Public screening of movies to a paying audience was first pioneered by the Lumiere brothers in 1895. Those movies were in black and white, did not have sound and lasted hardly for a minute.
By the 1920s, the movie industry in the US produced 800 feature s films a year. Move forward to 2020s, a century later, the largest film industry shifted to India, the US, China, Nigeria and Japan . All these years, the film production was characterized by a mix of actors, directors, cameras and crews.
Of late, the grammar of cinema is changing on account of a new tool — the artificial intelligence (AI). No cameras are rolling, and no sets are constructed. OpenAI’s image generator software DALL-E2 produces every shot. An animation tool adds movements to characters’ faces. An entire film is generated with little more than a script and a couple of algorithms. There is tremendous cost saving. So much finance committed to special effects (VFX) and computer-generated imagery is saved. On the other hand, AI compresses the production timelines from months to hours.
There are no outdoor location shooting expenses. There are no expenses of set design. Money can be saved on actors too. What was rendered in weeks in high-end studios could be produced by feeding text prompts into an AI model.
India has become an early adopter of AI powered movie making or storytelling. Companies are generating AI-driven micro dramas. These are based on mythology. The episodes running into hundreds are made. There are mythological adaptations. A large-scale biopic of Hanuman is being made for theatrical release. It is scheduled to release on Hanuman Jayanti in 2026. It will use cutting edge AI techniques.
The Frost24, a 24-minute science fiction short has been made by Waymark. It happens to be the first fully AI-generated film.
AI could disintermediate humans in film making, say screenplay writers and technical crews. Even actors fear that their likeness can be replicated by algorithms.
There are issues here. AI can generate convincing visuals, but the product lacks nuances. The emotional subtlety of an actor cannot be reproduced convincingly. It could alienate audiences.
Curious Refuge runs an AI generated film modelling course. It teaches prompt engineering, animation and story boarding techniques. Udemy also introduced a course on text-to film generation. Some run the courses of on integrating AI and corporate videos.
The main issue is whether AI will supplement the traditional film making or replace it. AI could expand creative possibilities and cannot replace human craft.
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