17 Comments

Great report Mike! That Terminator 2 trailer was crazy!

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The T2 crew is a funny group and full of talent. If you want a who's who of ai filmmakers their 50-person crew is where I'd direct most people. They have a good sense of humor too, very much informed by the limitations of the video models.

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I enjoy all of Mike's articles!

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Thank you. I try to provide useful information you wouldn't find otherwise.

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Well good for them.. & they do sound like absolute champs.. the real deal..

Am minor league by comparison - not in the same ballpark or snack bracket

& like or not ain’t got a dime to my name & give a shitnot re zombies - woof eh

& They won’t see the likes of me coming yet surely know me when they see me

Will be among those creating with other people - talents - skill sets - knowledge

& super stoked as integral teammates bringin th full load & rockin th cinema casbah

& holy hell - can prompt a soundtrack as well ? Boffo & sayonara to all those extinctified !

Might I point out that I’ve put high end stuff in the can with talent & live sync sound..

for less than the catering budget for those AI fandanglers that surely known a craft table or two

🦎🏴‍☠️🎬

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There's no minor league at the moment. A sentence I excluded from the ending is that the current moment is like being around when the Warner Brothers were forming their studio in the early days of Hollywood. There's very little, if any, established hierarchy at the moment. So opportunity abounds for just about anyone.

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.. never a worry.. wuz havin sumfun & givin ya the gears - am so oldSchool I seen The Man Who Planted Trees in a theatre with popcorn - NFB boom man & recordist old but was already a shooter

You guys are priceless in my view - behind or on the scenes - livin & breathin ‘Media’ & sharin the Intel - ahead of the curve, making ‘media and/or studying it sideways - ol Marshall McLuhan saw you two coming - tag team.. & your homies too - McLuhan’s co-author & translator Derrick de Kerckhove told me he spoke of ‘generalists - artists/business operators manning the outposts of culture & technology.. surfing the vacuum behind the leading edge.. hell ! I has a post here about this.. will throw it up on th creep.. in the hero spot.. the dude himself talkin with Tom Wolfe .. perfectly said - ie ‘cannot be paraphrased .. 🦎🏴‍☠️🎬

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& a kickass ‘PS to me - for letting that that line sneak past me .. oh deary me oh mee o my oh !

‘the only thing standing between the artist & their film.. ‘Film ? What Film ? Where ?

we talking ‘digital emulsion .. then how bout some hip new jargonese ..

‘had to upWarp via WetCloud just to spit out cyberchrome InterNegaNots

due to predictive ViralDemand ‘goBot demands !’

‘who said “SHOW me the FILM” ! ! 🦎🏴‍☠️🎬

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Hi Mike, great article and I love that you’re digging into the creators exploring the new technology.

I imagine it was a mistake but want to flag that Kiri did not work on any of the Grimes visuals at Coachella. All the AI work was produced and created by KNGMKR with the help of Hannah and POM from Banodoco.

Keep up the great writing and excited to read more of your stuff!

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Huh. I will look into that more. I think there were multiple visuals from multiple artists. I'm going off information from a tweet Kiri posted (https://x.com/Kyrannio/status/1780540740915073121).

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Ah, I see. This is good to know, I thought Grimes had made those clips herself (I’m one half of KNGMKR and we produced all the visuals save the very few Grimes pulled).

Thank you for clarifying!

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Nice to make your acquaintance! I'd love to learn more about KNGMKR too if there's somewhere I can do so.

Btw, I edited the article to say "some of the AI visuals" to be more accurate. Thanks for pointing this out.

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No worries! And not to take anything away from Kiri.

We’d love to show you some stuff.

I’m traveling at the moment but if you don’t mind (and before I forget) feel free to shoot an email to:

mac@kngmkr.co and Cc matt@kngmkr.co

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Super interesting. Nice to finally see how AI is being used in the real world (so far I’ve only ever seen people demo’ing it). I have to say though, sitting for hours coaxing prompts sounds like death to me. Making my art (I’m a musician) is a very personal process, even for outside projects. It involves emotion, life experience, technique, skill at the actual thing I’m making, trial and error, discovery, getting good nights of sleep (or not), etc etc. I’m intrigued by what you’ve described and am curious to learn to more about it, but I’d rather visit the Grand Canyon myself rather than have software simulate the experience for me. That’s how it feels to me.

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It's a new paradigm of creative process. A lot of filmmakers use cute terms in their end credits like "Made in collaboration with [insert AI program here]". At the current moment there's less room for demanding exact specifications the way a traditional director might. You need to go with the flow since many of the models are like slot machines. Many people are working on workflows and technology to bring more control to the process. We'll see how well it goes.

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I hear you. A new paradigm of creative process does sound exciting. But just sitting all day typing/tweaking prompts seems to me like trying to tame a wild horse that sucks at being a horse. AI is so primitive still and as it gets better it’s, by definition, supposed to need less human intervention. And the less human involvement there is, the less art it is. AI as a tool sounds great. AI as, well, artificial intelligence sounds awful to me, at least in regards to making art. It seems like such a dead end to me. Maybe I’m not seeing the full picture.

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No one knows the full picture. So your full picture is as valid as anyone's. The slot machine version of tweaking, prompting, & praying it's good is a pretty boring future. We're in agreement there. Right now there's a lot of excitement over new models like Sora, LumaLabs, and possibly Kling which seem to be 3D engine that produce full 3D outputs, then slice a 2D image out of it, and output that. This is exciting because it suggests a situation where filmmakers enter a 3D environment like a video game where they can move around and direct it, which then produces 2D images. Very similar to what we do in the real world now, just cheaper.

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