Movie Making with A.I.

A FineDay Course

With David Watkinson

First the Politics of A.I.

Beginning in 2025, using ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE to make movies became a very controversial subject that brings up painful issues associated with huge technological paradigm shifts. This shift is comparable to the movement away from thousands of years of live theatre as the main source of entertainment to moving pictures. As that shift began, there was great resistance and much denigration of the new art form of movies.

Today there are similar sentiments about A.I. movies including real concerns about livelihoods. I’m a proud veteran member of IATSE the union that represents over 168,000 behind-the-scenes workers in the entertainment industry in the United States and Canada. As a result I am painfully aware of the loss of income that looms ahead for actors and my brothers and sisters who are crew members and production personnel.

And there’s the issue of the possible environmental harm to the communities around data centers used to run A.I. My view is that fighting against the abuses doesn’t have to conflict with taking advantage of the incredibly useful technology.

So I invite those who are tech oriented to consider a new career creating A.I. movies. And for people with writing and directing skills there is also an important place for you in the new paradigm.

Level One – Short Videos

The course will begin with instructions for making announcement and game videos that feature different A.I generated hosts for the ZooYou.com website. The hosts will be characters from books that may eventually be turned into feature length A.I. movies in the Level Two course.

Here’s an example of a Level One video showing some A.I. characters from a kids book in the Zoo You preserve:

Level Two –Full Cinematic Stories

This level of the course will demonstrate how to turn a book or screenplay into a feature length movie using A.I. tools along with various multimedia tools. Phase one of the course involves creating scenes from the written work to serve as a promotion for the feature length project. The scenes will also serve as an ad if the work is available as a published book.

Here’s an example of a Level Two Phase One ad produced entirely by the teacher working on his computer.