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The world-famous Tribeca Film Festival starts next week and will feature a “live action” feature-length film entirely AI-generated, a world’s first.
As The Hollywood Reporter explains, the movie, “Dreams of Violets,” cost just $2,000 to make and is entirely AI-generated from start to finish. No cameras, no lenses, no actors, and no sets. More importantly, none of the human touch, creativity, and artistry intrinsic to a typical movie.
AI-generated movies, unfortunately, aren’t new. That’s true of television shows now, too. However, “Dreams of Violet” is unique in that it has been accepted into a major film festival. No other feature-length, live-action AI-generated movie has achieved this feat, for better or worse.
Technically, an AI-generated movie, “Hell Grind,” screened at Cannes earlier this month. However, as the Festival de Cannes has stated, this movie was not officially part of the festival. In that case, a 15-person team made the movie in two weeks for under half a million dollars.
“Dreams of Violet” is made by new AI company Fountain 0 and first-time filmmakers, brothers Ash and Pooya Koosha. It is a fictional dramatization of the thousands of protestors killed by the Iranian government earlier this year.
“While every image and person in the film is AI generated, it is based on journalistic reports, photographs, and eyewitness accounts from which AI video models were used to create a remarkably touching, impactful and at times shocking film,” the filmmakers claim. “The combination of creativity and technological innovation resulted in a film that appears as realistic as films produced through traditional human labor.”
“This is a very personal story to us having experienced brutality in Iran, and so the brutality that came about as a result of the January protests in Iran hit a real nerve with us. So we wanted our first Fountain 0 film to be dedicated to something that we felt the world needed to know more about and understand the human toll of far better. Since there has been extremely little first-hand journalism on these events, and the internet has been shut down, producing the first AI full feature film we felt needed to be on this topic. Every single image and scene in the film is AI generated,” says Ash Koosha, CEO of Fountain 0 and producer of the film.
While precise counts of how many people were killed, often arbitrarily, by the Iranian government are difficult to come by, Human Rights Activists News Agency put the number over 6,100. Some estimates are closer to 30,000. It’s an important story.
But is it a story that should be told like this? That’s an important question people need to consider.
Per Tom Rogers, Executive Chairman of Fountain 0, Ash Koosha spent his nights over the course of two months making the movie. Rogers characterizes this as a good thing that makes filmmaking more accessible, efficient, and fast.
“The film cost $2,000 to make — not the $2 million or more a comparable independent film might cost. These same techniques can bring the cost of making big budget Hollywood films from $200 million or more down to close to zero, and sprout an enormous stream of new movies — hence Fountain 0,” Rogers says.
“This will understandably bring chills down the spine of many in Hollywood. However, for the many independent filmmakers, and would be independent filmmakers, whose biggest barrier is access to money to make their films, Fountain 0 technology solves for the financial barriers they face. As a first time film creator, there is no way I could have brought this film to fruition without what our AI tools enabled me to do. Moreover, we will actively seek top writer and director talent whose creativity can be harnessed to produce great movies without their imaginations and visions facing any financial constraints,” Ash Koosha says.
Rogers says that when he showed “Dreams of Violets” to “one of the most prominent names in the independent film business,” he had no idea he was watching an AI-generated movie.
“We fully understand the very genuine sensitivities of those individuals working in the movie industry, and like them we are worried what the unknown implications are for the livelihoods of many,” the Koosha brothers say. “New types of jobs will undoubtedly be created in the AI film generation world. But the reality is that this film never would have been made if it were not for the AI capabilities that we were able to develop.”
One thing Fountain 0 neglected to comment on is the extreme resource demands of AI-generated video, yet another factor to consider beyond potential job loss in the industry and the general lack of artistic value of AI-generated content.
In a report last year, MIT Technology Review explained that generating just five seconds of video was equivalent to running a microwave for over an hour, riding an e-bike for 38 miles, or creating over 700 high-quality AI images. That’s just the generational cost, too, not all the expense and resources that went into developing the model in the first place.
Now extrapolate that over a feature-length film, which obviously requires many generations that never make the final cut, and it’s dire. Fountain 0 may have spent less than $2,000, but that is nowhere near the real cost of what has been manufactured. The AI industry may try to convince people that this somehow uses less energy and has a lower environmental impact than a full-fledged human-based film production, but that’s, frankly, hard to believe.
Another important question to consider is whether “efficiency,” speed, and cheap production are values we, as a society, should pursue in art. AI companies believe we are racing toward some utopia where anyone can make anything at any time for nearly no money and with no real skills. An equally plausible explanation is that it’s a race to the bottom where everyone loses.
Tribeca Film Festival viewers can decide for themselves whether such an endeavor is worthwhile, though, when “Dreams of Violets” premieres on June 10.
English (US) ·