AI will change how films are made

Whether you like it or not, AI is released upon the world and it’s here to stay. Learn to work with it or be left in the dust. I predict the AI is going to reshape so many aspects of the film industry and how we operate on set far more than we even know.

The more ubiquitous and accessible these products become, the sooner AI will be a crucial piece of our everyday life.

Technology is changing and moving fast; every few months, there appears to be new updates and advancements in the world of AI. I strongly believe it has the potential to fundamentally change every aspect of how films are made. Here are just a few examples of what this AI-powered future might look like:

Preproduction

I believe AI will change the way preproduction is organized and the speed at which it will be accomplished.

AI search engines are able to cross-reference locations with typical climate and weather patterns to help find ideal filming locations. AI will create organized tables in seconds; days of slowing filling out spreadsheets might be in the past.

While location scouting certainly includes on-foot exploration, the majority of the time is spent on the computer doing research. And if AI search is able to cut that search time down by not inundating you with ads for tourist traps, overpopulated hiking trails, and a random assortment of overpriced products in no way relevant to your task, that will be for the best.

Unlike a traditional google search that can really only effectively search singular queries, AI search tools such as Bing’s ChatGPT integration is able to stack searches and aggregate that data for multi-part questions. If you’re tasked with finding a snowy mountain within 50 miles of your city that doesn’t require a filming permit. These AI search tools will be able to combine these queries in order to give you answers to your questions without needing to do any of the webpages surfing yourself.

Other examples include:

• Organizing people’s schedules just got a whole lot easier. To find out when everyone is free to shoot, feed the AI bot all of the data on people's schedules, and it can create an organized list, table or excel document of every single date and time that schedules line up.

• Ask it to find Restaurants within driving distance of the set location that provide menu items meeting the dietary needs and restrictions of everyone on set.

So often are the answers we’re looking for are multifaceted there are several boxes we need to check off our list with the often time-constrained and pressure of a film set we don’t want to be wasting time looking up “Lee’s BBQ Joint” has some vegan options.

It’s not 100% there yet; searches and answers from the current tools available still need to be validated and cross-referenced before making final decisions. That’s the biggest roadblock holding back so many more of these AI-powered search engines from the release is not confidently giving the wrong answers, but the building blocks are all there and the nature of generative AI is the more data it’s fed, the more times it’s used, the more the program learns and improves. If it continues to improve and build upon itself, it’s inevitable that it will eventually reach a point it can be reliably used 99% of the time.

Writing

Unfortunately, with these AI tools released upon the world, soon we will be confronted with an onslaught of films written almost entirely by AI text programs.

Will these AI-written films be any good? Probably not; likely be extremely average and passable with something off about the way people talk.

Typing a basic story idea into Chat GPT and watching it write a complete story outline in less than 30 seconds is still astounding. Is what the AI comes up with truly that groundbreaking? Not really; currently, it’s often a basic, cliche and a little stale. That’s unsurprising it’s a robot that is cross-referencing a huge data set, ask it to write a romance script, and it’s going to mash thousands of romance scripts and character archetypes together and will result in something painfully unoriginal.

Asking GPT to write a western movie duel produced some brilliant lines like: “You know you can’t beat me, Lily. I’m the fastest gun in the West.” That’s pretty bad but the reality is real humans have written far worse. It writes at around a high school B- but it’s impossible to underestimate how putrid some real people really are at writing.

I hope we don’t live in a future where everyone forgets how to do any real writing themselves and every movie released is an AI genre smash amalgamation. I don’t see that future coming to pass. Good, natural, and poetic writing will always have a way of worming its way into our hearts in an inherently human way that even AI writing will never reach.

VFX

Visual effects is where AI will most likely make the most fundamental shift, whereas the previous examples of its use above have been ways in which these tool are able to assist in the creation and organization of everything surrounding filmmaking, AI’s use in visual effects will be seen in the final product.

We’ve already developed models for live greenscreen and character models applied to motion capture suits to be visible in the camera monitor. It might not be too long hat we can create new models and backgrounds on the fly using AI image generation and immediately have them viewable in the camera monitor.

Some of the latest Marvel movie releases have reached a point where the only real thing in the frame are the actors, and even then, sometimes everything except their floating head is completely replaced. So much of modern movies is CG; including AI generation to these workflows for creating these models and backgrounds almost seems like a no-brainer once the technology is capable of capturing the same level of realism and fidelity.

LED background technology is increasingly being used in newer films and TV such as The Mandalorian and The Batman. This technology is often powered by unreal engine, a game engine that’s able to create photorealistic models and backgrounds. One of the biggest benefits of using a game engine is the live adaptability, but it’s still held back by the restrictions of what is already made and modeled for the program.

Most sets can’t be stalled long enough for a 3D artist to design something new such as a spaceship from scratch to throw it in the background. Infuse the engines powering the LED backdrops with AI, and suddenly the entire scenery can be created out of nothing but a few keystrokes.

What does mean for VFX artists? I don’t yet. These artists are so often underpaid, under-credited, and forced to work endless hours to meet tight deadlines. Integrating AI could change this, allowing them to produce final products faster, giving ample time to tweak and refine the final product improving the quality of VFX in new films as a whole. Or, AI could allow studios to slash staff reducing whole departments down to a single team and forcing them to meet near unobtainable deadlines piping the films we watch with a strange uncanny valley of unrefined AI artifacts.

We’ve already developed models for live greenscreen and character models applied to motion capture suits to be visible in the camera monitor. It might not be too long hat we can create new models and backgrounds on the fly using AI image generation and immediately have them viewable on the camera monitor.

I am shocked at how quickly all of these AI-integrated tools have advanced and improved; looking at what Midjourney AI thought a human would like less than a year ago and seeing its latest release today make something so photorealistic at a glance could almost be a mistake for a real person.

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AI is not an entirely neutral topic, there's many reasons to be concerned for how it’s starting to seep into our lives and how we interface with technology. And it’s got is huge share of opponents, primarily from artists who view every piece of AI generated art as a theft, which is technically true and technically not, this tech is still far too new for the law to be widely regulated.

I don’t see AI as evil but I fear for what we lose when people are addicted to what AI can produce and say that they cease having any original thoughts, ideas, or creation not curated and filtered through several layers of AI programming. No art was ever remembered solely for the type of paintbrush used. At the end of the day, AI is a tool and should be seen as such albeit one of the most sophisticated creative tools we’ve seen in a long time but a tool nonetheless. It is still nothing with human ingenuity and creativity.

This new wave of AI is one of the biggest and fastest technological changes I have witnessed in my lifetime. Love it or hate it, the cat’s out of the bag, AI is out in the world, change is coming, and there’s no going back.