Here's How Artificial Intelligence Wrote & Directed This Creepy Short Film

Can Artificial Intelligence trump human imagination and sensibilities?

image credit: Youtube/Richard Juan

The day has come when ideas of the future no longer belong in the future. Our fascination with computer generated content has finally yielded a film. Yes, an entire short film written and directed by Artificial Intelligence.

AI entrepreneur and rocket scientist Aaron Kemmer took to Twitter to say:

"We used ChatGPT to WRITE and DIRECT a film in a weekend."

“My co-producer, who writes scripts for a living, was blown away when ChatGPT produced nearly ~50 scripts for us in 1 hour. This took months of work down to 1 hour.” Aaron added.

It’s worth noting that a similar experiment conducted a couple of years ago, yielded a script that was so incomprehensive, no one could understand a word of it. Now only in a couple of years, Artificial Intelligence has become so sophisticated that it’s giving a tough fight to qualified screenwriters.

Let’s take a look at how the film came about.

The Writing:

Aaron Kemmer used an AI Chatbot to come up with over a 100 ideas along with 50 short film scripts under an hour. The chatbot then used artificial intelligence to further refine each idea. While some of these ideas reflected themes like Stranger Things or The Goonies, upon further refining each idea, the chatbot kept generating more details until a completely unique idea had been hatched.

Virtual Pre-Production: “Holy S#it”

Once the script was locked, Aaron requested the AI chatbot for a list of shots. Allowing the chatbot to create a list of shots would mean the chatbot would become the de facto director of the film.

The chatbot came up with 18 different camera shots which Aaron Kemmer sent to his cinematographer for review.

“First, holy shit. Is this tech real,” asked Odyssey Flores, cinematographer of the award-winning film Lola. “Second, can we get more details?”

Aaron Kemmer then requested the AI to provide its preferences for camera positioning, set blocking, the angle of the set, cast, lighting, and even the color palette for the shoot. It only took the AI chatbot a few minutes to come back with the requested details for the cinematographer. The chatbot even came up with recommendations for the kind of lens they should use.

Once the list of shots was finalized, the AI chatbot printed out a series of images, similar to what it expected the shots to look like. Yes, the AI chatbot printed out a storyboard on its own. At the end of it all, the makers had over 50 pages of notes on how to shoot the film, on top of the final script.

The final Film: The Safe Zone

The result of the AI Chatbot’s instructions was a rudimentary but impactful short film called The Safe Zone which highlighted the theme of Artificial Intelligence taking over the human world.

While it's not exactly Oscar material, the clear sense of dramatic tension reflected through the script shows how far AI has come to understanding a film’s story structure; a first for a virtual filmmaker.

Sure, the actors of the film are to be credited for its dramatic output and to take the written dialogue to the next level. But one can’t deny the fact that AI can now be considered to as a serious storyteller. Give it a few more months of finetuning and we may soon have a sophisticated film produced by an AI enabled chatbot.

You can watch the entire film here on Youtube.