Ancestra said a lot about the current state of videos generated by AI-Ai

After watching the new short film by the writer Eliza McNitt AncestorI can see why a number of Hollywood studios are interested in a generative AI. A number of shots have been made and refined only with prompts, in collaboration with the Deepmind team from Google. It is obvious Primordial soup production house of the primordial soup of Darren Aronofsky And Google wishes to draw from the normalization of this type of creative workflow. But when you sit down to listen to McNitt and Aronofsky talk about how the short film met, it is difficult not to think of the potential of the generator to inaugurate a new era of “”content“It feels like it was cooked in a laboratory – and put dozens of filmmakers without work in the process.

Inspired by the history of McNitt’s complicated birth, Ancestor Zoome on the life of a pregnant woman (Audrey Corsa) as she prays for her future heart defect in her baby to heal miraculously. Although the short characteristics of a certain number of real actors occurring on practical sets, the Gemini, Imagen and VEO models of Google were used to develop AncestorThe plans of what flows into the mind of the mother and the tiny dangerous hole inside the baby’s heart. Inside the mother’s belly, we are shown Blond-Sque of the baby close -ups, whose heart rate is gradually part of the soundtrack of the film. And women’s ruminations on what it means to be a mother is visualized as a series of very short clips of other women with children, volcanic explosions and stars born after the Big Bang-which all have a very Byway-by-Way-de-Gen-Ai.

All this is very sentimental, but the message transmitted to the power of the love of a mother is cliché, in particular when it is juxtaposed to what is essentially a montage of nature sequences generated by computer. Visually Ancestor feels like a project that tries to prove how all AI Sols videos flood the internet are actually something that must be excited. The film lacks so much fascinating narrative substance, however, that it looks like a rather weak argument in favor of Hollywood rushes to go down the slope while it is hot.

While McNitt Smash cuts rapid photos of different types of animals nourishing their young people and their close -ups of holes filled with microscopic organisms, you can say that these visuals represent a large part of the AI ​​foundations of the film. They each feel as another example of the capacity of text models to produce strange and decontextualized images which would be difficult to integrate into a fully produced film. But in the video manufacturing video behind the scenes which Google shared its ad Last week, McNitt speaks at length about how, faced with the difficult perspective of having to launch a real baby, it was much more logical to create a false with Google models.

“There is nothing like a human performance and the kind of emotion that an actor can evoke,” says McNitt. “But when I wrote that there would be a newborn baby, I did not know the solution of how we would (get out) because you cannot make a baby act.”

The cinema with infants poses all kinds of production challenges which are simply not a problem with CGI babies And Doll accessories. But going to the Gen Ai road also presented to McNitt the opportunity to make her film even more personal using old photos of herself as a newborn to serve as a base in the face of the false baby.

With a little fine adjustment, AncestorThe production team was able to combine photos of Corsa and false baby to create scenes in which they almost seem, but not quite, interacting as if the two were real actors. If you look at wider photos carefully, you can see that the mother’s hand seems to hover just over her child because the baby is not really there. But the scene passes so quickly that it does not stand out immediately, and it is much less “Ai-l’AirThat the more fantastic photos of the film meant to represent the hole in the heart of the baby healed by the will of the mother.

Although McNitt notes how “hundreds of people” were involved in the creation process AncestorOne of the biggest dishes in behind the scenes video is how relatively small the project production team compared to what you might see on a more traditional short film telling the same story. Hire more artists to conceptualize and then create AncestorThe visuals would undoubtedly have made the film more expensive and taking time to finish. Especially for independent filmmakers and emerging creatives who have no unlimited resources at their disposal, it is the types of challenges that can be extremely difficult to overcome.

But Ancestor Also resembles a case study on the way generative behaves to eliminate jobs that would have been going to people. The argument is often that AI is a tool and that the work will move rather than be replaced. However, it is difficult to imagine that studio leaders truly believe in a future where specialists, concepts and storyboarders of today’s VFX have passed to jobs as fast writers who are sufficiently well offset to maintain their livelihoods. It was a large part of what led Hollywood Film / television actors And writers to strike in 2023. This is also why video game interpreters have been on strike for a better part of the past yearAnd it seems irresponsible to reject these concerns because people are simply afraid of innovation or change to change.

In the manufacturing video, Aronofsky stresses that advanced technology has always played an essential role in the cinema sector. You would have trouble today to find a modern film or series that was not produced with the use of powerful digital tools that did not exist a few decades ago. There are things on AncestorThe use of a generative AI which certainly gives a demonstration of how Google models could, theoretically and with enough high quality training data, become sufficiently sophisticated to create images that people would really like to look in a theater. But the way Aronofsky goes to the stony face and responds “not good” when one of Google’s Deepmind researchers explains that Veo can only generate eight -second clips says a lot about the place where generating AI is at the moment and Ancestor as a creative business.

One has the impression that McNitt tells herself a little when she tells how the release of generative models influenced the way she wrote Ancestor. She says that “the two things have really been informed”, but it looks like a very positive way to run the fact that the technical limitations of VEO have forced her to write a dialogue that could be associated with a series of clips vaguely linked to the concepts of maternity and childbirth. All this gives the impression that the intention of author of McNitt sometimes had to be prioritized in favor of working with all that the models of AI spit. If it was the opposite, Ancestor Could have told a much more interesting story. But there are very little on Ancestornarrative or, to be honest, his visuals which are so revolutionary that it looks like an example of the reason why Hollywood should Rushing to embrace this entirely fabric technology.

Movies produced with more generative AI It can be cheaper and faster to do, but technology as it exists does not seem to be really able to produce art that would put Buths in cinemas or pushing people to register for another streaming service. And it is important to keep in mind that, ultimately, Ancestor is really an ad intended for drum for Google, which none of us should rush.