Typically, an interview topic surprises you with one thing you didn’t see coming in any respect. “This movie is without doubt one of the first movies to include a totally AI-generated sequence,” Florian Frerichs (The Final Supper), director and co-writer of Traumnovelle, a brand new adaptation of the Arthur Schnitzler novella that impressed Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Large Shut, mentions throughout our Zoom chat.
Nikolai Kinski, the star of the movie, about an higher middle-class couple that will get drawn right into a secret world of erotic fantasy, which opens the thirty first Oldenburg Movie Competition on Wednesday, wasn’t absolutely ready for the revelation both. “What do you imply?” he asks.
“I believe it’s one of many first movies that did it,” Frerichs explains, sharing that AI was used for a dream sequence within the film when the protagonist Jakob, performed by Kinski, finds out from his companion Amelia, portrayed by Laurine Value, about her desires. “We’ve got this animation factor occurring there.”
Now Frerichs has everybody’s full consideration. “This was one thing very distinctive and really new as a result of within the e-book, this dream sequence may be very surrealistic,” he highlights. “It will have been very exhausting to shoot. Truly, it was additionally by no means filmed in any of the opposite movies” based mostly on the novella.
“With the use and the assistance of AI and my two pals, Sven and Victor, who dealt with the entire operation, we truly gave this dream sequence a face,” Frerichs provides. “Whether or not you prefer it or not, it’s been accomplished with the assistance of AI.”
So how was the expertise working with AI, and what had been the challenges? “It was quite a lot of work by our staff that we put into this AI. It’s not similar to we instructed the AI, ‘do that and that,’ after which It got here out. It took, truly, six months of analysis and of attempting,” the director explains. “It was quite a lot of trial and error, of prompting — after which additionally studying the craft of destructive prompting, which is much more necessary: telling it what to not do as an alternative of telling it what to do. So it was a really, very distinctive expertise in post-production to present beginning to this dream sequence, which in any other case we couldn’t have filmed on such a shoestring price range.”
Kinski is now extra-excited to look at the ultimate model of the film. “I haven’t seen the final model [with the AI sequence] so I’m fairly curious to see it,” he shares.
The actor calls the prospect of “AI and human interplay fascinating,” including: “I believe it’s just the start of a wild new period.”
Does AI scare or fear Frerichs? “Our machine dreamt up this dream sequence for our movie with a number of work that we put into it,” he tells THR. “So, I don’t have the worry that any animators or so will lose their jobs. My expertise with the AI was that this can be a instrument, and you should put a number of creativity into it to get one thing out of it.” Concludes the filmmaker: “That’s why I can proudly say that we now have an AI sequence in there which elevates the entire sequence and movie.”