This guy is using AI to make a movie — and you can help decide what happens next
Stelzer creates images with image-generation tools such as Stable Diffusion, Midjourney and DALL-E 2. He makes voices mostly using AI voice generation tools such as Synthesia or Murf. And he uses GPT-3, a text-generator, to help with the script writing.
“In my little home office studio I can make a ’70s sci-fi movie if I want to,” Stelzer, who lives in Berlin, said in an interview with CNN Business from that studio. “And actually I can do more than a sci-fi movie. I can think about, ‘What’s the movie in this paradigm, where execution is as easy as an idea?'”
“Right now it’s in an embryonic stage, but I have a whole range of ideas of where I want to take this,” Stelzer said.
“Shadows of ideas and story seeds”
The idea for “Salt” emerged from Stelzer’s experiments with Midjourney, a powerful, publicly available AI system that users can feed a text prompt and get an image in response. The prompts he fed the system generated images that he said “felt like a film world,” depicting things like alien vegetation, a mysterious figure lurking in the shadows, and a weird-looking research station on an arid mining planet. One image included what appeared to be salt crystals, he said.
“I saw this in front of me and was like, ‘Okay, I don’t know what’s happening in this world, but I know there’s lots of stories, interesting stuff,'” he said. “I saw narrative shades and shadows of ideas and story seeds.”
The vintage sci-fi vibe is partly an homage to a genre Stelzer loves and partly a necessity due to the technical limits of AI image generators, which are still not great at producing images with high-fidelity textures. To get AI to generate the images, he crafts prompts that include phrases like “a sci-fi research outpost near a mining cave,” “35mm footage,” “dark and beige atmosphere,” and “salt crusts on the wall.”
The look of the film is also fitting for Stelzer’s editing style as an amateur auteur. Because he’s using AI to generate still images for “Salt,” Stelzer uses some simple techniques to make the scenes feel animated, like jiggling portions of an image to make it appear to move or zooming in and out. It’s crude, but effective.
“Salt” goes to college
“Salt” has a small but charmed following online. As of Wednesday, the Twitter account for the film series had roughly 4,500 followers. Some of them have asked Stelzer to show them how he’s making his films, he said.
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