#Sunspring Movie

[riseofthecommonwoodpile]

Hi Izzy! I remember back in the day you were a big fan of Sunspring and wrote a beautiful piece discussing it and talking about AI art. Do you think any AI art has surpassed Sunspring? Have changes in the development of AI changed your perspective on it at all? Asking bc I love that essay and I’m very curious :) thx

(context for those who don't know, Sunspring is a short film made about 8 years ago that used a relatively early LLM to generate its script, which was then filmed with a real cast and crew. if you want to watch it here it is, it's about 9 minutes, i highly recommend it)

i've thought about Sunspring a lot as AI art has become such a big topic in the past year or so, and I think the pieces i wrote about it i still stand behind, though i got a few things wrong that i'll bring up when i answer the second question.

to answer the first question: i personally haven't see any AI art that has impacted me emotionally nearly as much, but i also kinda dropped off watching new movies (most of the new-to-me movies i watch are found footage horror movies, 70's porno-chic also-rans, and shot on video movies from the 90's), and i would wager that, if i could somehow experience all of the AI art that exists, there'd be something that hit me in the same way again. there's too much of it for that not to be the case, and too many genuinely creative people experimenting with it. that said, what was so beautiful about Sunspring was how imperfect the tech used to create it was. Almost all of the script makes grammatical sense, but the way it flows, the directions sentences go, the phrasing used is so strange that the friction between the failures of the tech to be truly convincing and the actors trying to bridge the gap to make it still work is what was exhilarating and moving. as the models have gotten better and better, as the rough edges smooth off, that tension so often has just faded into a bland beige unflavored oatmeal of average aggregate language. some of the phrases in Sunspring that have stuck with me the most ("I think I could have been my life", "Whatever you want to know about the presence of the story, I’m a little bit of a boy on the floor.", etc.) wouldn't be created by any of the most popular LLMs today. they're too idiosyncratic, the phrasing is too odd, the grammar almost but not quite there. the plot is surreal and associative, the structuring bizarre and dreamlike. the lines Sunspring ends on— "He looks at me, and he throws me out of his eyes. And then he says he’ll go to bed with me."— are some of my favorites in any film, and it's because they are abstract, poetic, like the computer stumbled upon a phrase so evocative that no written-by-committee script would've let it through. he looks at me, and he throws me out of his eyes. this man who is supposed to love me looks at me in a way where his love of me has gone, where i'm barely even seen as me. it's not the kind of sentence most modern LLMs, with their focus on being convincing, are designed to create.

as far as the second question, i think the biggest change in my perspective is how my belief in the technology, both good and bad, has curdled. i bought into the hype that the technology would progress to the point where screenwriting could be turned into an assembly line, and maybe after that the rest of the parts of filmmaking as well. i had hoped it would become a new collaborative process between human and technology, and i feared it would become a way for movie execs to pay people less and eliminate jobs. the first i haven't seen much of, and the second, while certainly the dream of so many boosters of the tech, has largely been a failure (though plenty, plenty of people have still lost their jobs to LLMs despite that, and as a labor issue i still think it is a very important area of focus). i was too caught up in the possibilities that i didn't bother to research who was making the tech, where the money was coming from, what growth in the sector would look like materially, etc. i still believe LLMs can be used creatively, but most likely any interesting art coming from them will emerge out of models custom-molded by artists to have some of those same rough edges i loved in the first place. i think, in terms of mainstream film, any use of AI is in service to the same bland competence the rest of the industry is mired in, a determination to make products for everyone that inevitably become products for no one. i've become a lot more cynical about the trend towards mediocrity in entertainment, and that cynicism is due at least in part to much of what i've seen come out of the AI space. i do not have a knee-jerk hatred of the tech, but it has not at all panned out how i had hoped or dreaded.

[according-to-shlorp]

For some odd reason, I’d love to see Terry and Korvo watch ‘Sunspring.’

I can only imagine Korvo’s reaction to it, being confused as fuck, and rant about it. While Terry claims he understood the meaning behind the movie and loved it. Though, the ‘meaning and plot’ Terry thinks the movie is about is far off. Because the movie actually doesn’t have much meaning to it.

The Replicants also watch it at a point. I’d think Jesse and Yumyulack would fight over what the movie was truly about and it’s meaning.

