One of the winning films, “The Dawn of Creation”, takes the artist Paul Gauguin on a mystical journey. … [+]
If you like your movies on the surreal side, look no further than the winners of the second annual AI Film Festival sponsored by video startup AI Runway.
In the short film by Daniel Antebi take me out, which won the grand prize out of thousands of entries, a boy named Aka frantically tries to escape a shady suburban American house. “But this house won't let me leave”, the protagonist narrates in Japanese. “Torturing me.”
However, the house is much more than a physical structure. It's a repository of Aka's haunting memories, depicted here as a ghostly blood-red figure locked in a macabre dance with the live-action protagonist. Antebi rotoscoped a second performer, then reskinned him with AI to make it look like he was made purely of muscle, with no skin.
Using AI “was the only way to execute the effect we wanted with the budget we had,” the New York-based filmmaker said via email. “Also, he produced some mind-blowing effects that were really emblematic of the character's internal state.”
Antebi made his frantic six-minute film about commuting and mental health using three AI products, including Runway's Gen-2 tool, which can generate videos with text, images or video clips. The festival's judges included film and television producers and directors, as well as technologists.
“I don't think it won the AI festival because of a clever use of the tool,” Antebi said, “but because the panelists who are artists and professionals resonated with the narrative of the piece created by a team of very passionate humans.”
take me outDaniel Antebi
The dawn of creation, Carlo De Togni and Elena Sparacino
Last year, Runway and Runway Studios announced the winners of Gen:48, the company's first AI short film competition. Like this competition, Runway calls the AI Film Festival a celebration of art and artists embracing new and emerging AI techniques for film. The company received around 3,000 submissions from around the world, including the US, UK, China, France and Spain, and announced the 10 winners on May 1 at the opening of the festival in Los Angeles , which my Forbes colleague Charlie Fink attended.
Runway announced the festival winners as artists continue to wrestle with the implications of rapid iteration generative AI. Some marvel at its potential to steer them in strange and wonderful directions. Others worry that it will steal their work to train datasets or even alter the very nature of creativity.
Antebi shares these concerns.
“Creators will face existential convulsions and even internal battles such as atrophy in their critical thinking because they will use AI to solve problems instead of figuring things out with collaborators or on their own,” he said. “I've even experienced the latter problem when using certain large language models for extended periods of time.”
Still, Antebi doesn't see pausing creative AI tools as the answer. “Like many problems, what we resist persists. I'm not sure we have solutions, but denial won't work,” he said.
PounamuSamuel Schrag
Samuel Schrag, whose hypnotic film Pounamu was also a top 10 performer at the festival, said he chose to collaborate with artificial intelligence to explore how it can innovate the storytelling process and help artists overcome geographic restrictions and time constraints.
In the film, an unwilling kiwi wanders through a dreamy nightscape before being pulled into an equally magical underwater world. The film's title, which comes from the word for a type of green stone found in New Zealand, was inspired by both the cultural history surrounding the stone and a Maori proverb often said when 'offered a small but sincere gift: “Although it is small, it is green stone.”
“The phrase has a past meaning for me,” Schrag said via email, “and from the collective and personal history, 'Pounamu' becomes a metaphor for something significant or essential, a dream that arose of the heart”. The filmmaker, originally from New Zealand, is Maori himself and moved to the United States with his family.
“My goal,” he said, “was to try to capture the migratory experience one feels in the early stages of realizing a dream or idea, discovering one's home in unfamiliar places and finding the strength and courage to move forward and persevere despite any setbacks or obstacles”.
Pounamu It took five weeks to make from initial concept to final export, and Schrag sees great potential for AI to help artists and creators, both in brainstorming and full productions.
“Initially, I envisioned the transition from AI-generated artwork to paper cut-outs, but practical limitations such as color printing costs made this difficult,” he said. “Looking ahead, I'm excited about the potential AI has to further bridge the gap between traditional and digital art forms.”
Where do grandmothers go when they get lost? Leo Cannone
In another winning film, a poignant and poetic offering by French director and photographer Léo Cannone, a boy whose grandmother died wonders aloud where grandmothers go when they get “lost.”
“Maybe they're just walking with other lost grandmothers to a secret land, a place so far away that even our maps can't find it,” muses the young narrator. One imagines grandmothers becoming tall giants who transform into sturdy trees or beautiful icebergs and mountains.
lapsesYZA Voku
Cristóbal Valenzuela, co-founder and CEO of Runway and one of the judges for this year's AI Film Festival, emphasizes that art made with AI is only as attractive as the humans who help create it.
“Sometimes we hold AI to a kind of impossible standard where we ask systems to make whole jokes, whole shows, whole movies, or whole songs, and really, that's never been the point,” Valenzuela told me when I interviewed him last time. course “You can choose which parts you will incorporate. It's up to you as an artist how you want to use it best.”
