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The studio model is being upended by seismic business
pressures and the disruptive potency of AI. For seasoned scriptwriters and
producers partnered as Talk Boys Studio, the answer was to create a short film
that could be the bellwether for a new wave narrative Generative AI content.
Ian McLees and Daniel Bonventre have written or produced a range of scripted comedy and unscripted shows for network TV in the U.S over the last decade. As a partnership since 2016 they had a number of scripts and pilots either sold pending development or pitched into studios with good prospects, or so they thought. Then Covid happened followed by the Writer’s Strike and the existential threat of AI.
“We were at the top of our game, ready to go, but suddenly
no-one was commissioning. There was no money anywhere for anything,” says McLees
(who wrote sitcoms Drama Club and Commanders and feature
mockumentary Like, Earth). “There was sheer frustration with the studio
system which is collapsing in front of our eyes.”
Their story has been replicated hundreds of times among
below the line talent but rather than waiting for the industry to pick up they
decided to DIY their existing scripts using AI.
“Let's take these projects that we loved and nobody can
afford and just see if we can make them,” says Bonventre (who helped produce
Alec Baldwin hosted panel show Match Game and Funny You Should Ask
and Apple+ reality series Kendra Sells Hollywood).
“More and more of our peers are turning to AI as an outlet
as a way to break down the barriers of the traditional Hollywood model.”
With no prior knowledge, they researched and learned AI
tools themselves. “We went to school,” says Bonventre. “We read everything we
could to stay on top of how to actually use this. It feels like we got a
master's degree in AI. Make no mistake these programmes are very difficult. You
have to sit in front of a screen for 20 hours a week and treat it like a job to
learn the editing software, learn the animation software and the prompting
language.”
They applied their new skills to a script about a canine
police officer interrogating a rodent suspected of arson and created short film
Roadkill.
“It was an idea we wanted to do as a feature animation in
the vein of Who Framed Roger Rabbit. We were obsessed with making this
movie. And we couldn't get any traction with it so when we found these AI tools
we truncated the story and took it from there.”
The result might betray its AI origins but is remarkable for
having been made at all. Creating
watchable two-minute videos in AI is impressive but at 12 minutes McLees and
Bonventre have made a narrative with professional rhythm, pace, comedy and
pathos.
“Nothing that we do is AI assisted from a writing standpoint,”
McLees insists. “The only thing we're using AI for is the image creation to
help bring those ideas to life in a way that we couldn’t without raising a ton of
money to shoot.”
The subject matter of the film doesn't pertain to AI. Nor
does it overreach to try and dazzle the eye with CGI. It's a simple, intriguing
two-hander that would have made a laudable stage play. The film is an attempt
to normalise the medium and show that the incorporation of AI doesn't call for
the negation of all that came before.
Bonventre explains they treated production like it was a
real film. “We made a shot list from the script and a mood board then drew up a
storyboard. We went through our timeline and if we needed an insert shot of a
cup of coffee or a wide shot of a desk then we plugged that shot into Midjourney,
created from image references in the style we wanted, and dropped that back
into the timeline.
“It was a lesson in how to direct and in cinematography
because you have to be so so specific about exactly what you want to see. When
framing a shot your intent doesn't always communicate to the program. Nor is
the technology that advanced for animation of creatures. We use programs that
animated animal faces and then had to edit the mouth movement in fine detail to
match lip sync. It required a lot of its trial and error because sometimes it
spits out garbage. You need to iterate many times over in Runway or Midjourney
even simple things like a dog’s paw pouring some whiskey into a coffee so it
translates properly on screen. It is extremely tedious and can easily look
janky.”
McLees adds, “Some people will ask ‘What prompt did you put
in ChatGPT?’ but there is so much more that has to go into putting these films
together. Sure, you can type in ‘Show me a bird flying over a volcano’ and
it'll spit out the image. But if there's no story, you’re going nowhere.”
They used a variety of AI software including Runway, Hedra,
Sunomusic, Based Labs, Hailuo, Nim and even provided the voice acting using AI
program ElevenLabs after laying in a radio play under the images.
“What would normally have cost us tens of thousands of
dollars just to make a concept trailer, or a short film to help sell the idea
to the studio or even just to get a meeting, we can do now for a fraction of
the cost using AI,” says McLees. “This is all human conceived, human written,
human directed and edited so we still have that power as the creatives.
“The storytellers who can figure out how to use the tech are
the ones that are going to cut through right now. None of our friends are
willing to go to school the way have. The workflow with AI is really the wild
west right now. AI is a difficult barrier of entry but eventually it's going to
get so much easier.”
Studios and writers have an uneasy alliance before the
current agreements on limited use of AI expire in 2026. Under the contract
signed between the Writers Guild and studios in 2023, production companies have
disclose to writers if any material given to them has been generated by AI
partially or in full. AI cannot be a credited writer nor can AI write or
rewrite ‘literary material.’ And AI-generated writing cannot be source
material.
“AI can't write. Full stop,” says McLees. “ChatGPT and
others just recycle language. There's no human emotion. It’s purely formulaic.
In eighteen months, with the tech moving so fast, who knows? I'm sure Disney,
Apple and Netflix are having their AI incubators spit out romantic comedy or
action thriller on ChatGPT believing that that can become a future script, but
I don't think we're there yet.”
Roadkill has been well received online and played at the AI
International Film Festival. Talk Boys Studio has also created an ad for the
brand Sour Patch Kids candy brand; comedy shorts featuring dinosaurs in an
office and one called Birdwatchers which went viral on Instagram and TikTok on
weekend of release with over 400K views across socials.
“It took us a month to do 12 minutes so would it take six to
nine months to make a feature?” poses Bonventre. “AI is still so new. No-one's really got it
figured out. Aside from a few top tier filmmakers everybody else is throwing
stuff against the wall hoping something will stick. That's exciting for us. Can
we be on the forefront of making a series? Can we do the first sitcom that's
fully AI? We're testing the boundaries
of what we can accomplish because if nobody wants to give us money to make the
full thing conventionally we still want our projects to be realised.”
The industry-wide fear of AI replacing jobs remains but McLees
and Bonventre insist that AI storytelling requires humans at the core to
execute. However, where it might once have taken a team of people to
animate Roadkill, it needed just the two of them. Surely jobs are going
to be lost?
“Look what happened when Pixar released Toy Story in
1995,” Bonventre says. “There was this huge fear that computers would replace
the jobs of traditional pencil animators. To an extent that happened, but there
are still lots of CG animators on a Pixar movie and just as importantly Pixar
movies are held up as the high water mark of animated storytelling because they
have incredible human artistic involvement.
“AI gets a bad rap because it feels scary but in reality
it’s a development of the industry. The old studio system broke down when
people started their own production companies. Artists have always adopted consumer
tech to create content from camcorders to the iPhone. It is all about taking
power away from those people that were closing the gates on us. That's kind of
what we faced in 2022 and it’s why more and more people from our industry are
going to start doing this on their own once the tech becomes more even more
accessible.”
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