The AI Filmmaker
Not too long ago, a clip went viral on social media – Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt in a fight on top of a building in a city of ruin. Cruise and Pitt have never been in a movie together, though. And sure as shit they weren’t in a real fight. The scene was courtesy of a new AI, Seedance. The output is pretty scary in terms of realism. It’s still not quite perfect, but I’d argue that in the age of CGI generation, we get a lot of action scenes where characters – even normal everyday people – are defying physics in ways that are unrealistic. (As an aside,…
Wonky World Building and JJ
All storytellers have different strengths and weaknesses. In telling a story, they’ll play to their strengths, and hopefully that compensates for their weaknesses. But what happens when a storyteller’s weakness is storytelling? I can’t fault director JJ Abrams’s ability to make visually stunning movies (lens flares and all). But his storytelling is terrible, which is born from his appalling world-building. Word-building is paramount to me. Get it right, and you can sell me anything. I’ll believe immortals are living among us who can only die if they lose their head; I’ll believe an eccentric inventor builds a time machine out of a DeLorean; I’ll believe an archaelogist is retained by…