[chrysantilus]

New Article Up! #FreeFilmFridays

http://www.emilyeaglin.com/read/free-film-fridays-futurist-short-double-feature-pumzi-sunspring

[fishozymaa]

[lovequotesworld]

+32 shakespeare in love movie quotes : Image in love it collection by sunspring on We Heart It https://ift.tt/37UbXl9

[iamvictoriaanne]

Ars is excited to be hosting this online debut of Sunspring, a short science fiction film that's not entirely what it seems. It's about three people living in a weird future, possibly on a space station, probably in a love triangle. You know it's the future because H (played with neurotic gravity by Silicon Valley's Thomas Middleditch) is wearing a shiny gold jacket, H2 (Elisabeth Gray) is playing with computers, and C (Humphrey Ker) announces that he has to "go to the skull" before sticking his face into a bunch of green lights. It sounds like your typical sci-fi B-movie, complete with an incoherent plot. Except Sunspring isn't the product of Hollywood hacks—it was written entirely by an AI. To be specific, it was authored by a recurrent neural network called long short-term memory, or LSTM for short. At least, that's what we'd call it. The AI named itself Benjamin.

[loicpidoux-blog]

Sunspring

Sunspring est un court-métrage de science-fiction réalisé en 2016 par Oscar Sharp. Le film de neuf minutes à la particularité d’avoir été écrit par Benjamin, une intelligence artificielle crée par Ross Goodwin et Oscar Sharp. L’AI, basée sur un algorithme de prédiction de texte, a analysé plus d’une quarantaine de scripts de science-fiction comme 2001, l’Odyssée de l’espace, Star Trek ou encore Interstellar pour créer son propre scénario.

On peut donc retrouver dans le script qu’a créer Benjamin certains motifs/redondances qui reviennent régulièrement dans les histoires écrites par les humains, comme le personnage qui questionne son environnement qui reviens souvent dans Sunspring.

La principale difficulté pour Oscar Sharp a été de mettre en image une histoire créer par une machine qui n’a pas conscience de la réalité et génère juste des mots selon un algorithme. Il a fallut faire preuve d’imagination pour certains passages du script à priori incohérent comme ci-dessous :

Le résultat est un film surréaliste, drôle, et qui montre que les scénaristes n’ont pas encore de soucis à se faire, du moins dans immédiat.

Source : https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2016/06/an-ai-wrote-this-movie-and-its-strangely-moving/

Le court-métrage Sunspring : https://vimeo.com/187172971

[ahgnews]

Movie written by algorithm turns out to be hilarious and intense

Movie written by algorithm turns out to be hilarious and intense

Sunspring, a short science fiction movie written entirely by AI, debuted exclusively on Ars in June 2016. Ars is excited to be hosting this online debut of Sunspring, a short science fiction film that’s not entirely what it seems. It’s about three people living in a weird future, possibly on a space station, probably in a love triangle. You know it’s the future because H (played with neurotic…

[pkmatrix]

Whenever the topic of an AI written movie comes up, I usually see people bring up Sunspring (2016).  Which, yeah, is weird and bizarre...but is also four years old, and well out of date when it comes to the state of the art. A couple days ago a new AI-written short film was released, this time written using GPT-3.  Comparing the two, it's staggering just how far we've come in such a short period!

[iamaarushisharma]

AI Automation in Filmmaking: Roll camera – AI – Action!

Remember Jarvis, Iron Man’s AI-backed companion with British accent and an obedient “at-your-service sir” attitude? How astounding it is to witness a tech-world where imaginary characters can become a reality with the help of AI. Facebook founder, Mark Zuckerberg has already started to work on the subject by inventing his personal home AI assistant called ‘Jarvis’ to create virtual reality visualizations.

It all began with Expressionism

Experts are working persistently to experience pivotal Artificial Intelligence (AI) age not from a decade but from far earlier. Film industry is one such arena utilizing AI in big-small ways to add special effects and gather eyeballs. Surprisingly, the use of AI in movies dates back to the time where before the videos even had audio. Shocking, right? In 1927, German Expressionism film ‘Metropolis’ introduced a robotic character which became a benchmark and allowed experts to forecast the success of AI in film making and advertising in the years to come. Today, the technology providers have upped the ante and companies are training their AI systems and bots to make a complete video. Use of sophisticated technology has allowed the film makers to evade time-consuming activities while saving significant production costs. This is evidenced by many movies which have become benign examples of this smart technology.

Movie Trailer for ‘Morgan’

20th Century Fox collaborated with IBM and its AI system called ‘Watson’ to develop the trailer of the horror movie ‘Morgan’. The 6 minutes trailer was created by Watson in only 24 hours that could have taken weeks if produced by humans. The AI system was trained by the experts by segmenting audio, visuals and other essential elements of 100 horror movies to teach it moments for creating automated trailer. Each shot was labelled with an emotion from 24 various emotions like frightening, eerie, and joy to make the trailer functional. The movie was the first attempt at using the AI for trailers and it not only reduced production cost but also the time from weeks to hours.

