Take a few minutes to watch this video, published at the end of last year.
It’s a short Star Wars fan film, bringing to life a moment that happened off-screen in the original trilogy.
It’s been made using A.I. video tools, likely cost under a thousand dollars, and is a blatant copyright infringement of the Star Wars IP.
It is, also…well, it’s rather good!
“This five minute film shows more respect for the franchise than the entire sequel trilogy” is just one of the comments echoing the general sentiment of the audience.
Like most artists, and someone who’s made their career in video, I have very mixed feelings about generative A.I. tools, to say the least.
But these Star Wars fan films (of which, there are already a lot — of varying quality) inspires me to rebel and make an argument in favour of this new technology. It makes me want to say that rather than killing film, it might be saving it.
Why does art grow stale?
I’ll start with a question: Why is it that some art forms continue to surprise us, while others seem to ossify?
Why, for example, does music — a form of expression that has existed for tens of thousands of years — never cease to reinvent itself, constantly finding new genres and sub-genres? Consider there are pretty much only twelve notes available to every musician and a finite number of instruments. And yet every year, someone makes music no-one else has heard before.
And, conversely: Why do film and television — forms of expression barely a century old — already feel caged inside conventions and formulas established in their infancy? Narrative cinema — to my layman’s eyes anyway — seems to have lost its innovative energy, its confidence.
I think we all feel that sense of decline in Hollywood.
There are many explanations for this phenomenon, most of them industry-specific and economic. But I’d like to offer an explanation of my own, building on Robin Sloan’s ‘little rooms’ argument; one that I think tells us something about how art gets made.
My theory of bedroom-able art
I believe that the art forms that continue to surprise and innovate, no matter their age, are bedroom-able.
By this I mean they are, once stripped down to their essence, something a teenager can practice alone in their bedroom. The creative tools are cheap and the cost of production (and therefore failure) is practically zero.
Most musical instruments are within the reach of a low to middle class family and, guitar in hand, it costs nothing to move your fingers up and down the fret, see what sounds come out. What happens if I tune the E string down a step? What sound does that produce? It costs nothing to noodle about and find out.
This “noodling” - just letting ones hands move about intuitively — is how art forms stumble into new territories.
Now, I would argue that film and television production are not, and never really have been, bedroom-able. The costs in equipment and human labour are too great to facilitate noodling. From its very beginning, movie-making was an industrial process, therefore the motive always was, and had to be, profit.
As long as we insist narrative films capture a physical reality on a camera that meets a certain visual quality, it will never be possible to noodle.
And as the gears of late-stage-capitalism grind towards the inevitable, motion picture production will remain limited to a dwindling pool of people with access to a shrinking well of resources. As movies become more elitist, so shall they ossify.
To argue that A.I. video might rescue film, rather than kill it, I first need to go back thirty years to the mid-90s — because there was one time in my life when filmmaking was, briefly, bedroom-able.
McZee’s Magic Movie Studio
In 1995, Microsoft released a video game called 3D Movie Maker. It starred a bizarre purple chap called McZee, who took you in a shopping cart to the magical city of Imaginopolis. Here, dozens of sets, locations, actors, props, special effects and musical scores were at your disposal.
This video shows you the chaotic game play — not to mention just how hardcore 1990s it was.
Between the ages of 12 and 14, I spent hundreds of hours playing this game and made dozens of little movies. Some were set in space, others in dense rainforest. I staged car chases, assassinations, plane crashes, even — ahem — love scenes. I stretched the limits of what the software (and the RAM of my PC) were designed to do to get the result I wanted. I often failed, but failure cost me nothing.
For a brief while, I was a filmmaker who noodled.
A new hope
I don’t know if any of these Star Wars fan films are made by some man or woman in their bedroom…but they could be. And watching them reminds me of my hours spent in Imaginopolis.
And that gives me hope.
Yes, these Star Wars videos are flawed: the voices don’t always match the real-life actors, characters will inexplicably change appearance midway through a scene; the dialogue is janky (but also, it’s not like the original trilogy was written by Aaron Sorkin).
And yes, they’re blatant IP violations. But fan fiction is the obvious staging ground for a new creative technology — they all begin by attempting to mimic what already is. Disney appears to have already folded to inevitability, signing a deal to allow use of a range of their characters on Sora.
“That’s all well and good Adam, but if that video at the top of this article was made by Disney, then it would have provided work for hundreds of people — actors, set designers, gaffers, DPs and editors.”
It would have, but here’s the thing: Disney was never going to make these Star Wars shorts or anything like it. The above production, made without A.I., would cost millions, and Disney is not in the business of spending millions of dollars on five-minute YouTube videos.
This short-film, and the jobs it could have provided, was never going to exist outside of A.I. — but now it does, and it’s delighted nearly two million people already.
The exciting next bit
At some point — I feel like it’ll be this year — someone with no connections to Hollywood, but an original story in their heart and an ear for dialogue, will get their hands on these tools and make an honest-to-god original drama.
It will be deeply flawed I’m sure, but free to noodle in their bedroom, this filmmaker will create something visually and narratively inventive, that does something a film has never done before. Inspired, hundreds — thousands — of others will start making their own stories. Some will build audiences enabling them to invest in real-life film production, unleashing a new creative energy to motion picture storytelling.
Filmmaking will join the other great bedroom-able arts and surprise and re-energise us for centuries more.
In his ‘little rooms’ article, Robin Sloan shares this quote from André3000:
“Little rooms. Great things start in little rooms. That’s it.”
To it, I’d add this quote from the 20th century art historian Kenneth Clarke:
“I wonder if a single thought that has helped forward the human spirit has ever been conceived or written down in an enormous room.”
To Imaginopolis we go!
Until another Sunday soon,
