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Recently, Jackie Chan's new film "Legend" suffered a Waterloo in terms of reputation and box office. With a Douban score of 5.4 and a box office of more than 70 million in more than ten days, Bona Film Group, which suffered a net loss of 108 million to 153 million in the first half of the year, was unexpected. Bona Film Group established its own AI studio this year. Before the release of "Legend", AI technology has always been the gimmick of the film, but after the release, it became a point that the audience did not buy. Bona Film Group used the current popular AI face-changing technology to restore the 27-year-old Jackie Chan, who appeared in 80% of the film, but the overall presentation effect had many inconsistencies. The audience said that Jackie Chan in the film was very out of place, and the effect of AI simulating real-life expressions was not in place, which caused the audience to have an uncanny valley effect.

The practice of using "AI face-changing technology" to restore younger versions of actors was tried as early as 2019 in Ang Lee's "Gemini Man" and Martin Scorsese's "The Irishman". At that time, some viewers said that the faces of the characters after "de-aging" were a bit stiff.

Al Pacino and Robert De Niro after being de-aged by AI.

Even in Hollywood, where technology is more mature, AI face-changing technology is not perfect, and a series of AI-related technologies have also caused a lot of controversy in Hollywood. Last year, the strike of screenwriters and actors in Hollywood was caused by the threat that AI might replace actors and screenwriters, in addition to the salary conflicts between actors, screenwriters and investors.

Compared with Hollywood, the reaction of Chinese film and television creators seems to be relatively calm and positive. Liancheng Yicui, a self-media person who observes the film and television industry, believes: "It is understood that AI has fully entered all areas of film production, from the creation of the script outline in the early stage to the drawing of the shooting storyboard in the middle stage, and in the later stage, whether it is editing, dubbing, color grading, special effects, subtitles, posters, etc., there are cases involving AI technology in almost the entire process. It can be said that AI has become one of the indispensable basic technologies or tools for film production..."

Regardless of whether AI technology still has many immature aspects, it is already a reality that the film industry has to face.

1

AI technology is an auxiliary technology

Well protected creative energy

On February 16, 2024, OpenAI released the video generation model Sora, which can generate a one-minute high-definition video by inputting text. Once Sora was released, it caused panic in the entire film and television industry, believing that it would have a huge impact on the field of visual creation. Against such a background, many film professionals in the industry have begun to apply AI technology.

Screenshot of a movie generated by Sora.

On April 11 this year, Guo Fan, the director of the Wandering Earth series, said at the conference "AI, Movies, AI Movies and Discussions about the Future" that AI technology will be used in The Wandering Earth 3. "For the early text work, language models such as Claude3 are very helpful for our film and television creation. Claude3 is more 'human' than GPT4, and it will even 'pre-test' the questions I ask."

Guo Fan added: "When the screenwriters are in a meeting, the recording and AI recognition can analyze the speech of each participant and eventually form a corpus. After ten consecutive days of ten hours of discussion every day, AI recognition can accurately extract everyone's important views in seconds, avoiding the tediousness of manual queries. The same is true for writing scripts. With the help of the Claude3 language model, we basically free our hands... As for movies, the script needs to be converted into audio-visual language, and it does not focus on literary quality like novels. Language models such as Claude3 and GPT4 can fully undertake the task of 'explaining things clearly'."

In Guo Fan's view, this is not a kind of laziness, but "a good way to protect the energy of creation." After coming up with some basic plots, Guo Fan's team will use Runway, Stable Diffusion, and Midjourney to generate visual concept maps, and there will be dynamic concept videos. They will then select one or two final use plans. Only then will humans begin to intervene, and refine the design, split the model, and perform animation testing based on the intentional concepts generated by AI. AI technology greatly saves time and energy.

On June 21, during the 26th Shanghai International Film Festival, Lenovo Group and the famous film director Lu Chuan premiered the documentary "Wild West". Earlier, Director Lu Chuan and Lenovo Group announced the joint establishment of Lenovo Yuanchuang AI Imaging Laboratory, and the documentary "Wild West" is the first work of the joint laboratory. Lenovo provided a set of AI animal behavior detection system for Wild West. Lu Chuan used Lenovo's AI PC to complete part of the post-production of the documentary "Wild West", which greatly improved the speed of creative visualization and made his idea of ​​the film a reality with the help of AI. This is an important case of using AI technology to shoot documentaries in China.

Screenshot from the documentary "West Wild".

Whether it is "The Wandering Earth 3" or "West Wild", AI technology has brought convenience to the filming of both, saving time and energy. Some industry insiders were worried that AI technology would replace humans in coming up with creative ideas, but for now, this is still an overreaction.

Yan Peng, a member of the Science Writers Association and a film critic, told Nandu reporters: "AI technology can only be an auxiliary technology, it is not a creative (technology). This technology depends on the user's aesthetic and technical level. In the future, AI will be widely used in the pre-, mid- and post-production of movies, but it will be used as a tool, not a magical technology that can turn stones into gold. In the future, there will be a world of difference between creators who use it well and creators who use it poorly, so good creators will not be controlled by AI, they will calmly control AI technology."

2

Has the cultivation of film talents using AI technology kept up?

As a new technology, AI has a large talent gap, and the corresponding education in major universities is still lagging behind. One of the reasons is that AI technology is changing with each passing day, and university teachers are also in the learning stage.

