Generative AI makes loads of IndieWire readers mad. This week, we’re speaking about it anyway.
The main focus is Curious Refuge, a worldwide AI filmmaking training hub that has ties to each main AI software program creator, is paid to coach studio movie groups, and has college students in additional than 150 nations. It’s additionally a check case in the way to cowl a topic that’s transferring so quick, and upsetting such sturdy emotions, that skipping it isn’t an possibility.
I first met Curious Refuge CEO Caleb Ward contained in the foyer of NuArt on Santa Monica Boulevard in March 2024, again when most individuals noticed AI as a child buzzword. The theater was packed for the premiere of “Our T2 Remake,” a crowdsourced satire of “Terminator 2: Judgment Day” stitched collectively from dozens of AI-generated scenes.
Our headline led with the information: This was not good film. I additionally wrote that the occasion had an power that recalled Sundance 1995, which it did. Readers weren’t happy; Instagram response was voluminous, quick, and blistering. (My favorites: “Narcwire” and “Fuck this shit off a cliff.”)
My opinion of “Our T2 Remake” stays unchanged, nevertheless it’s clear that assessing it solely on creative deserves is just a little like dismissing the Lumière Brothers’ 1896 “The Arrival of a Prepare at La Ciotat Station” as boring.
One of many “T2” filmmakers, Dave Clark, is now co-founder and Chief Inventive Officer at generative AI studio Promise, with backing from Peter Chernin’s The North Street Firm and Andreessen Horowitz companion Andrew Chen. And Curious Refuge, which Promise acquired a couple of yr after that screening, represents a group of greater than 50,000 AI filmmakers.
Ward launched Curious Refuge in Could 2023 whereas nonetheless head of selling at VFX faculty Rebelway and using the viral wave of his AI Wes Anderson spoof “The Galactic Menagerie.” Two months later, he was all in on Curious Refuge. The primary course noticed practically 500 college students in 18 hours, promoting so quick he needed to shut down enrollment.
“AI filmmaking was a really new idea at the moment, and it was very, very experimental,” he stated. “It caught us off guard to start with, however we actually felt like that is going to be the way forward for filmmaking. We began doing all the things from meetups to competitions shortly.”
At the moment, Ward stated, Curious Refuge has educated over 10,000 college students from 172 nations. Its tutorial content material on YouTube sees upward of 5 million views a yr. The varsity hosts meetups all over the world. A month-long course is $749; bundles get reductions. And, like every good AI-facing firm, it’s lean. Between full-time and freelance, Curious Refuge has a workers of 14.
Ward, talking with me over Zoom alongside his publicist, was desirous to dispel the concept AI movie training is a menace. Once we met on the NuArt, he stated being on-line helped college students shield their anonymity. At the moment, he avoids making that declare.
“I’d say whereas there was hesitancy possibly two years in the past, the know-how felt very complicated,” he stated. “Now I feel loads of the instruments are simpler to make use of, and so it simply appeals to a bigger group of working professionals.”
Perhaps. There’s additionally the utter ubiquity. He hosts a weekly internet present devoted to reviewing the newest generative AI instruments; the newest episode featured eight. “It’s loopy that you may actually have a weekly internet present [to] speak concerning the new instruments from the final seven days,” he stated. (Present favourite: He ranks the just-launched Seedance over Google’s Veo 3.)
So the place does this depart us? Just like the title says, we’re IndieWire, however a part of that’s the Way forward for Filmmaking. We’ve got a century of proof that proves nobody wants AI to make a film; the filmmakers I do know are way more vested in determining the way to get their movies produced and seen. Nonetheless, it could be the peak of delusion to imagine that the Twentieth-century model of creating motion pictures and TV will stay preserved in amber.
I’d think about “T2” was a stunt that received’t be tried once more. Not solely has the purpose been made (and continues to be made, with Runway’s annual AI competition that’s coming to an IMAX close to you), however for Ward it additionally delivers the incorrect message. In our dialog, he leaned into the concept AI isn’t meant as an all-or-nothing idea.
“These instruments, we actually really feel empower artists as a lot as they need to be empowered via them,” he stated. “If that’s simply in serving to you to create storyboards in these early days to tell your bodily manufacturing, nice. If which means creating a whole AI movie that wouldn’t have existed in any other case, nice. The artist is in management, and we in the end need to help the artist in no matter artistic journey they need to go down.”
For now, AI in filmmaking stays a Rorschach check: Some see a software, others a menace, and lots of a distraction from the already brutal work of getting motion pictures made. Curious Refuge is betting that extra filmmakers will see it as a ability value having, even when they by no means intend to make an “AI movie.”
What’s sure is that the know-how isn’t going away and neither are the arguments. The Lumière brothers’ practice has pulled into the station; whether or not you select to board is as much as you.
Then once more, I requested Julian Sol Jordan, the 24-year-old filmmaker I profiled final week, for his tackle AI. Verdict? “I nonetheless suppose it’s gross.”
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dana@indiewire.com; (323) 435-7690.
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