AI filmed: how Russian auteur cinema saves with the help of neural networks
The premiere of Bakur Bakuradze's film "Lermontov", where the fog is partially drawn by artificial intelligence, took place at the Mayak festival. Before that, the Feofan series was presented on the "New Season", completely created by a neural network, including actors. In Russia, they are just trying to introduce technology into film production, and in Hollywood, real actors are calling for a boycott of the first AI actress Tilly Norwood. About how technology is changing cinema, how much Russian companies save thanks to it, and whether progress can become a threat to the actor's profession — in the Izvestia article.
Fog, gray veil
Director Bakur Bakuradze himself does not resort to artificial intelligence, but his cameraman Pavel Fomintsev turned to neural networks in his work on Lermontov.
— There was a difficult shot with fog. And it required layering and multilevelness. You can't create it yourself. And we also needed to beautifully embed the branches there. Therefore, we had to use such technologies. And it saved him a lot of time. And if it's time, then it's money," Bakuradze explained to Izvestia.
Two weeks earlier, at the New Season festival, Mikhail Tkachenko, Director of production at Start Studio and producer of Start Production, presented the first 10-minute episode of the comedy series Feofan, created entirely using artificial intelligence.
— The idea to release the first neural series was spontaneous. We generated a promo video for another project, Khutor, but it turned out so well that we decided to make a full-fledged series out of it as an experiment. So far, only the first ten-minute episode has been released in the format of a sketch show. Of course, making a neural series is much cheaper and much faster than shooting the same project in live scenery and with real actors. But we must take into account that we still have a small form and not so many heroes. The main ones are Feofan and Matvey the cat. Therefore, the budget is small. We don't disclose it, but we can say that generating one video costs an average of 150-300 thousand rubles per minute, depending on the complexity," Tkachenko told Izvestia.
Neural networks as a rescue for animators
New technologies are also being tried in animation. Yakut film director Peter Hickey is creating his new project about the national epic of Olonkho using neural networks. According to him, this reduces the artist's work by almost 90%.
— We can do motion capture: we film ourselves and superimpose the AI on the finished character. Or we draw sketches and insert our hero there. Thus, we reduce the artist's work to almost 90%. This saves a lot of effort, time and budget," the director confessed to Izvestia.
Hickey and his studio are currently working on a story about demons from the lower world of the Yakut epic who kidnap the daughter of the ruler of an impregnable city. According to him, their main task in working with AI is to make its presence in the film invisible to the viewer's eye.
Director Nina Volova before the screening of the competition film "Fireworks in the Afternoon" at the Mayak Festival of contemporary Russian cinema in Gelendzhik
The director said that neural networks can be a beneficial tool for young creators to save their budget. So, if the task is to make a video for an artist for 30 million, then the production and postproduction team will have about 50 people, and five artificial intelligence specialists will do the work for 17 million.
— For the customer, this option will always be preferable, but for us, the guys who dream of implementing an ambitious project, it is impossible to do this without neural networks. The numbers are too big. The neural network gives us the opportunity to implement it much cheaper compared to global budgets," said Hickey.
Producer Alexey Barykin agrees that AI significantly saves money and time, but the question arises — who will own the rights to the artwork as a result of such cooperation.
— Today I will do it very profitably, and tomorrow it will turn out that my content is not mine, but belongs to Elon Musk, for example. And I definitely don't want that. I try not to trust neural networks with something essential and authorial. Of course, with the help of artificial intelligence, we process the image, sound, and clean it all the time. But it's definitely not possible to generate a script fragment, pictures, or special effects that are inserted into a rental film using AI," Barykin told Izvestia.
Authors are against templates
However, many filmmakers, on the contrary, deny the use of neural networks in their work. Director Nina Volova, who made her debut at the Mayak Festival with the film "Fireworks in the Afternoon," said she hates Chat GPT. In her opinion, he is only able to handle "secretarial work."
— AI generates exclusively templates. I tried to write a dialogue with his help, but the program kept leading him in a positive direction. Neural networks are definitely not an assistant for screenwriters and directors," says Volova.
This point of view is supported by director Nadezhda Mikhalkova and animation artist Konstantin Bronzit. Despite the prospects of saving time and money, both prefer to work the old-fashioned way, without any use of neural networks.
AI-actress Tilly Norwood
Meanwhile, Hollywood is boycotting the first AI actress, Tilly Norwood, created by studio Particle6. The premiere of the digital avatar at the Zurich Film Forum and the subsequent demonstration of videos where Tilly cries, laughs, advertises jeans and plays in scenes of various genres caused alarm among the professional community. Although the company's CEO and Tilly's creator, Elin van der Velden, reassured the actors that Norwood is not a substitute for a person, but a work of art that arouses interest and in itself testifies to the power of creativity.
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