Restoring Metropolis

Building on the last three articles on the topic of Generative Blockchains, MovieNFTs and the potential for an open source Movie Minter, I gathered some feedback this morning around how to go about running a trial of the concept.

Problems with minting generative movies, currently

• One person suggested that getting a crowd to collaborate would be challenging because of the creative differences involved.
• Another person mentioned the problem of editing movie clips together.
• Still another problem is that there currently is no high quality open source video platform that can produce cinematic grade generative AI movies. At this moment, the best is Stable Diffusion Video and Pika Labs.

Solutions: Start with Public Domain films

After thinking about it, I came up with a solution which is to use Public Domain films where 100% of the frames are available. In particular, the 1927 sci-fi masterpiece Metropolis only just entered the public domain as of January 1st, 2023.

Given the current state of tools, it is possible to generate high-quality images using Civitai, then upscale them using Krea or Magnific to a quality beyond cinema grade.

Doing a crowdsourced upgrate and minting Metropolis via collective cinema and AUTOMATIC1111 might be a possibility, taking this approach would help to reduce the problem of not having sufficient writing / direction / editing.

Once proven, and as open source video generation tools evolve, custom and original movies can be produced this way later on.