‘Zone Out’, the automated short film

The fact  is, the movie is fully bizarre, has incoherent and hilarious dialogues, a completely muddled plotline, distorted characters, and eerie soundtrack. However, despite being a mismatch for entertainment, the video demonstrated a positive indication of AI in the entertainment sector. This 5-minute film was written, directed and edited entirely by the AI algorithm called ‘Benjamin’ in just 48 hours. The creation is a collective effort of Los Angeles based director, Oscar Sharp and Ross Goodwin, who is also a creative technologist at Google, to learn dialogue using voice-generation and face-swapping technology. The partners have worked before to work on the same subject by creating another short film- ‘Sunspring’. The movie was less of a failure than ‘Zone out’ as it used real actors and dialogues.

The Endgame’s AI Paradigm

Shout out to all the Marvel fans! James Alexander Hendler, an AI researcher with his expert team used AI algorithms and machine learning programming to convert the very dashing Josh Brolin into the anti-hero- ‘Thanos’. The team worked extensively to train the AI-backed system to scan and record actor’s expressions and face structure to automatically map on the animated character body. This helped the actor to perform with other co-stars instead of alone in front of a blue or green screen. Meanwhile, Digital Domain’s machine learning algorithm saved lots of time by capturing it in real time to perform face mapping and swapping.

AI and robots are rapidly automating the filmmaking process to bring out impressive results and error-free edits but there is still humongous amount of work to be done. Technology is improving and there is a long way to go and develop smart AI algorithms to speed up the entertainment sector but experts like Hendler believe that soon AI and bots will become the norm to film industry. Audiences and fans of expert CGI and animation just have to sit tight and cheer for more that’s coming their way.

Source: https://techpatio.com/2019/articles/ai-automation-filmmaking-roll-camera-ai-action

[cracked]

As much as engineers would like to try, it's impossible to replace all liberal arts majors with a bunch of machines. Take writers, for example. Surely they must be immune to the rise of the machine worker, right? Right? Well, while a robot may never write the next Moby Dick, it wouldn't take more than a toaster strapped to a typewriter to come up with garbage like Dumb And Dumber To. The machine writer is coming, so you better get your ass in gear and finish that Goonies 2 spec script before it does. 

The movie Sunspring is a short film experiment made for the 48-Hour Film Festival in London, which was written by an AI program called Benjamin. The producers fed the data of dozens of popular movies into this neural network, and it spat out a script, complete with dialogue, based on the prompts given to it. The producers then made a nine-minute film based on Benjamin's screenplay.

The movie is amusing, in an uncanny valley sort of way. Most of the dialogue is what could be called "coherent gibberish" -- the sentences are grammatically correct (mostly), but they are otherwise incomprehensible.

Ironically for a sci-fi movie written by a robot, there's not a lot of science going on in the plot. The dialogue is mostly about misunderstandings, love triangles, and disappointing sex. The movie ends with a nonsensical Gone Girl-esque monologue about the regrets of lost virginity. Despite being utter nonsense, the movie is still kind of engrossing, even if it's in a cloning-experiment-gone-wrong sort of way.

5 WTF Ways The Future Is About To Change Movies

[ferdifz]

Throwback from 2016.

[bananadata]

David Hasselhoff becomes Hasselbot, a remote controlled actor whose text is written by an AI

Last year we got super excited about the short movie that was written by and AI, Sunspring. We didn't suspect that it was only the beginning...

Here's an AI goodie

[vesperlord]

So after going through and reading stories written by AI (and in particular, watching this short film: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LY7x2Ihqjmc) I vote that we have AI write all of our movies now,

[theoptioncalledsciart]

Dream job

Today’s Sci-Art gem on the Internet is the short film “Sunspring” by Oscar Sharp.

The predictive text system of the phone was hacked by Ross Goodwin and was fed different screenplays from some of the highest grossing films in Hollywood history. It has some insightful and deep dialogues, such as: “I don’t know” “I don’t care.” and my personal favourite: “I am the one who got on this rock with a child and then I left the other two.” I just love the fact that the filmmakers gave the most important part of a film to an A.I. . Also, it is a fantastic way to generalise the screenplays from Hollywood movies

Here is a screenshot of the screenplay the A.I. wrote:

https://soundcloud.com/tigerandman/home-on-the-land References: Sharp, Oscar and Ross Goodwin. Sunspring. 2016. Web. 1 Feb. 2017. Sharp, Oscar and Ross Goodwin. Screenshot of the script of Sunspring. 2016. Image. 1 Feb. 2017.

Sharp, Oscar and Ross Goodwin. Screenshot of the themesong of Sunspring. 2016. Image. 1 Feb. 2017.