AI-Powered Filmmaking with Waymark's Stephen Parker and Josh Rubin

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Video Description

In this episode, Nathan sits down with Stephen Parker and Josh Rubin of Waymark, and creators of The Frost, an AI-powered 12 minute short film. In this episode, we get a behind the scenes look at their creative process, the prompting and creative techniques they used, and an overview of the current state of AI art. If you're looking for an ERP platform, check out our sponsor, NetSuite: http://netsuite.com/cognitive

TIMESTAMPS
(00:00) Episode Preview
(00:01:00) Nathan’s introduction for Stephen Parker and Josh Rubin
(00:05:01) - The Frost is a 12-minute short film created using DALL-E 2 images.
(00:07:06) - The Frost started as an experiment to see if a narrative film could be created completely from AI imagery.
(00:08:38) - The filmmaking process was different because DALL-E images provided a starting point to build the story.
(00:10:38) - Parker started generating images with DALL-E 2 when he got access to the early preview.
(00:12:26) - Prompt technique to get consistent images by providing context about a hypothetical film.
(00:15:57) Sponsors: Netsuite | Omneky
(00:19:37) - Compositional continuity, like shot-reverse shot, was hard to achieve through prompting.
(00:22:13)- Rubin would request specific shots and the team would prompt DALL-E 2 to create them.
(00:25:24) - Filmmaking with AI as opposed to traditional filmmaking
(00:32:25) - Getting consistent facial features for characters was very difficult.
(00:39:03) - The storytelling helped cover inconsistencies that viewers might not notice.
(00:40:15) - Working with the images DALL-E provides
(00:41:54) - MacGuffin Object to tie scenes together
(00:44:53) Inpainting and compositing to refine DALL-E Images
(00:45:41) - Prompting for complex or novel compositions remains challenging.
(00:50:43) - The AI art is limited by what exists in the training data.
(01:02:05)- Animating the human characters was challenging because of missing or incorrect appendages.
(01:07:36) - The team had to find creative ways to convey emotion through the limited animation.
01:02:24 - Animating subtle human movement and emotion is still very difficult.
(01:06:35) - A romantic comedy would be much harder to produce with current AI capabilities.
(01:12:17) - For Frost 2 they are using text-to-video models like RunwayML.
(01:15:43) - AI voicing advancements applied to filmmaking
(01:19:27) - The future of AI in Hollywood and filmmaking: quality narratives still require human vision

LINKS:

The Frost: https://www.thefrostpart.one/

MIT Tech Review Feature Article: https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/06/01/1073858/surreal-ai-generative-video-changing-film/

Behind the Scenes Videos: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p31COxNbTWs and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F8k9MeXpSUU

The Frost Part 2 – trailer – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RcmwtRd_NIs

X/SOCIAL:

@Stephen_Parker (Stephen)
@bigkickcreative (Josh)
@Waymark
@labenz (Nathan)
@eriktorenberg
@CogRev_Podcast

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Music Credit: GoogleLM