Movie Making with A.I.
(And Other Video Tools)

Politics of A.I. — Level 1 (Short Videos) — Level 2 (Full Stories)

The Politics of A.I. (Note from the Instructor)

From Instructor David Watkinson: I’m looking for a teacher to substitute for me so that I may take a hiatus. As a result, this course is currently not accepting students. As of this writing, I’m checking out AI Video Bootcamp to see if I can recommend it as an acceptable substitute.

In the meantime, here are my thoughts about the politics of using artificial Intelligence to make movies. First of all, I am totally opposed to the flood of AI videos on the Internet that are fraudulently presented as depicting real events. However, videos that use AI for clearly fictional stories are literally and figuratively a different story.

Since AI production could ultimately eliminate the need for human actors, camera equipment and production crews, the issue has become an increasingly controversial subject. It’s a subject that brings up painful issues associated with huge technological paradigm shifts.

This particular shift is comparable to the movement away from thousands of years of live theatre as the main source of entertainment to movies then TV and streaming videos. As that shift began, there was great resistance from the live theater world and much denigration of the new art form of moving pictures.

In the late 1890s and early 1900s, moving pictures were often regarded by theatrical elites as cheap, crude, mechanical, impersonal entertainment lacking the prestige of theater.

Today there are similar sentiments about AI 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 AI. My view is that fighting against those 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 AI 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 videos that feature different AI generated hosts for the ZooYou.com website. The hosts will be characters from books that may eventually be turned into feature length AI movies in the Level Two course.

Here’s an example of a Level One video showing a 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 AI 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 can also serve as an ad, if the work is available as a published book. Here’s an example: