AI has taken the world by storm and has made its presence felt in the world of cinema.
The 21st century has witnessed tremendous growth in the development of AI, from traditional machinery to modern supercomputers and robots that function like humans. Our lives have been transformed beyond measure, and this is just the beginning. The pace of these innovations is staggering and it’s safe to say that we are just scratching the surface of what AI can do.
Generally in the movies, AI plays the role of the faithful robot that obeys the hero (the Star Wars robots, for example), the villain who wants to destroy humanity, as in Transcendence (2014), or both: the technology created to serve he turns against his masters: Terminator (1985), Matrix (1999), I, Robot (2004), etc.
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But AI doesn’t just seek to destroy the world in fiction. The AI of the hand of the automation and the robots can help human beings in the world of the creation and edition of films and videos.
AI and Video Editing
On the iPhone Photos app, the “Memories” feature offers an intriguing video-making option. When a picture is selected, the user can customize the length & add an emotional tone. Memories generate videos automatically, making the task of creating a beautiful, inspiring, or emotional piece a breeze. This function can be a great way to relive memories or showcase a collection of photos. Overall, a simple & fun feature to explore.
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You can see more advanced examples of AI video editing on the Wibbitz page, which can automatically generate videos based on the text being fed in a matter of seconds.
Wibbitz technology is based on algorithms that analyze the text of an article, extracting the most interesting information and converting it into a video using NLP (Natural Language Processing) technologies. These videos show outstanding phrases, images, infographics, and everything that attracts the most attention of the analyzed text.
Websites that cover breaking news like CNN and Mashable use this service to create content to increase their written stories for users who prefer to watch a story then read the article.
Magisto is another website that automatically creates edited videos based on user-loaded content, which requires the user to choose an emotional address and then provides them with the ability to make changes by customizing time, transitions and effects.
AI as Director and Film Editor
IBM supercomputer Watson helped a video editor produce a trailer for the Morgan thriller in Hollywood in 2016. IBM scientists started the process by ingesting more than 100 horror movie trailers in Watson to evaluate sound and visual component patterns, which enabled Watson to determine what characteristics they produced to a vibrant trailer.
Thanks to IBM Watson, the process of creating movie trailers has been revolutionized. In just a span of 24 hours, Watson analyzed a list of ten scenes from a movie & determined the best six minutes to include in the trailer. From there, a human editor crafted those six minutes of footage into a coherent story. This remarkable feat usually takes anywhere between ten and thirty days, making Watson’s contribution to the industry invaluable. With artificial intelligence, movie trailers can now be created efficiently & effectively, leaving more time for filmmakers to spend on the creative side of movie making.
A film called Impossible Things, which presented its script written by both AI and humans, took things a step further in the filming process. The AI officer evaluated the information to determine which twists of stories, premises and plots best would resonate with the viewers ‘demands. As a super intriguing fact, the AI agent determined that a bathtub and piano scene was specifically necessary to make it resonate with the target audience.
Surprisingly, a science fiction film called Sunspring premiered, featuring an AI agent named Benjamin as its sole writer, or “automatic screenwriter.” Benjamin created the entire script by analyzing and learning from numerous sci-fi movies and TV shows like Star Trek, The Fifth Element, and Ghostbusters among others. Despite being a collaborative effort between human actors, filmmakers, & editors, the final result was underwhelming, showcasing the current limitations of AI in the creative writing process. The film turned out to be perplexing & challenging to comprehend, proving that we still have a way to go before computers can duplicate human creativity.
Nevertheless, this experiment has only opened up new possibilities for every AI app development company
Have you heard of KIRA? KIRA is a robot arm developed by Motorized Precision that is rapidly changing the game to get smooth, precise and very complex kinematic camera movements. Over the past three decades, computer-generated images have transformed the way many movies and television shows are made. However, the creation of digital effects is still a complex and very tedious process. For every second of a movie, an army of designers can spend hours isolating people and objects in unedited recordings, digitally building new images from scratch and combining them so that editing is not noticed. Array develops systems that can execute some tasks of those processes. Gary Bradski & Ethan Rublee, who founded the company, were also involved in Industrial Perception, a robotics firm acquired by Google.
Backed by more than $ 10 million in financing from various companies — such as the venture capital firm of Silicon Valley Lux Capital and SoftBank Ventures — Array is part of a widespread effort undertaken by both industry and academia and is dedicated to building systems that can generate and manipulate images autonomously. Thanks to improvements in neural networks – complex algorithms that can learn tasks by analyzing vast amounts of data – these systems can edit the noise and errors present in the sequences, apply simple effects and create very realistic images of fictional characters or help put the head of one person in the body of another.
Adobe, a leading provider of design software, is exploring the potential of computer learning to automate certain design tasks. This follows the success of Google’s neural network, which quickly surpassed the company’s technological performance. One of the driving forces behind this development is Gary Bradski, who, along with his colleague Ethan Rublee, previously helped to develop the computational vision of robots designed to load & unload cargo trucks. To inform their work, the team collected over a decade’s worth of rotoscope material & visual effects work from various design studios. While they didn’t specify which studios they used, this data has likely been instrumental in advancing their research.
Besides, they have added their work to the collection. After filming people, dummies and other objects in front of a green screen, for example, the company’s engineers can rotate thousands of images relatively quickly so that they are added to the data collection. Once the algorithm is trained, you can rotate images without the help of the green screen. The technology still has flaws and in some cases, designers must still make adjustments to automated work, but it is improving.
Zazz acknowledges that the future of AI movies is uncertain, but it’s guaranteed to be entertaining. With endless possibilities, it’s exciting to imagine what creative masterpieces await us.