which told Variety<\/a> it was \u201ca purely mechanical exercise without any of the uniquely innovative thinking or a creative force like Welles\u201d.<\/p>\nBut Heenan says AI has the capacity to show us the impossible \u2013 it\u2019s a tool that can be used creatively, not just derivatively, as her documentary demonstrates.<\/p>\n
She says even the likes of David Attenborough couldn\u2019t have accurately conveyed how the fierce spider and tiny frog help and protect each other, because all the action takes place inside the spider\u2019s lair. Lights and microscopic cameras would interfere with the natural behaviour.<\/p>\n
\u201cNobody\u2019s actually managed to capture [the spider and frog] on film in the wild, to my knowledge, so I thought that was a really great reason to use AI specifically,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n
\u201cI can show the detail of the relationship, I can get into the spider\u2019s burrow \u2026 and then recreate that in AI, but put it in a natural environment, so that it feels and looks like a real nature documentary.\u201d<\/p>\n
She researched how National Geographic, Animal Planet, and David Attenborough\u2019s teams put their documentaries together, and steered clear of AI\u2019s capacity for cheap special effects.<\/p>\n
\u201cNo fancy camera tricks and morphs and warps, none of the fun stuff that AI can do that looks really cool,\u201d she says. \u201cI almost wanted it be: you\u2019re in boring hotel room, you put on Nat Geo because there\u2019s nothing else on the TV, and you get sucked in.\u201d<\/p>\n
AI film-makers from the US, the UK, Brazil, Ukraine, China and Australia were among the Omni category winners, with Canada\u2019s Robert Gaudette, a self-confessed \u201cmiddle age nobody\u201d working in creative AI, taking out best picture award.<\/p>\n
Last month his eight-minute film A Face Only a Mother Could Love was also awarded the $50,000 grand prix at the Runway AI film festival at New York\u2019s Lincoln Center.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
\u201cI knew what type of story I wanted to tell, and I knew I wanted it to be different from what a lot of other people were doing in AI,\u201d Gaudette tells the Guardian from his home in Toronto.<\/p>\n
\u201cAI is really great at creating spectacle \u2026 a lot of eye candy can be very visually stimulating, but I wanted to see if I could test the limits in terms of storytelling, trying to connect with an audience through a character \u2026 a character who had been treated very callously throughout his whole life, yet a character who just refused to meet the world the same way the world was meeting him.\u201d<\/p>\n
Gaudette\u2019s poignant tale of Marcel Dupont, a physically disfigured man who perfects the waltz alone in his kitchen each night \u2013 convinced that one day someone will ask him to dance \u2013 is, he hopes, a counterpoint to criticisms that AI has no place in the crafting of emotionally resonant stories that come from uniquely human imagination.<\/p>\n
AI did not create the story, Gaudette points out. He did. AI was merely one of the tools in the toolbox he used to bring his story to life.<\/p>\n
Both Gaudette and Heenan say the industry and governments need to resolve the persistent teething issue of fair compensation for original creators, as AI hoovers up copyright works to train itself.<\/p>\n
And, as AI replaces older special effects, some jobs will go, Gaudette concedes. But he believes new ones will emerge.<\/p>\n
\u201cIn the Hitchcock era, there would be 30 to 50 people sitting on a sound stage, and then CGI came along, and there was a lot of fear, a lot of disruption, and a lot of people laid off from their traditional jobs and replaced by computers,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n
\u201cBut if you look at a Marvel film nowadays, there\u2019s 300 to 400 people working on those projects, so there\u2019s been a net addition in terms of the economy and employment.<\/p>\n
\u201cAnd I think AI, once we see it a little further down the pipeline, we\u2019re going to see the same kind of thing \u2013 unanticipated and unexpected new roles \u2026 we will just be using creative teams in a new way.\u201d<\/p>\n
Heenan believes the accessibility of the new technology has brought a democratic revolution in visual storytelling.<\/p>\n
\u201cI don\u2019t need to wait for Hollywood to allow me in as a PA, then get the gracious gift of being able to maybe be on a film set to maybe make something one day,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s no longer a choice \u2013 do I spend my house deposit on making a short film? I can make a shot film for $500.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe more stories that people can tell that don\u2019t have the money and the resources behind them to tell their individual stories, that is just groundbreaking.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s going to level the playing field \u2026 removing those gatekeepers stopping you from telling your story\u201d<\/p>\n
Gaudette agrees. \u201cNobody knew who I was three weeks ago,\u201d he says. \u201cI would have had zero potential of having my short film funded in any traditional way to shoot it live action\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Scene: a dimly lit underground burrow. A giant Amazonian tarantula and a tiny dotted humming frog share the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":676964,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[96,2839,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-676963","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-entertainment","tag-movies","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/676963","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=676963"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/676963\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/676964"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=676963"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=676963"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=676963"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}