Comment by Keyframe
1 day ago
You know what, in my previous life as a filmmaker I could've only dreamed of such a thing. Filmmaking is an art form which you cannot do alone. Outside of a lot of time and money, you need cooperation of a number of people and each day of production you end up accumulating a set of compromises to your vision. Your taste is what makes you tolerate that or not, and it's exhausting. It matters if you're the author since at the end of the day it's your name on it, not the crew (as much).
Now that we have these tools, I don't know but I am absolutely disinterested in it. Not that it doesn't feel right or anything, but I'm just not excited enough even to want to try to materialize some of my "big game" stuff. Closest thing I'd compare it with is like when you pirate a bunch of games and you play none as a result of abundance.
Weird-ass times.
I think for me it's just missing the "essence". Making a film is hard, but that labor with multiple people who are passionate about the project is just as important as the end result.
I've been trying to generate concept art for a game idea. I figure, I can't draw so why not have something else bring my vision to life. After dozens of failed attempts and burned tokens I decided to just hire someone. The experience was night and day. They provided thoughtful details to help tell a story in the image. They got to tell me what they added and why, etc. This isn't even their project but their passion for it showed in the end result.
These models are impressive, but I think people watch movies because of the essence as much as the movie itself.
This is the same level of arguing that only painting is the real art and photography is just clicking the button
AI prompting can be an art form when someone makes something actually capable of evoking emotion from me. So far I have seen exactly 0 good pieces of serious media created with prompts.
The only reaction I have to prompts is "wow, its impressive that humans created a machine that can mimic art".
It isn’t. Photographers take the time to seek out things they want to photograph, decide how to compose the shot, maybe pick a subject and have them pose certain ways. Choose their lighting and color grading. That is their essence.
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The thing is, it has the same essential property that you don't control it any more. The problem with these tools is the lack of fine grained control means there is no room for you to express your individual creative input. Your total input is a few sentences of a prompt, then the AI did all the creative part. If the creative input is what you enjoyed, it is actually not that much more (or even less) here than it was with traditional film.
It will change soon. Ai is enabler. Again, as with photography and especially digital photography- everybody can click button but not everybody is photographer. Ai helps to raise the floor, not the ceiling
This is a matter of effort and direction and not an inherent flaw of the tools. Look at Apple's recent image tools to change perspective. Tools to improve artistry are improving.
Could you tell more? Is it new iOS features?
Another aspect is that if you struggle and struggle and create something great, people can see the work you put in, and you'll visibly stand above the rest who don't have the same level of perseverance. But if anyone can create big studio quality visuals with a prompt, how do you stand out? "When everyone's super, no-one will be."
The same way you stand out now. There are giant budget movies out there that are total trash compared to, say, The Odyssey. One that comes to mind that even had Matt Damon is The Great Wall. Such a huge budget and stacked cast (Pedro Pascal, Willem Dafoe) but a garbage movie. The tools being available to you isn't what make a you super.
I often see this kind of passive-aggressive characterization of the process with AI that's meant to bait people who obviously are expressing their creativity with these models.
I hope no one will fall for it: even when you emphatically reply "I spent the last year building the pipelines I use" it'll still be treated as equivalent a couple of sentences relative to the old ways.
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At the end of the day, the painful lesson some people are (re)-learning is that creative expression doesn't have to be tied to any specific process. A lot of people fall in love with creative expression + process... but some fall in love with just the process, and some fall in love with creative regardless of the process.
AI does not favor those of us who loved the process (that's me with coding), but it's definitely capable of allowing new people to experience what it's like to have creative input in your mind and see it expressed outside of your mind.
Often in making art you need to love the process. Otherwise you’ll never get good enough. Most filmmakers don’t even watch their films after they have spent years with it discussing, planning, shooting, editing etc. There is lots of travelling, new friendships, comradery involved and in a way it becomes the whole scaffolding of your life. Replacing this with prompting is probably not interesting to this particular group of people, but might be appealing to completely new set of people.
There are people who love coding and really dislike vibecoding, but atleast coding and prompting are the same mode of activity (typing in to a computer) so you don’t have to change your whole life to move from one to another.
I completely agree with you. The question is, are we headed to a situation where it is a new process that still allows the same expression, or is it fundamentally less able to facilitate that expression? we have to get beyond the one-shot style prompt shown here to something much more fine grained. The jury is still out for me on this, but I can believe we will get there. We just aren't anywhere close to it right now.
Was just going to say... Even if all AI gives me is the opportunity to bring my visions to life even somewhat terribly... That's a lot better than I'd be able to do without it. Which is for them to go nowhere. I'll take it.
I am not a film maker but I had some sketches on my head that I always wanted to try to make. Even Gemini scratched the itch for me, and my folder “projects” is growing with other ideas that I’d like to sketch
I am going through the same struggle but with software development.
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