This is great use of AI IMO. We’ll see how it turns out, but patching back together lose footage could be fun
It’s interesting from an academic perspective but it’s much more generative than it is patching,
While Welles wrote detailed notes about how he wanted The Magnificent Amersons to be cut, RKO did not follow them and the studio ultimately destroyed the negatives correlating to the film’s lost footage for storage reasons. Showrunner intends to work around those hurdles with a mix of AI-generated approximations of what Welles might have shot and sequences featuring live actors whose faces are manipulated with gen AI to look like members of the original film’s cast.
It might be a different story if the film was damaged and AI was simply repairing footage or filling in a few missing seconds but by all accounts this is creating new scenes.
Sometimes when films have deleted scenes we instead see storyboards to represent the scene. Replacing those storyboards with AI generated scenes might be convenient, but they’re just a representation of what might have been, they’re not the film.
Eh yeah… If they knew the script or anything I’d be down for it, why not try to see what it can do. But, out of their ass is different
While the studio destroyed the film they cut out, we do have the script and Welle’s own excruciatingly detailed notes. As much as I loathe generative AI, this could be the rare good and ethical use case.
I’m okay with this.
I’m not okay with AI potentially replacing artists/actors and putting them out of work.
But we’re talking about recreating lost footage from the back half of the last century. Everyone involved is dead and gone. There’s no compensating them. As for their descendants, they are free to make their own money — but by the same token, the AI shouldn’t claim it’s their ancestors acting when it’s generating the stuff. And in fact, it should change it up so it doesn’t resemble any real person.
Honestly the audience for something this old will be quite niche anyway.
I’d be willing to read a critic’s article about it once it’s done. 😐
