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I was about 15 minutes into Google’s AI short-film screening when I realized I had nearly finished my popcorn.
Granted, the bag was small. But the rapid munching was a natural consequence of my piqued intrigue late last
month as the tech giant showcased 11 AI-generated short films at Manhattan’s arthouse Metrograph theater. The directors — a mix of various ages, demographics and professional backgrounds — were the fourth cohort in Google’s “Flow Sessions” program, a six-week intensive that gives a group of up-and-coming filmmakers unlimited access to the company’s Flow short-form AI video generator and several mentorship sessions to bring a short story idea to life.
It’s no secret that short-form videos have been a layman’s doorway into moviemaking in the AI era, with companies luring users with the notion of bringing their imaginations to life in ways unfathomable before the advent of generators. Google knows this as well, and the short-film exhibition seems as designed to present the films and the technology as it does to showcase the company’s eagerness for the film industry to embrace AI’s potential, moves further reflected in its DeepMind research partnership with A24 and its work with filmmakers including Darren Aronofsky and Doug Liman.
That includes hiring a filmmaker-in-residence, Henry Daubrez, who has worked with each cohort to shepherd their ideas from concept to generated reality. Daubrez says the AI era means one doesn’t need a professionally creative background to tell stories, as those from other industries have found a pathway to tell stories that would’ve otherwise lain dormant in their minds.
“Life is messy,” he tells me in a video interview ahead of the latest screening. “Sometimes that was my dream career, and they get there. Sometimes they had [a dream] and it didn’t work out. Sometimes they had to keep in the family business. I think what AI is doing — and I understand the pushback about most people can say, ‘Hey, you have a camera on your phone. What prevents you from going outside and shooting?’ Depends what you want to say — the story, VFX is expensive, it’s still complicated to put things together. But I think for a lot of people, it’s gonna give them a new door.”
It’s a sentiment Google’s keen to put out there, from the cast of creators they’ve enlisted to the venue they’ve chosen. The sessions’ screening venue moved from Tribeca’s Roxy Cinema to the much bigger Metrograph in the Lower East Side, an ode to the cinephile demographic that reveres the theater. (A prior July event at Metrograph: Charli xcx’s early listening event for her latest album “Music, Fashion, Film.”)
But it’s one that still contrasts with the industry consternation around AI generators, which studios and creative unions have still torn into for scraping copyrighted content without creators’ consent. Such concerns remain evident in some of this cohort’s films themselves — the screening of the meditation-focused short ”One Breath at a Time,” by director Santiago Carrasquilla, featured a prominent shot of a Nintendo Game Boy logo that was promptly blurred for its online release. (Google never explicitly banned logos from the shorts, one director told me, though it was suggested they blur them.)
The short films themselves ran the gamut from the abstract to the questionable, with layers of emotion sprinkled in throughout the hourlong session. One, “Two Chairs,” dove into director Dion Lee’s existential crisis over whether to have children, with AI aiding in animated sequences. It’s a story rooted in emotion, a far cry from the wholly AI-generated, “Texas Chainsaw Massacre”-inspired horror short “Mascot,” which featured a costumed character in Times Square assaulting a man who didn’t pay for the photos he took of them. Another short, “Nothin’ Beats a Cheeseburger,” revolved around an alien arriving on Earth to indulge in the alleged “world’s best cheeseburger,” using real actors for the two leads while AI generated the alien’s likeness onto one of them.
The credits for “Mascot” featured behind-the-scenes shots of the two characters — the violent costumer and the frightened photographer — that made me question whether its director, short-form filmmaker Daniel Garcia, took a hybrid approach of real actors within AI sequences. But those shots, too, were also wholly AI, a choice Garcia says was a cheeky choice to lampoon those interested in how films are made but one that left me worried over whether it clouded reality.
“Seeing is not believing anymore,” he says. “So I just thought that, especially with AI, the behind-the-scenes is more important than the actual product. And I think now, because everyone has access to the tools, everyone can make cinematic stories easily, and what I find now is that most people are not interested in the actual film. They’re more interested in how you made it.”
Still, humanity emerged in Lee’s film, which physically featured the 35-year-old creative director in the six-minute project as she wrote letters to her future self and potential daughter. Lee tells me it was paramount she starred in the film because of its personal nature. “It would be weird if it was someone else,” she says.
Lee, a freelance art director who’s worked everywhere from Vox.com to the New York Times, says over drinks at the post-screening reception how she uses AI models to help generate assets, such as, in “Two Chairs,” a chair. But she understood people’s hesitancy toward the technology and doesn’t believe it needs to be forced upon those who aren’t already eager to embrace it.
“I think it’s good for things that you need but you can’t necessarily have access to on a day-to-day basis, and if you’re happy with that, then that’s great,” she says. “If you don’t need that or want that, then that’s totally fine too. I just feel like take what you can from it. It’s a tool. If it doesn’t work for you, then it doesn’t work for you.”
Still, Lee says she’d use AI to help produce other video projects, suggesting Google’s gambit — whether embraced by Hollywood or not – may pay off.
