Comment on Disney's Sora Disaster Shows AI Will Not Revolutionize Hollywood
mindbleach@sh.itjust.works 5 hours agoDenouncing the pursuit of verisimilitude is a novel response to hand-wave CGI. Are you this philosophical when a movie does spend a million dollars, to make two unrelated actors look exactly the same? Do you expect audiences should be happier if a no-budget sci-fi film has cardboard displays? It’s cute, certainly. But when a central complaint is that people will notice generated elements and object to low quality, I think they’re gonna notice literal cardboard.
Films are photographs. That’s why The Social Network didn’t just say the Winklevii were twins and expect people to pretend. Movies are a visual medium, whereas theater is mostly heard. Like how television has viewers but theater has an audience. You can Dogville it, and people will roll with that, but anything that looks fake is more commonly a technical failure than a stylistic choice.
So yes, you can tell people the tin can is a spaceship… but they’d rather be shown. The preference for showing over telling is so ingrained that it’s cliche. Nobody needs to announce ‘we lay our scene in fair Verona’ when you can put the mediterranean coastline onscreen, and then cut to a cobblestone village where people have pointy shoes. Folks will get it. They’ll get it on a level deeper than narration, or an overlay reading “Verona, Italy, 15° E, 40° N, June 17th 1435, 0700 hours.” They’ll get it even if the aerial shot of the coastline was bought as stock footage. Or rendered, in one way or another.
supersquirrel@sopuli.xyz 4 hours ago
Your lack of media literacy is wild, film is entirely a honest fabrication of obvious fakes, that is the basis of cinema, the fundamental concept of the movie screen being itself simply a fake window that is honest to you about the speculative nature of the image presented beyond.
mindbleach@sh.itjust.works 3 hours ago
Yeah imagine if I had the media literacy to describe an establishing shot’s form and function, even if it was borrowed or fabricated. But as someone who’s never seen a movie before, I could never suggest costume and set dressing conveying expectations beyond their literal imagery.
What are you doing?
Yes, professor, how and why I show an elephant will matter more than ‘hey look, an elephant.’ But in order for my intent to matter, when showing an elephant, I do require the ability to show an elephant. A depiction can’t mean anything unless I can in fact depict it. If I just tell you to use your imagination, that’s not a movie, that’s a book.
These tools let you show basically anything at basically no cost. What you want and why is your own problem. The premise, the message, and the edit are still entirely human art. This only replaces the part where real photons bounce off a fake building and look real enough on a sensor. (Or the part where a guy fakes that in Blender.)