Three people making films with generative AI used The Future of Filmmaking panel at TheWrap's TheGrill business conference to argue that people, not synthetic performers, belong at the centre of the work. Director Eliza McNitt said everyone acting in her film is human, and that the industry should "unplug Tilly Norwood", the AI-generated actor.
McNitt, who previously directed SPHERES, the three-part VR piece produced by Darren Aronofsky with Millie Bobby Brown and Jessica Chastain, showed a trailer for Ancestra, her AI-assisted short. The hardest thing to put on screen was a newborn: the usual choices were luck on the day, a CG baby or a doll. Instead she worked with Google and fed in her own baby photos to generate an infant that looks like her. After tests in which she lay on a couch cradling nothing, the team came back with a picture of the baby in her arms, and that was when she knew the idea would work.
For her the tools pay off before and after the shoot rather than in front of the camera. Proofs of concept and quick visuals let her show the crew exactly what she has in mind and cut an edit before filming starts, which she said made planning far easier, while she still works with human storyboard artists.
Jason Zada, founder and creative chief of Secret Level, which bills itself as an entertainment studio powered by AI, showed a clip from its coming film Terrarium. It is a hybrid: SAG actors were shot standing still on a bare white cyc in sparse locations, then set inside generated surroundings that widen the scale, with the camera moved around them and the light changed afterwards.
Ori Winokur, who leads music and entertainment partnerships at Artlist, a maker of AI tools for creators, said his main lesson is that a director with a vision and a team of artists remain essential, and that AI is producing new kinds of collaboration rather than turning filmmaking into a one-person job.
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