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Iterative Creativity : City Zen Can - a film in progress

Quick & Dirty: Generative AI Film

a work in progress

City Zen Can

Project Goal

From a standing start & blank page could a rough cut trailer for a film be created in half a day using only Free To Use AI tools?

Result

I used Orson Welles as this was all done entirely on spec and he once described Directing as ‘overseeing accidents.’

Obviously it’s as rough as a Marine made of sandpaper, but the scope & time frame are the most notable aspects.

  • The only piece of genuine originality was the script which did involve real time rewriting to match visuals but no less than the usual process of drafting scripts

  • A list of the free to use tools is available on request

  • Large amount of services offered were often what is already available on ChatGPT but with a commercial ‘skin’ wrapped around it.

  • The split remains where AI can do all heavy lifting data work with ease but human originality & creativity remains the driver for producing non-generic work.

I could offer the flimsy pretension that I was hoping to emulate Mr Arkadin - often refereed to as

Nobodies favourite Orson Welles film

There’s seven versions of this film all competing for the title of Roughest Cut.

Nobodies favourite Orson Welles film

A Musing

As a big fan of Welles it would be fascinating to know what he’d have made of AI?

On the one hand it would grant him the complete artistic freedom he always craved both for himself and from the studios with whom he spent his life constantly clashing.

AI is a brand new and experimental medium Here was a man who triumphed yet became quickly restless with the constraints of every medium available to him - he went back and forth from live theatre to radio to film to television, thus he may have found the novelty and capacity of AI hard to resist.

It would also allow his creative inner devil to make merry hob in offering him an almost unlimited opportunity to indulge his degree of artistic artifice and FX shenanigans - (War of the World's, F for fake)


Finally the was a chronic itetratist - constantly going back and recutting, finessing, re-dubbing and editing his projects - AI would certainly allow him huge scope to indulge.

But, on the other hand Welles was determined to reveal universal truths through storytelling and that's a thing so far that AI really struggles to do authentically.