You can influence the plot of a movie being made by this person using artificial intelligence.

“Salt” has 35mm imagery of space freighters and gloomy alien landscapes, which makes it similar to many science-fiction movies from the 1970s and the first half of the 1980s. Although it has a retro appearance, the way it was made suggests that there may be new directions in filmmaking.

 

Fabian Stelzer is the author of the song “Salt.” He is not a filmmaker, but over the past several months, he has mostly relied on AI technologies to produce this series of short films, which he posts on Twitter about once every few weeks.

With the use of image-generation programmes like Stable Diffusion, Midjourney, and DALL-E 2, Stelzer produces images. He primarily creates voices using Synthesia or Murf, AI voice generating software. Additionally, he makes use of the text-generator GPT-3 to assist with script writing.

Participation from the audience is also included. Viewers can vote on what should happen after each new instalment. Stelzer uses the poll results to inform the plot of his upcoming movies, which he can create more swiftly than a typical director would be able to do because he is utilising AI techniques.

 

Stelzer, a resident of Berlin, said in an interview with CNN Business from his little home office studio: “If I want to, I can film a ’70s sci-fi movie.” “Actually, I’m more capable than a sci-fi movie. What movie depicts this paradigm, in which carrying out an idea is as simple as carrying it out? comes to mind.”

The plot is still hazy, at least for the time being. The majority of it, as the trailer demonstrates, takes place on the far-off planet Kaplan 3, where an abundance of what initially seems to be mineral salt causes dangerous circumstances, such jeopardising a nearby spaceship. There are also new narrative threads established, and perhaps even some time anomalies, to further complicate (and intrigue) matters.

 

The resulting movies are stunning, enigmatic, and sinister. Each film has a running time of under two minutes so far, which is inside Twitter’s two minutes and 20 second limit for videos. On rare occasions, Stelzer may tweet a still photo along with a statement that adds to the odd, otherworldly mythos of the series.

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Stelzer’s project provides an early illustration of how disruptive AI systems could be to the film industry, much like how AI picture generators have already alarmed certain artists. It may affect how we think about idea creation and execution as AI technologies that can produce images, text, and voices become more potent and affordable, challenging what it means to create and be a creative. Even if these films have a small audience, some people in the tech industry are paying close attention and anticipate more to come.
Although it is still in its early stages, Stelzer stated, “I have a lot of ideas about where I want to take this.”

“Ideas in the shadows and tale seeds”
Stelzer’s studies with Midjourney, a potent, freely accessible AI system that users can feed a word prompt to and receive an image in response, gave rise to the concept for “Salt.” The system responded to his commands to produce graphics that, in his words, “felt like a cinematic universe,” showing things like strange vegetation, a shadowy person, and an odd-looking research centre on a dry mining planet. He claimed that one shot showed what seemed to be salt granules.

I don’t know what’s happening in this world, but I know there are lots of stories, intriguing stuff, I thought when I saw this in front of me, the man added. “I noticed story nuances, shadows, and story seeds.”

 

Stelzer has experience with AI. In 2009, he co-founded EyeQuant, which was later sold. However, he lacks filmmaking experience, so he began educating himself with software and produced a “Salt” trailer, which he tweeted on June 14 without any further explanation. (The tweet did, however, contain an emoji of a salt shaker.)

The first episode, as described by Stelzer, came after that a few days later. He has released a number thus far, coupled with a large number of still photographs and a few brief film snippets. He stated that he plans to eventually combine the segments of “Salt” into an one long film, and he is creating a firm in the same vein to produce AI-powered movies. He claimed that each film is produced in around a half-day.

 

Due to the technological limitations of AI picture generators, which are still not very good at creating images with high-fidelity textures, the classic sci-fi aesthetic is partially an homage to a genre Stelzer likes and partially a necessity. He creates prompts for AI to use, such as “a sci-fi research outpost beside a mining cave,” “35mm film,” “dark and beige environment,” and “salt crusts on the wall,” to create the photographs.

The movie’s aesthetic fits with Stelzer’s unprofessional auteur editing approach. Stelzer utilises several straightforward tactics to make the scenes feel animated because he is utilising AI to generate still images for “Salt,” such as jiggling bits of an image to make it look to move or zooming in and out. Although primitive, it works.

Salt attends college.
Online, “Salt” has a modest but devoted fan base. The movie series’ Twitter account had about 4,500 followers as of Wednesday. According to Stelzer, some of them have asked him to demonstrate his filmmaking process.

 

Following “Salt” on Twitter, Savannah Niles, head of product and design at AR and VR experience developer Magnopus, said she sees it as a prototype of the future of storytelling, where people actively interact and contribute to a narrative that AI helps build. She thinks that in the future, equipment like the ones Stelzer uses will make making movies, which can currently require hundreds of people, take years to complete, and cost millions of dollars, cheaper and faster.

It’s thrilling because I believe there will be a lot of these in the future, she added.
Additionally, it serves as a teaching tool. According to Northern Illinois University professor David Gunkel, who has been following the movies on Twitter, he has previously used the short sci-fi film “Sunspring” to teach his students about computational creativity. It was published in 2016 and starred “Silicon Valley” actor Thomas Middleditch. It is believed to be the first movie whose script was written using AI. He stated that he will now employ “Salt” in his communication technology classes for the upcoming fall semester.

 

He claimed that it “creates a world you feel interested in, immersed in.” I simply want to learn more about the potential outcomes of this.
Stelzer said he has a “somewhat cohesive” idea of what the overall narrative structure of “Salt” will be, but he isn’t sure he wants to reveal it — in part because the community involvement has already made the story deviate in some ways from what he had planned.

 

I’m truly unsure of how the story I have in mind will turn out, he admitted. And the intellectual appeal of the experiment to me is motivated by the curiosity to discover what the creator and the community might produce together.