Tech Researcher Creates Award-Winning Short Film with AI
We are only scratching the surface
On Friday, tech researcher Jean-Baptiste Martinoli was informed that his short film, “Extraterrestrial Message,” won the best short Sci-Fi film and the Golden Minds Film Festival.
The previous day, the same film won the Best Canadian Film at the Candian Cinematography Awards.
The film has been accepted to other festivals and is likely to win more awards this year. It also was made almost entirely with AI in about four hours.* For those of you that attended the Synthedia Synthetic Media Conference, you had the chance to hear from the film’s creator directly. A video of the interview is available on YouTube. The full three-minute film begins at about 30 seconds. I recommend you watch it.
One Non-AI Element
The only non-AI element was the script. Martinoli said he had been curating several images from his Midjourney experiments that depicted fantastical landscapes and buildings. That gave him the idea of creating another world that was too far to travel to the Earth but knew of its existence. The alien society sent a message and images to let the earthlings know they were not alone in the universe.
So, the script is one human-contributed element beyond the prompts that created the images and the musical score. The other human intervention was post-production video editing to get the images in the right sequence and align the music and dialogue with the on-screen action.
Martinoli says the process took him about four hours to complete. Granted, he already had more than a dozen images created through Midjourney that he could use for the film. So, to create something similar, you might need another hour or two of creative time and be familiar with the tools.
He used Midjourney for the images, D-ID to animate the characters’ mouths and faces and align with the dialogue. Cre8tive AI was used to create graphs of the landscape images so the video shots could show them in motion as if a drone was taking fly-through footage. Soundraw AI was used to create the music. It’s a creative AI cocktail that someone will soon put into a single suite of tools.
A Fully AI Short Film
Martinoli, who goes by Digitonaut on social media, recently took the next step and created an experimental short film with the script created using Jasper AI. This is even more impressive because the script was actually pretty decent, and he didn’t change it. You can check it out below.
Both of these are amazing, and Martinoli is posting new experiments regularly. If creatives can do something of this quality in a few hours, there is little doubt we are going to see further democratization of filmmaking. YouTube content might just be full of these films very soon. Netflix or Prime Video may also see the value in having these independent films in their catalogs. Much more to come on this topic.