrate it, and Hollywood is gradually catching onto that.
Read Next: ‘We Have To Fight It’: Kevin Sorbo Warns Against AI Use In Hollywood
Questions or comments? Please write to us here.
- Content: +4Share:
- Content: +2