AI in Film Making

                                        

The Film  industry generates over $700 billion in revenues annually. And film-making offers the perfect place to explore the future roles of artificial intelligence.It’s easy to think that technology like algorithms and robots will make the film industry go the way of the factory worker and the customer service rep, and argue that artistic filmmaking is in its death throes. For the film industry, the same narrative doesn’t apply — artificial intelligence seems to have enhanced film industry's creativity, not squelched it.
It’s true that some jobs and tasks are being rendered obsolete now that computers can do them better. The job requirements for a visual effects artist are no longer owning a beret and being good at painting backdrops; the industry now calls for engineers who are good at training deep learning algorithms to do the mundane work, like manually smoothing out an effect or making a digital character look realistic. In doing so, the creative artists who still work in the industry can spend less time hunched over a computer meticulously editing frame-by-frame and go do more interesting things.
Just like computers made it so animators didn’t have to draw every frame by hand, advanced algorithms can automatically render advanced visual effects. In both cases, the animator didn’t lose their job.
Big players like Netflix and Amazon are using big data and artificial intelligence (AI) to create perfectly tailored entertainment for its subscribers – and to help us find it. In 2016, 20th Century Fox paired up with IBM Watson and used AI to create ‘the perfect’ movie trailer for sci-fi horror film “Morgan”. And that same year, Benjamin, an AI software agent developed by researchers at NYU, created the short film “Sunspring”. AT&T Foundry’s Future of Entertainment Report from last year concludes that “Algorithms will enable a new world of storytelling”.

In filmmaking, writing and pre-production are the stages where the highest leverage decisions that affect the final product are made. But when we look at the way most people approach pre-production, it resembles a Waterfall Process.

Most filmmakers would agree that the most tedious and time-consuming parts of pre-production are :

a) script breakdowns

b) storyboards and shot list generation

c) optimizing schedules

d) creating budgets.

With the help of  companies such as The Agile Producer platform ,All of this can be done in the span of a day, something that would have otherwise thrown the entire production off course. 

"If AI and Data Science are able to automate most of that process, then filmmakers can focus their time on the more creative and human-centric aspects. It makes filmmaking more fun, and generating these parts automatically reduces pre-production time."

STARTUPS ON AI IN FILM MAKING:

ScriptBook | Hard Science. Better Box Office

Artificial intelligence may soon move beyond even the performance and editing sides of the filmmaking process — it may soon weigh in on whether or not a film is made in the first place. A Belgian AI company called Scriptbook developed an algorithm that the company claims can predict whether or not a film will be commercially successful just by analyzing the screenplay, according to Variety.
Human script readers can do all this too, of course. And human-written coverage often includes a comprehensive summary and recommendations as to whether or not a particular production house should pursue a particular screenplay based on its branding and audience. Given how much artificial intelligence struggles with emotional communication, it’s unlikely that Scriptbook can provide the same level of comprehensive analysis that a person could. But, to be fair, Scriptbook suggested to Variety that their system could be used to aid human readers, not replace them. Scriptbook claims that its algorithm is three times better at predicting box office success than human readers. The company also asserts that it would have recommended that Sony Pictures not make 22 of its biggest box office flops over the past three years, which would have saved the production company millions of dollars.

The Fiction Lab | More Audience

The Fiction Lab is an audience development agency that applies cognitive science to content industries. For 18 years The Fiction Lab has helped talents, producers, broadcasters and distributors to increase the audience and market shares for their entertainment contents: films, formats, video games, trailers etc., by testing and improving the productions ability to e.g. generate deep emotions with the audience and enhance mental identification to situations and characters.
Their work includes major productions such as Titanic, Avatar, Game of Thrones, Assassin’s Creed, House MD, Blake and Mortimer.

Cinelytic

 
Los Angeles-based startup Cinelytic is one of the many companies promising that AI will be a wise producer. It licenses historical data about movie performances over the years, then cross-references it with information about films’ themes and key talent, using machine learning to tease out hidden patterns in the data. Its software lets customers play fantasy football with their movie, inputting a cast, then swapping one actor for another to see how this affects a film’s projected box office.












References:
1)     https://www.theverge.com/2019/5/28/18637135/hollywood-ai-film-decision-script-analysis-data-machine-learninghttps://www.theverge.com/2019/5/28/18637135/hollywood-ai-film-decision-script-analysis-data-machine-learning
2) https://www.boldbusiness.com/digital/artificial-intelligence-film-making/
3) https://medium.com/rivetai/data-science-and-ai-in-film-production-8918ea654670
4) https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence-automating-hollywood-art