I recently found myself sitting between three tech bros on my right and three cinephiles on my left. The film festival panel was meant to be a discussion about AI in the film industry; instead, it was an exasperating—if entertaining—demonstration of the radical gap in knowledge separating people who have some technical understanding of AI and those who don’t. There were tone-deaf proclamations about “generating content” and “optimizing workflows” on one side. And there was shouting, swearing, table-pounding, finger-pointing and (almost) tears on the other side, culminating in the announcement, “We’re very afraid!” I get it. AI has been foisted on […]
by Holly Willis on Dec 15, 2023For their Rotterdam-premiering feature New Strains‘s poster, Prashanth Kamalakanthan and Artemis Shaw knew they didn’t want to use an actual image from their pandemic production, which was shot on Hi-8. And they wanted an image that in addition to being beautiful would formally resonate with the film itself, a story of visiting young lovers (played by the filmmakers) stuck in New York when a travel ban hits at the start of a pandemic. “We were thinking about that sense of being frozen in time,” Shaw says. “In March, 2020, everyone was obsessed with the news, but we were all stuck […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jan 20, 2023“An ominous slender figure in the foreground, a gay couple kissing in the distance, alleyway, two-point perspective, at night, a bar crowded, 8K, cinematic, cinematic composition, in the style of Jean-Luc Godard, rendered in the Gaspar Noe engine.” Via Zoom, Natou Fall shares her screen with me, allowing me to look at the hundreds of images she’s created using text prompts in the generative AI program Midjourney. The image resulting from the prompt above is an eerie one of a silhouetted couple holding hands, both wearing fashionable flared jackets and standing in a sparse, neon-accented nightclub with a figure lurking […]
by Scott Macaulay on Dec 15, 2022