WILL FILMMAKING EVOLVE USING GENERATIVE VIDEO TO BECOME A FINE A(I)RT?

What would it take for filmmaking to be considered as fine art? By definition, fine art is typically characterised by a singular artist distinguishing a clear vision without collaboration such as with painting, sculpture, or other decorative art forms. It requires aesthetic value, conceptual depth, creativity, originality, technique, emotional engagement, and cultural significance. That’s a high water mark to tick all those boxes. 

Photography is considered a fine art. But unlike photography, filmmaking has historically been rooted in collaboration. With the growth of the film industry, the number of positions on a film has also grown over the century. There are now hundreds of roles on a film set and throughout post production. Even on a low budget independent film, it is a challenge without the creative helping hand of dozens of technicians and of course, there are the actors to think about. Over the next few years, the filmmaking process, both at a grass roots level and within the Hollywood studio system will change dramatically.

With big budgets ballooning, it is already becoming unsustainable as a business model. The impetus behind the reduction in personnel is as always to lower cost and increase profit. This is worrisome to many people who earn a full time living in the film and tv industry, from writers to composers. As artificial intelligence and generative Ai software tools have been introduced on public platforms, many of the black art and learned trade techniques are now in the hands of most filmmakers. It’s still early days in the development of this sophisticated technology so although most film industry jobs are not at immediate risk, there will be a creative culling down the line. 

This is a real concern and this time the alarmists are justified, as the rise of Ai is signalling the end of the film industry as we know it. Though there is some truth to this, this powerful technology is also both democratising and empowering individual users. While the pyramid structure of a film production has been built and refined over the past 125 years, in service to helping the director's vision, Ai has now created the opportunity to realise auteur theory to its final conclusion - a single individual in control of and creating every aspect of a motion picture, from scratch. Fine art.

My personal experience working with generative Ai has been a mixed bag. Like many people, I have tinkered with ChatGPT for writing duties. While it is obvious Ai cannot write original prose, it does reduce the drudgery of researching. It is a kind of immediate Cliff Notes to understand a subject or subject matter quickly. Ai, a machine-learning model, is designed or programmed to recognise patterns in data. It can only recall what has already been created. It cannot at the moment, create fully original concepts and ideas. It can draw from multiple references and combine them, which some may recognise as original-inspiration but in truth, it cannot express itself or the human experience in a truthful way. It only knows what it has been programmed to know.

How to use Ai is about grappling with prompts, the language the software understands and communicates with to produce results. There are many tools out there and websites that promote and sell prompts to achieve your creative aspirations while using generative image creation or text-to-video generators, but from my experience it is more productive to grapple with it directly and experiment with different language prompts. Only trial and error will help you conjure what is in your own mind. True originality and creative breakthroughs can be found with Ai but it will likely be either a happy accident or a long, drawn out slog, so in many ways the pain of the creative process continues but now in a different form.

In what could be described as a paradoxical contradiction to auteur theory, I have decided to launch a public experiment which invites creatives from around the world to collectively tell a story that is both personal and collaborative.

I have set this first creative challenge to create a film noir set in America in the 1950’s, produced exclusively using generative video and Ai software to build all aspects of production including vocal performances and music. The end goal is to assemble a feature-length film from shots and sequences created by anyone who wants to contribute. This experiment is to explore montage theory in cinema.

“Montage theory, in its rudimentary form, asserts that a series of connected images allows for complex ideas to be extracted from a sequence and, when strung together, constitute the entirety of a film's ideological and intellectual power,” says ChatGPT.

In essence, montage theory focuses on editing techniques rather exclusively on the content itself. Every participant in the experiment can break off from the main narrative and create sub-stories, enhance characterisation, juxtapose viewpoints, and any other device to deepen the complexity of the story overall.

Perhaps, in the future, there will be even more jobs in the film and tv industry through this “collective auteurism”. After all, the Italian Masters, Salvador Dali, and Andy Warhol had factories of brilliant, talented and creative apprentices helping them to realise their singular "fine art" vision. 

Without a doubt, Ai will have a huge impact on the creative process and the exploration of new ideas in the future. But any originality will more likely be a result of human invention.

If you want to be involved in the Montage Theory Experiment and contribute to a fully creatively collaborative feature film, visit https://www.youtube.com/@StormlightStudio