At present, the film and television college in China that has systematically developed AI courses is the Shanghai Vancouver Film School of Shanghai University. Starting from February 2023, the school began to offer AI courses, which is the first AI film course in Shanghai's film schools. Nandu reporters contacted Odet Abadia, the head of the school's Vancouver Film AI Future Image Creation and Research Center. In her course teaching, she used AI as an auxiliary tool to improve the efficiency of the industry's workflow. The school's teachers and students use large language models (LLMs) to set up script writing courses. With the help of this language model, students can better analyze the script and then improve the scene description or dialogue characterization, and stimulate brainstorming of potential scenes.

The school has courses at different levels. The most basic one is to use mainstream artificial intelligence applications such as Midjourney, Runway or Elevenlabs. These applications are very easy to use, so students will not be afraid of difficulties and can gradually deepen their knowledge later.

Academic activities of the 7th Pingyao International Film Festival. Odet is second from the right.

Odet believes that AI is a great boon to the traditional filmmaking process, especially in terms of reducing costs and increasing speed. In the past, even just a few years ago, only a few filmmakers who already had funds for project development could afford to hire concept artists to help them turn their film ideas into images. For artists, even just creating a frame is time-consuming and costly. Today, for any young filmmaker, making their own concept map is just a small subscription fee, and the process has become very fast. We can even change our ideas and opinions countless times and try various different things without considering the cost and time of each modification.

Of course, in order to prevent students from becoming too dependent on artificial intelligence and becoming lazy, Odet advocates the gradual introduction of AI into the curriculum. Students need to learn how to use traditional methods to complete a task before being taught how to use AI to improve efficiency and save costs.

At present, the domestic discussion of AI technology is still mainly at the "technical" level, but in fact, many people have raised questions about the ethical issues of AI, and Odet has also captured this public opinion. She believes that whether it is from the model training method, bias, the possibility of abuse or copyright issues, Odet's way of dealing with it is to plan to launch a new course called "AI Literacy". In this course, she will cover all these topics so that students can correctly understand the full background and usage context of artificial intelligence, rather than just being an AI user.

AI teaching must move from the level of "technique" to the level of "Tao".

3

Animation production is better than live-action movies

More sensitive to AI technology environment

In addition to live-action movies, AI technology is also used in animation production.

Zhu Haipeng, director of the Animation Department of the Guangdong University of Finance and Economics Bay Area Film and Television Industry College, told Nandu reporters: "Compared with live-action movies, animated movies are actually more sensitive to changes in such a technological environment. In the past two years, tools such as mid-journey, stable diffusion, and chatGPT have actually been gradually applied by domestic animation companies of all sizes, and some animation companies have gradually developed their own AI applications.

New technologies represented by AI have had an impact on the animation industry in two main aspects: the first is the transformation of the entire production process. Traditional animation production, whether two-dimensional or three-dimensional, has a very clear and strict workflow, but now with the emergence of AI tools, we find that there will be a new production trend.

What used to take a whole team to complete can now be done by just a few people with the help of AI technology, which is undoubtedly a subversion of the traditional animation production process. Another point is that AI technology may subvert the current animation production industry, because the main large models are now in the hands of some high-tech companies, such as Baidu and Alibaba in China, as well as some large comprehensive technology companies such as Douyin and Kuaishou. These technology companies are likely to develop the animation industry in the future with their own large models and the big data they have mastered, which will have some very important impacts on the traditional animation industry. "

The first AI animation in China "Poetry of the Thousand Years".

Similarly, the emergence of AI technology also requires the innovation of animation production talent training programs. Zhu Haipeng believes that the emergence of AI technology has also brought some challenges to the training of animation professionals. The first point is that the construction of the curriculum system needs to adapt to such a situation, adding some basic computer application knowledge to the entire curriculum system, and then some AI tool course content;

The second point is the challenge to teachers. The existing teachers are mainly from traditional animation majors, so they are still in the exploratory stage of mastering this new technology. It can be said that teachers and students are at the same starting line, so this relatively speaking puts great demands and requirements on teachers;

The third point is the transformation of the integration of industry and education. In traditional animation production, there is still a big difference or gap between schools and enterprises. It is difficult for college students to get in touch with actual projects. However, with the emergence of AI, colleges and enterprises are on the same starting line. At this time, if colleges and universities can play their advantages in scientific research, they will take advantage of the opportunities provided by AI to further strengthen cooperation with enterprises, thereby making more breakthroughs in the integration of industry and education.

Summarize

AI is rapidly iterating and updating, with new developments every once in a while, which is a challenge for creators and teachers. From the initial fear to the subsequent embrace of learning, the change in mentality also shows that everyone is aware of the unstoppable wave of technology.

As the first attempt of AI under domestic big capital, "Legend" faced a flood of negative reviews. In response, the director of "Legend" Tang Jili said that AI technology is not perfect and is still under continuous research. He hopes that everyone will be more tolerant. Although "27-year-old AI Jackie Chan" is not successful, its role in connecting the past and the future cannot be ignored. Creators in the industry should regard it as a case study, otherwise it will waste a costly trial and error.

Written by: Southern Metropolis Daily reporter Liu Yifan and intern Lin Ruiyuan

Special translator: Lin Hao