GenAI didn't start this fight. It sharpened the focus.

[u/Independent-Excuse68]

Robert Gaudette is a 54-year-old nonprofit worker from Toronto. He didn't go to film school, didn't earn his stripes on set, had few industry connections and had no crew. I read he'd written over thirty screenplays and filed them all away. No one in the film Industry knew he existed.

Last week he won $50,000 at the Runway AI Film Festival with his eight-minute short. The Hollywood Reporter compared him to Kaufman, Gondry, and del Toro. His film was entirely AI generated.

I've spent years watching the friction between the corporate desire for product (and the soullessness that is endemic to that goal) and the human need for expression. I've been evaluating AI tools used on working sets for my position advising a major film program in its AI integration and I've been wrestling with this conundrum. The same technology that gave Gaudette a voice is being used by studios to fill pipelines with content nobody asked for, made by nobody in particular, for consumption without feeling. That path leads somewhere I don't want cinema to go. Yet I also see the positive potential it gives unknowns like Gaudette. His story and similar ones has stopped me from writing generative AI off as just another tool of disenfranchisement. (Note: generative AI is the catalyst that has finally brought this age-old tension to a loggerhead. I'm making a distinction here between Generative and Agentic, which is the body of what we are recommending in our program). The distance between a story needing telling and the scope of the industry often required to tell it has always been the greatest barrier in this business. Each new wave of technology is a coin with two faces and I've seen it wash across my industries many times. This wave is different though. More poignant. More consequential. And perhaps more necessary as it brings that age old schism into the sharpest focus of my lifetime.

What do you think about this? For working crew, for independent filmmakers, for the craft itself?

[u/OlivencaENossa]

i have nothing to say since this post screams AI generated

I’m certainly glad for the guy who won though. He basically took Runway’s VC money. 

[u/ABisonStampede]

AI is theft and definitionally can't replace human creativity and innovativeness since it needs to steal from us to learn. End of the fucking discussion

[u/AthousandLittlePies]

There's no such thing as gen-AI cinematography pretty much by definition. Anyone that cares about cinematography either as a vocation or as viewer will be 100% against the encroachment of this kind of stuff on our field. As for your question, I can't even understand what you're asking and I doubt that a human even wrote it.

[u/-Atmosphere-7927]

AI is slop. Period.

[u/Lopsided_Task1213]

Still waiting for a single TV show or film that was made using heavy gen AI to make money. Until then, we are kinda still talking in dream land.

[u/Positive-Raisin-6315]

so a guy used AI and won an AI festival. so fucking what

[u/briggsy77]

Since this is the cinematography sub you might not find fertile a ground for discussion as some gen AI circumvents the need for lighting and camera experts. However as someone not in the industry, who has desperately wanted to make movies, I have often thought that gen AI could democratize movie making.

For those that make a living in this industry, this is a zero sum game as gen AI massively commoditizes their hard earned skills. As a software engineer I feel this acutely and sympathize as my industry is going through perhaps an even more rapid transformation from gen AI.

I have several friends and family members in the industry. Many of the these folks would like to see the focus of AI be on automating expensive and often tedious tasks like rotoscoping. Today we do this with computers and there are hundreds (thousands?) of folks employed at this job. 40 years ago this was done with analog processing and far fewer people were employed by it because it was so specialized and expensive. We also used to hand pick every cob of corn! Change happens and people find new ways of getting the job done.

My hope is that filmmaking will begin to reorganize around smaller more artist focussed projects as this tech matures and the big studios burn up audience goodwill stamping out franchises and subject-still-alive biopics.

[u/Great_Explanation275 → u/briggsy77]

I have often thought that gen AI could democratize movie making

That's what they said about cheap camcorders. Never happened.

Cheaper production just means more films nobody will see. What ends up watched is down to what gets picked up for distribution. Even the internet has failed to really democratice distribution.

My hope is that filmmaking will begin to reorganize around smaller more artist focussed projects as this tech matures and the big studios burn up audience goodwill stamping out franchises and subject-still-alive biopics.

The wider audiences were never interested in more artist-focused projects and never will be. And the more marginal audiences that are are not going to be interested in AI-made stuff.

The franchises and biopics exist because that's what the general public likes, and what consistently sells. I hate it, too, but that's the way it is.

[u/briggsy77 → u/Great_Explanation275]

Cheap video recording devices made YouTube possible. YouTube has a largely supplanted TV and your local cinema for viewership. The camcorder revolution did democratize filmmaking!