AI: from social media novelty to proper video

Well, this is the first tech revolution that's happened since I came of age, and I've seen those various steps (and possibly instigated some).

To be fair, by the time that I left uni, Suresh was already using AI to generate things. That was from a consciousness studies perspective, while my approach was creative. Rotoscoping wasn't something I thought of doing until I'd made 100 issues of the Dream O'Clock comic strip. By the way, I still love that comic strip: that was so exciting to make. Essentially, I knew a lot about how animation was made on a technical level, but wasn't at all artistically talented enough to draw my own cartoons. So I got really into it, as we can see from my political caricatures, and the rotoscopes of my cellphone videos. I'd also say that AI is creating a linguistic shift. Suddenly, extremely literal English is a highly prized skill. A lot of jobs that were done by a human editor are now done by AI, and the gig for the human worker is to proofread/challenge the AI.

DDG and Runway combined is a powerful combo. It's interesting that everyone in the States and other places was talking about DALL-E and Stable Diffusion, but my film only used Stable Diffusion for one bit: the Gaza strip montage set to the theme from 1492, or, as we know it in NZ: the Crusaders theme song. DDG and Runway did most of the AI work, alongside some colorisations by DeepAI.

- My advice to filmmakers is basically that AI is another tool in the arsenal, but it's really unlikely to fully replace VFX artists. This new DDG video tool is a step in the right direction, but the AI can't really understand spatial geography, so it's not useful for most FX.