B (3:34)
Hey, everyone. Hi. I'm an independent filmmaker, and for the past 20 years, I've been making documentaries about design, art, and music. But they're really about people. And over the years, I started to question the limitations of documentary filmmaking. Because human beings are multidimensional, there's never just one story about any of us. The documentary film is, by its nature, reductive. Any documentary you've ever seen is just a tiny sliver of the actual story. But what if a film could tell more than one story? Or what if one film could tell thousands of stories about its subject? How could we re envision documentaries so that they were as multifaceted as human beings are? Well, that's what my team and I have been working on. And last year we released a film called Eno. It's a documentary about the musician and artist Brian Eno that changes every time it's shown. It's the world's first generative feature film, and there are billions of possible variations of it. It's always a story about Brian Eno. It's just a different story every time you watch it. So you probably have some questions like how does the film change? Why does the film change? How do I talk to my friend about a movie if they've seen a totally different vers or why are you doing this to us, Gary? We like our movies the way they are. Yes, we all love movies. We've watched hundreds of them in our lifetime. Thousands, probably. And we have our favorites. There's one thing that all of these movies have in common. They are all linear, fixed experiences. There's a beginning and an end, and they're the same every time we watch them. But have you ever wondered why? Why do films have to be the same every time? The reason is actually a technical constraint from 130 years ago when cinema was born and film was a physical medium. A reel of celluloid images that had to scroll through cameras and projectors, and they had to make duplicate copies of those reels and send them out to theaters. But 25 or 30 years ago, when filmmaking all went digital, suddenly this constraint of physicality is gone. But we've continued to make movies in the same way we always have. It's like we're playing by a rule book that doesn't exist anymore. So in 2019, I reached out to Brendan Dawes, who is a digital artist in England, and we started experimenting. We wanted to see if we could make a cinematic documentary that was created dynamically in software with real footage that could tell a different story each time. We built a generative video platform that was entirely human coded. It wasn't an AI model based or trained on other people's work. And as we were experimenting, we realized who the ideal subject would be for the first generative film. And then we reached out to. To this guy. Can you tell us your full name? Brian Peter George St. Jean Le Baptiste de la Salle Eno. We'll just use his shortened form, his name for this talk. So Brian, for the past 50 years, has been pushing the boundaries of creativity and technology, from his electronic music experiments in Roxy Music to his collaborations with David Bowie on records like Here Heroes, to producing Talking Heads, U2, Laurie Anderson, Grace Jones, so many others. And he's released over 40 solo and collaboration records. And in the 1990s, long before Generative AI, Brian was making software to create generative music. He likened it to planting the seeds for a piece of music and then letting that piece of music flower in thousands of different ways over the course of time. It was like the music was a living thing now. I'd actually approached Brian several years before this about doing a normal documentary, and he turned me down, and he turned down a lot of filmmakers. But his reason was really fascinating. He said he hated biographical documentaries because it was always one person's version of another person's story, and there was never just one story about anyone but Brendan and I thought we had a solution to this. And we showed him an early demo of our Generative film software, and he was really excited. I still don't think he wanted to have a movie made about him, but he wanted to be part of this gendered film experiment, and that was the price that he had to pay. Brian gave us access to hundreds of hours of archival footage on every obsolete videotape format imaginable. It took us two years just to digitize and catalog all this stuff. But we needed more than just archival footage to tell this story. So I filmed another 50 hours with Brian with talking about his creative process. In the end, we had over 500 hours of material for this Generative software platform, and I'll show you how that works. We start off with a data set of edited scenes, raw footage and music. And the system selects pieces from that material and builds them into a film that's probably 85 to 90 minutes long. Now, the system knows what all the contents of these pieces are, and it knows how to arrange them into a good story flow. It also creates transitions between the scenes dynamically in real time. The biggest challenge for us was how to make it so that every version of the film had an engaging story arc, regardless of what individual pieces kind of were in it. Filmmakers are notoriously control freaks, but I still have control. But it's on this higher level. I'm curating all the different little pieces that could go into this system, and I'm also designing the limitless ways that they can interact so I don't have control over the contents of each individual film. But it doesn't matter because it always works. We've designed it that way. And I get to be surprised by my own film every time I watch it, which is crazy and so liberating. If you have 500 hours of footage and you got to get down to 90 minute film, that's the cutting room floor thing. Normally in a film, you'd have to get rid of all that other footage and get it down to that time thing. Killing your darlings is what they say. But in this approach, there is no cutting room floor. I can put as much material in and it will come up in different versions of the film in different ways. So it's not like a choose your own adventure. Well, actually it's more like the adventure choosing you. But another thing that we built in that's really cool is that we had in any iteration of the film, in everyone, either Laurie Anderson or David Byrne will appear and choose one of Brian's. They're called oblique strategies cards. These are like random prompts. If you're in a creative bind, you can read them. So there's dozens of them, and depending on which one comes up in the film, it will divert the movie or react in some way. So I'll show you how that works.
