Artificial Intelligence Combined with Cloud Computing Will Democratize TV & Film Making
Imagine if movies could have all the same bells and whistles of the biggest blockbusters but at a fraction of the cost, time, and number of people needed to make them. There certainly would be a lot more made as the threshold to be profitable would come down significantly. Computer-generated imagery (CGI) has that promise but some would argue that CGI has ruined moviemaking instead of expanding it and has killed good storytelling in favor of big effects. Throw in AI that improves by the day as an amazing tool that compresses creation time, and upends the artistic and engineering skill sets needed, and then what does the future hold when technology overcomes certain limitations? Will movies explode in popularity or will they fade away, lost in a vast sea of mediocrity and sameness that makes us disdain them all?
Modern movies have always pushed the limits of special effects and CGI is no exception and neither will Artificial intelligence (AI). There is no shortage of disaster porn, sci-fi thriller, and action-packed explosive movies and they are fun to watch and the big screen is a reason to see them in a theater. But that seems like the only selling point of theaters as we discovered during the pandemic. Home screens are always getting bigger, more detailed, and cheaper, and new versions of Virtual reality (VR) movie watching with a larger-than-Imax immersion are on the horizon. What happens to theaters and movies then?
Movies are big business and whether you spend 200 million 3 times to make back a billion dollars or 20 million 30 times to make back a billion, if the timeline is the same, so is the return. That’s starting to happen today to some extent and will continue to trend in that direction. Imagine beyond that where a high school kid with access to a good consumer computer can make a feature-length movie with virtual actors and AI-generated voices and sound.
Imagine the story started as an AI-generated script based on a novel now in the public domain, something like the Iliad. Let’s also say this kid spends 200 hours on it and maybe $2000 in AI credits to make this film. To include equipment, misc. costs and decent pay, let’s call it $60,000 to make, which means to get the same percentage return on investment it would only have to make $100,000!
The future is bright for storytelling and the choices and quality will continue to skyrocket until there are more quality hours of story than hours to watch them. A good problem to have if you are a viewer, but not so much if you are a creator. At some point, a movie made for pennies will rocket to the top of the charts and it will be a wakeup call. Movies won’t just be made in studios and the lines between a streaming service and Youtube will begin to blur as movie-making becomes democratized.
The cream will still always rise to the top and money will always follow the eyeballs. What happened to the music business and the publishing business will undoubtedly eventually happen to the movie and TV businesses. We have self-published authors on Amazon, Band produced music on Spotify, and one day we’ll have self-created films and TV shows on the streaming services.
“…we will see every novel ever written could become a movie or tv series.”
Suddenly as the movie-making bar to entry drops to ground level then we will see every novel ever written become a movie and/or TV series. It will be a world where actors are programmable and CGI is relatively cheap. Imagine to start, if they just took the top ten thousand best-selling books of all time and made movies or series out of the ones without a film version already. It’s overwhelming. This new era will call for new skills and experience in translating culture and linguistic nuances as AI brings the ability to make digitally perfect dubbing into all languages for every movie and show made now and in the past.
The modern renaissance of TV shows has shown us that novels are much better when told over ten hours instead of two. It’s why the book is almost always better than the movie. So movies will no doubt continue down the path of the epic blockbuster but what if they consumed the vast treasure trove of short stories and made them movies? Just a thought.
What is a movie other than a visual story told in one sitting lasting roughly 90 to 175 minutes? In an age of streaming and eventually of immersive viewing in VR headsets, does a movie even still retain its distinctive meaning or are we just clinging onto scraps of the past to ground us in a rapidly changing world?
While CGI remains a computationally intensive process, cloud computing puts near-infinite storage and processing into the hands of anyone who can pay the bill. Add in the exponential growth of AI of late and movie making is more and more in the control of the writers and directors.
One day, maybe soon, we can wake up in the morning with a movie idea and by bedtime be uploading a feature-length film for viewing. People do this all the time with content on YouTube and with AI doing the heavy lifting we will routinely do the same with all sorts of content from Vlogs to shows to movies and more.
Expensive sets on exotic locations will be a thing of the past as they will all be AI-generated. Actors will be virtual and their enormous salaries will disappear from the budget as will film crews, support staff, craft service, and all the misc human being expenses. One or a handful of people could do the whole thing leaving cloud computing and AI as the biggest expense.
“…does a movie even still retain its distinctive meaning or are we just clinging onto scraps of the past to ground us in a rapidly changing world?”
At some point AI will make the whole movie just from the prompt provided and maybe an outline of the story if even that. People could come up with the basic idea and play editor/director to make changes to the story to better humanize it. This will put a lot of Union people out of work and create lots of artistic opportunities in their place but it certainly won’t be one-to-one and the creative’s income will be closer to YouTubers or bands on Spotify than current Hollywood talent.
Movies will transform from the most expensive storytelling to the cheapest as it is the shortest in length and the tools exist for the masses to experiment and tell great stories to a worldwide audience. Serialized storytelling will continue to expand and the movie will continue to fade away in its modern blockbuster theatrical form. Movies must evolve to survive and expand their sources of content like short stories and existing foreign films once cost comes down.
Movies longer than two hours will make more sense to serialize and whether we still call them movies or something else, there is a huge opportunity for self-contained stories that last 15 to 80-ish minutes that will explode once we start to see the democratization of filmmaking take hold.
“…we can wake up in the morning with a movie idea and by bedtime be uploading a feature-length film for viewing.”
Coming our way is a world where every story ever told is done so in print, in audio, and in “film”. It will be available in these formats in every language spoken and even specific to regionalities. Anyone anywhere with a phone and a pittance of money could make a movie with virtual actors, AI-generated scenery, and even AI-generated dialog that could be directed by a human to bring a vision to film for mere pennies compared to what we think of as movie making today.
Wait until we go one step further and the film version could be shot in the style of a given writer or director or with different actors or from different perspectives or ad infinitum until there are millions of possible versions of every story ever told?
“…there is a huge opportunity for self-contained stories that last 15 to 80-ish minutes that will explode…”
The world is changing at a breakneck pace and such an essentially human thing as storytelling has seen its share, from the tools of creation to the distribution process to the consumption options. The world is changing even faster now and at an increasing speed by the day. Fancy tech has contributed to even bigger budget movies with previously unimaginable effects but we are rapidly coming to a tipping point where the cost and accessibility of the tools needed are plummeting rapidly and are becoming available to the masses.
We have gotten used to 20 and 40-minute TV shows and 90–120 minute movies as our standard container sizes but that too is being challenged. Coming sooner than we expect we will be able to see every movie ever made in any language, tuned to any culture, in any directorial style, with any collection of actors, in really any way you want it. The democratization of TV and filmmaking has begun and if we thought the Golden Age of Cinema or the modern Renaissance era of TV was something, we ain’t seen nothing yet.
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By the Author of- Plato’s Dream: Crisis of the Employment Singularity
