AI film festival gives glimpse of cinema’s future

NEW YORK – With fantastical characters including mud people and giant grandmothers, an AI film festival is giving a glimpse of the storytelling made possible by the novel technology.

Nearly 3,000 short films were submitted to the festival organised by Runway AI, one of the leading start-ups in the field of artificial intelligence-powered video generation. The 10 films selected put the film-makers’ vivid imaginations on display, with their stories set in aesthetically stunning universes.

“There is a perception of... AI-driven film-making and creation as having a very specific style,” said Runway co-founder and chief technology officer Anastasis Germanidis. But each of the selected films “feels very different from the other one”, he said on May 9 at the festival’s awards ceremony.

Movie-making and animation have grown by leaps and bounds in the past 50 years. Past feature films, such as Inception (2010), The Matrix (1999) and Loving Vincent (2017), come to mind when watching the AI shorts.

But the latest technology allows films to be made on a fraction of a typical movie budget, and by anyone with access to a computer and the software.

With just a prompt, Runway can transform a series of still images into a short video or turn a photo into a painting.

In February, generative AI leader OpenAI launched its video creation software, dubbed Sora, while Google and Meta are developing their own versions, called Lumiere and Emu, respectively.

For his short that won an Honoree prize at the festival, Leo Cannone generated hundreds of images using the AI application Midjourney, then animated them with Runway, making countless edits along the way.

Current AI technology is still underdeveloped in some areas, particularly in providing multiple camera angles and creating flawless human-like speaking characters. “I couldn’t really have human characters or dialogue, so that set the aesthetic of the film,” the French director said of his short, Where Do Grandmas Go When They Get Lost?, about what happens to grandmothers after they die.

With the AI-generated visuals, “there were still a lot of defects in each scene, so I had to retouch a lot. It doesn’t come out of the software ready to use”.

Runway co-founder Alejandro Matamala conceded the technology has not been perfected.

“If you want a photorealistic character that is human... we are not advanced enough to do that. But we are saying, there are many different ways to tell stories.”

Runway is developing something it calls General World Models, an AI system that can simulate a real-world environment by anticipating how future events unfold in a dynamic setting.

The three Runway co-founders do not come from computer engineering backgrounds. Rather, they studied art-related fields at New York University.

They are focused on creating a common language for programming and creativity, citing Apple and Pixar as examples.

“For some of the emerging film-makers like myself, it represents a real opportunity to turn the typical model of the Hollywood industry,” said Italian director Carlo De Togni, who also won an award at the festival for his work titled The Dawn Of Creation.

“Artists could bring to life some new stories without having the money,” he said, pointing out that some generative AI platforms offered subscriptions for only US$30 (S$41) or US$50 a month.

The prospect of such a sea change in film-making is so troubling to Hollywood that actors and screenwriters staged a months-long strike last summer, demanding protection against generative AI, among other things.

For De Togni, the technology will eventually become commonplace, and what will be more important are “your ideas, your thoughts”, in using the tools to bring a vision to life.

AI film-making already cuts out work done by various professionals, putting industry jobs at risk.

But Runway co-founder and chief executive Cristobal Valenzuela said automation “happens all the time, but the jobs themselves are going to change”.

“That’s the role of technology – to allow us to change.” AFP