AI-Powered Filmmaking with Waymark's Stephen Parker and Josh Rubin

"The Cognitive Revolution" | AI Builders, Researchers, and Live Player Analysis

In this episode, Nathan sits down with Stephen Parker and Josh Rubin of Waymark, and creators of The Frost, an AI-powered 12 minute short film. In this episode, we get a behind the scenes look at their creative process, the prompting and creative techniques they used to generate and animate the DALL-E results, and an overview of the current state of AI art. If you're looking for an ERP platform, check out our sponsor, NetSuite: http://netsuite.com/cognitive

We're hiring across the board at Turpentine and for Erik's personal team on other projects he's incubating. He's hiring a Chief of Staff, EA, Head of Special Projects, Investment Associate, and more. For a list of JDs, check out: eriktorenberg.com.

TIMESTAMPS

(00:00) Episode Preview

(00:01:00) Nathan’s introduction for Stephen Parker and Josh Rubin

(00:05:01) - The Frost is a 12-minute short film created using DALL-E 2 images.

(00:07:06) - The Frost started as an experiment to see if a narrative film could be created completely from AI imagery.

(00:10:38) - Parker started generating images with DALL-E 2 when he got access to the early preview.

(00:12:26) - Prompt technique to get consistent images by providing context about a hypothetical film.

(00:15:57) Sponsors: Netsuite | Omneky

(00:19:37) - Compositional continuity, like shot-reverse shot, was hard to achieve through prompting.

(00:22:13)- Rubin would request specific shots and the team would prompt DALL-E 2 to create them

(00:32:25) - Getting consistent facial features for characters was very difficult.

(00:39:03) - The storytelling helped cover inconsistencies that viewers might not notice.

(00:40:15) - Working with the images DALL-E provides

(00:44:53) Inpainting and compositing to refine DALL-E Images

(00:50:43) - The AI art is limited by what exists in the training data.

(01:02:05)- Animating the human characters was challenging because of missing or incorrect appendages.

(01:07:36) - The team had to find creative ways to convey emotion through the limited animation.

01:02:24 - Animating subtle human movement and emotion is still very difficult.

(01:06:35) - A romantic comedy would be much harder to produce with current AI capabilities.

(01:12:17) - For Frost 2 they are using text-to-video models like RunwayML.

(01:15:43) - AI voicing advancements applied to filmmaking

(01:19:27) - The future of AI in Hollywood and filmmaking: quality narratives still require human vision

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Music Credit: GoogleLM