The generative filmmaker of AI Dave Clark tried “each tool under the sun” for having made his artificially intelligent films, the most famous for his short viral “battalion”. But even in the year since he published this video, technology around Gen-Ai has progressed considerably, and he thinks that what was considered innovative at the time can now be pushed even further.
Tuesday, Google at its E / O event unveiled Flow, a generation of generation generation of the Google AI model, Veo 3. Clark was one of the filmmakers of AI which collaborated with Google Labs on the functionality and the interface of the new tool as it was designed with filmmakers and creators. It is enough to say that it is impressed by the results.
“My mind is always blown by the level of control,” Clark told Indiye before the launch of Flow. “It is for me as a filmmaker, that’s what I expected. You put in the 10,000 hours, you have trouble these prompts, and you use these different systems. But all that we really hope is this level of control that I have the impression of finally having an idea of it, and it is long to come to be so early.”
Flow has camera controls that allow filmmakers to specifically articulate the movement and the visual angle they want to create for a shooting as if they made a director of photography. It has a functionality called Scenebuilder which allows filmmakers to generate a scene, then extend it while keeping all their conceptions and locations of coherent and intact characters. Creators can download and combine several reference images that will correspond to things such as faces, clothes and locations, which does it with super specific details.
The flow also allows a more natural language in rapid writing, so that it includes the visual language of scripting and granular technical details such as objectives, lighting conditions, focal lengths or film grains. He is even able to generate sound in real time with the generation of videos, including sound effects, background music and dialogue.
Clark and its IA production banner promise use Flow to create a new short film generated by AI called “freelancers” about two adopted brothers who, by separate paths, become international spies and hired killers. He described a scene he generated in which his two protagonists sit in a restaurant, with an establishment with a slow dolly.
“And that did it! To see the way the camera trembled, it’s exactly the same way I would probably film it if I was in this restaurant. It was pretty cool, and I didn’t see this level of (control),” said Clark.
Not so long ago, Openai unveiled its Sora video model; The filmmakers of the AI to whom we spoke were then amazed that he had “a quick grip”, where you can articulate something that happens, then that something else happens to this figure in the same sequence. Flow and Veo 3 have demonstrated an even more advanced capacity, in which a scene that the creators have generated can then be dragged and extended to a chronology to effectively pursue the action and even lengthen the duration of an individual shot beyond 6 to 8 seconds that the model would normally generate.
Clark compared it to the practice practically to create his own “oner” of style “1917” if he wanted, with the action extending from one location to another even if the character remains the same.
“Let’s say it’s a guy who drives a car around the Amalfi coast. With Scenebuilder Inside Flow, the director in me was able to block the rest of the scene,” said Clark. “So maybe it starts inside the car with the guy driving, then it’s POV, then I could go to a wide plan, and the way the flow works is that he really knows all the information that has been put, all the guests, the appearance of the character, the way in which the Amalfitian coast and the road looks, the color of the car. It is able to translate this story.”
Clark said that it had become as specific as the scene articulation for looking at having been filmed with a target of 50 mm up to a target of 135 mm long, and that the flow includes not only, but can then marry this work with a specific blockage.
Matthieu Kim Lorraine, creative leader of Google Deepmind and Thomas Iljic, product leader at Google Labs, discussed Indiewire to understand someone like Clark’s creative process in order to inform the functioning of the flow, and they were amazed by what he and others were able to create with what they thought, at the time,
“Show and Tell is important. They don’t just want to type text,” said Iljic. “They want to bring these elements, these ingredients. They want consistency through the shots. They want to have plans to start managing the structure, because it’s so many files, asking me how I will assemble this thing? ”
Lorraine added that the keyword for AI filmmakers is “personalization”, and five different AI filmmakers could have five different workflows, or even a filmmaker could have a different method for a different project, and all this is integrated into flow.
“Sometimes you need video on video, because in fact, you want to start from a composition. You really want to organize the perfect image, then develop,” said Lorraine. “Sometimes it is the construction of the world. And in the case of the construction of the world, which is why we have the ingredients so that you can define your characters, find your environment, and they want it. This is the type of control. It is not only controlling how they can control video, but also control of how they can design the creative process for each project. ”
Clark’s promise announced earlier the day of the AI Future fund of Google, as well as venture capital partners, Kivu Ventures and Saga Ventures, earlier in the day. But Google is also associated with two other filmmakers on the launch of Flow, notably Henry Daubrez and Junie Lau. Flow is also available for Google AI Pro and Google AI Ultra Plans subscribers in the United States, with more countries to come soon.
Clark does not know what is the next specific border with rapid evolution technology, but he thinks that when the tools become more accessible, creators is to understand it at least.
“I always refer to the James Camerons and the George Lucases, some of the best filmmakers were always technologists, and I have the impression that we will see this next level, this next school of George Lucas, who will be intrinsically technologists,” said Clark. “You will have to understand the technology, whether you use it or not.”
