This year’s Sundance Film Festival – an incubator for innovative indie films as always – buzzed with talk of their AI-infused screenings.
Director and co-writer Jack Begert’s first feature film is marked by an experimental departure from traditional film format. For its boundary-pushing work, “Little Death” was awarded The NEXT Innovator Award presented by Adobe at the Sundance Film Festival in January.
Within the film we see a merge of two distinct stories, each stylistically differentiated. In the first half, the audience enters the psychosis and dreamscape of Martin Solomon (David Schwimmer), a middle-aged filmmaker who’s hooked on pharmaceutical drugs.
To create this psychological re-imagining of reality, the filmmakers utilized AI-generated art, animation, CGI and VFX, or a “big blender of every trick we could possibly throw at the wall,” as described by Begert during the Q&A following their premiere screening. Many of these techniques pull from Begert’s music video background where he is known for working with the likes of Dominic Fike, Kendrick Lamar and SZA.
While AI is minimally used in the grand scheme of the film, it still begged questions about the future use of the technology within filmmaking.
“I think every filmmaker needs to look at it very, very closely because ultimately, it comes down to stories, and how can these new tools help us tell the stories we want to tell, and how can they help us tell new stories?” said Producer Darren Aronofsky in an interview with Deadline. “But that’s why I think ‘Little Death’ is one of the most exciting films right now, is because Jack is really pushing those tools and asking a lot of questions of us.”
Another Sundance premiere film, “Eno” utilizes AI generative technology to create completely unique screenings each time the film is seen. There are 52 ten quintillion (meaning 19 zeros) possible versions of the film, which would take 200 whole years of non-stop watching to get through, explained the film’s director of programming Brendan Dawes.
While there are some key scenes that appear in every version, such as the explanation of generative art, everything from the scenes themselves to the order they appear to the music is reorganized. Editors Maya Tippett and Marley McDonald worked to create modules and scenes that could play together and maintain a narrative arc when reorganized.
In the press release, director Gary Hustwit explained, “I kept asking myself, why does my film have to be the same every time it’s shown?” Through the non-replicable experience of watching a screening of “Eno,” the film encapsulates the uniquely communal experience of live events.
The generative software also proved useful to situate the roughly 500 hours of archival footage on the documentary subject Brian Eno, a pioneer of ambient music and producer for artists from David Bowie to Talking Heads. The team plans to continue inputting more footage over time. As the film reflects on the work and life of Eno, the ever-changing nature of the film mirrors that of natural memory – shifting and changing with new meanings as we look back.
Both the “Eno” and “Little Death” teams spoke of their AI use as a tool that required an intense amount of manpower and ability to utilize.
“We had a whole super talented team of a lot of people who really put their blood, sweat and tears into this. I want to shout out the whole post [production] team,” Begert said in the Q&A.
In the press release, Dawes responded to critics’ concerns over AI taking away from the creativity of storytelling, writing, “The way we tell stories should always be evolving, and generative systems, if they’re used in the spirit of creative advancement, are the next evolution in that journey.”
Although the films’ own use of AI doesn’t apply to many of the large concerns brought up during the Hollywood strikes in 2023, it certainly has opened the conversation for where the tool fits within the industry.