{"id":141825,"date":"2025-11-19T14:41:09","date_gmt":"2025-11-19T14:41:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/141825\/"},"modified":"2025-11-19T14:41:09","modified_gmt":"2025-11-19T14:41:09","slug":"cost-time-savings-writing-charlie-chaplin-in-tallinn","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/141825\/","title":{"rendered":"Cost, Time Savings, Writing, Charlie Chaplin in Tallinn"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tAI<\/a> or not AI? That was not the question during a session at the\u00a0Industry@Tallinn & Baltic Event<\/a>\u00a0portion of the\u00a0Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival<\/a>\u00a0(P\u00d6FF)\u00a0on\u00a0Wednesday. Instead, the focus was on opportunities that AI can open up in the film industry, along with thoughts on best practices needed as guardrails.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cMoving Forward With AI: Beyond Constraints. Future Scenarios for European Film Productions & Business\u201d was the title of the panel that brought together industry experts to discuss how to work with AI to enable creativity and strengthen production, finance and other processes \u201cwithin the boundaries of best practices, guidelines and regulations,\u201d as the program summary highlighted. And it noted that the goal was to \u201cdemonstrate how to produce outstanding new content and business by leveraging emerging technologies despite disadvantages.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tThe speakers were director-producer Matt Szymanowski, who is currently in post-production on Captive Mind, a \u201chybrid dystopian feature film shot with actors\u201d that is integrating AI technology, and directing A Human Future, a documentary on the global AI boom shot on three continents in more than 10 cities; AI expert and script consultant Maciej Zemojcin, who has worked on the Picture From Auschwitz<\/a> initiative; and screenwriter Katri Manninen (Codename: Annika<\/a>, Shadow Lines). The moderator of the session was Kristen Davis, the\u00a0former IT and innovation director at the New York Times International<\/a>, who founded the consultancy CinqC in 2016. Oh, yeah, and Charlie Chaplin made a voice appearance courtesy of an AI agent. But more on that later.<\/p>\n

\n\tDavis opened up the event by highlighting that AI will require \u201csignificant\u201d changes to skillsets, mindsets and processes to get the industry to a state of \u201caugmented creativity.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tManninen is currently studying how developing drama series with AI differs from purely human work. Poems and other texts written by ChatGPT 3.0 felt like material written by kids or teenagers, she argued. \u201cI really want to ideate my own stories,\u201d she said. By their very nature, large-language models (LLMs) generate \u201cthe most likely answer,\u201d or \u201cgeneric shit,\u201d she concluded. \u201cI use AI for everything but writing so I can focus on storytelling \u2014 and rise above the generic shit.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tThat means she never uses AI to come up with ideas or be a co-writer. \u201cBut I did learn to use AI to keep track of my diaries\u201d and \u201ctake notes\u201d as she speaks about ideas, Manninen shared. She then also uses LLMs to format and edit text to take out pauses and fill words, plus asks AI for notes, scene lists, a synopsis, character descriptions and the like. Instead of spending five days on a synopsis, she uses AI to get the job done based on her own writing. Her advice: \u201cGive it the genre, short storyline and the characters and their roles (hero, bad guy, etc.) to help it make sense of the script.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tManninen even uses AI to do preliminary research for her. But she warned: \u201cYou\u2019ll only get a general idea and not all the details \u2014 and some of them are likely wrong,\u201d so always fact check AI research.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cAI is really good at getting me \u2018unblinded\u2019 with instant feedback,\u201d especially when other people are not around or would take too much time, she also told the Tallinn session. Since LLMs have learned to please humans, Manninen suggested, though, to \u201cask for only the most brutally honest feedback\u201d to get at least \u201csemi-honest\u201d feedback. In comparison, \u201chuman co-writers have \u2018skin in the game\u2019 and can\u2019t be ignored,\u201d she emphasized.<\/p>\n

\n\tSzymanowski, in his comments, compared the shift coming to the film industry from AI to the change from silent movies to \u201ctalkies,\u201d the arrival of CGI, and other technological innovations. He recommended \u201cgetting their hands on the tools\u201d to help people better understand them and their implications. <\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cWe\u2019ve seen short films made with AI,\u201d he said. \u201cBut can we make a full-length feature film?\u201d His take: \u201cThe future of cinema is hybrid.\u201d Pointing to his work on Captive Mind, he cited efficiency, sustainability, for example, thanks to work via the cloud, and innovation as benefits of AI filmmaking. <\/p>\n

\n\tHigh fidelity is now \u201cthere\u201d in AI, Szymanowski said in discussing the continued technological improvements, mentioning that AI can be a VFX supplement and help with world-building or with character augmentation.<\/p>\n

\n\tHe projected that for a full feature with \u201cseveral full AI sequences,\u201d the post-production timeline can be reduced by 25-40 percent, while the team size can be cut down by 40-60 percent, leading to $120,000-$300,000 in cost savings.<\/p>\n

\n\tJoining the session via video conference from Barcelona, Artefacto Studio executives Anna Giralt Gris, CEO and founder, and Jorge Caballero, co-founder, cited AI concerns, such as Guillermo del Toro saying: \u201cI\u2019d rather die than use generative AI.\u201d They highlighted that the age of AI means a \u201cparadigm shift in film production.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tThe traditional production process is \u201clinear and sequential,\u201d which changes to \u201citerative and continuous,\u201d they offered. For example, \u201cboundaries between phases blur,\u201d they explained. \u201cAI tools extend development\u201d via concept generation, visualization and simulation. And they mentioned the chance for \u201creal-time iteration during production,\u201d including the testing of narratives, visuals and sound.<\/p>\n

\n\tFinally, Zemojcin, who calls himself \u201cthe film AI guy,\u201d told the Tallinn event to \u201ctrash the past dream!\u201d \u201cIf you are not ready for this shift, this will not shift for you,\u201d he warned, encouraging people with the words: \u201cNo fear!\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tHe said the term \u201cfilm and TV industry\u201d is outdated, with him instead preferring the term \u201ctechnology storytelling.\u201d His take on the value in focus in this age: \u201cIn the fake content times, authenticity is a value.\u201d While IP and ownership are \u201cin flux,\u201d Zemojcin also argued that \u201cemotional connection with the audience is valid.\u201d <\/p>\n

\n\tA \u201cdifferent decision process and chain\u201d are key to the age of AI, which people with industry experience will have to get used to, he said.<\/p>\n

\n\tHe asked an AI agent that he created using ElevenLabs and that uses the voice of none other than Charlie Chaplin for insight on best practices and potential risks for the use of AI in the film space. The expert said his long prompt for the AI agent included the likes of a description of personality and values, with the voice synthesized from The Great Dictator and Chaplin\u2019s voice.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cThe future of film will be decided by which side wins the close-up, studios using AI to cut humans out, or humans using tools carefully with unions, laws and strong norms to protect their faces, voices and stories,\u201d the AI agent offered. \u201cI think cinema survives if we insist on three things: transparency about when AI is used, consent and fair pay for every human whose work or likeness trains or appears in it, and audiences choosing soul over sludge. So the real question is not what the future of film will be, but what you here in this room are willing to refuse and what you are stubborn enough to protect.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"AI or not AI? That was not the question during a session at the\u00a0Industry@Tallinn & Baltic Event\u00a0portion of…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":141826,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[345,27438,146,85,399,46,83056],"class_list":["post-141825","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","tag-ai","tag-artifical-intelligence","tag-entertainment","tag-il","tag-international","tag-israel","tag-tallinn-black-nights-film-festival"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/141825","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=141825"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/141825\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/141826"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=141825"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=141825"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=141825"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}