Stelzer creates images with imaging tools such as Stable Diffusion, Midjourney, and DALL-E 2. He mostly makes sounds using artificial intelligence sound generation tools like Synthesia or Murph. And it uses GPT-3, a text generator, to help with scripting.
“I can make a ’70s sci-fi movie if I want to in my studio in my little home office,” Stelzer, who lives in Berlin, told CNN Business from that studio. “And actually I can do more than a sci-fi movie. I can think of what movie is there in that paradigm where the execution is as easy as the idea?”
“It’s in the embryonic stage right now, but I have a lot of ideas about where I want to take it,” Stelzer said.
“Shadows of Thoughts and Seeds of Stories”
The idea for “Salt” came from Stelzer’s experiments with Midjourney, a powerful, publicly available AI system where users can feed a text query and get an image in response. His instructions to the system produced images that he said “felt like a movie world,” depicting things like alien vegetation, a mysterious figure lurking in the shadows, and a strange-looking research station on an arid mining planet. He said he included what appeared to be salt crystals in one image.
“I saw it in front of me and I said, ‘Well, I don’t know what’s going on in this world, but I know there are a lot of stories, interesting things.’ “I saw shades of stories and shadows of ideas and seeds of stories.”
The vintage sci-fi vibe is partly an homage to a genre Stelzer loves, and partly a necessity due to the technical limitations of AI image generators, which are still not good at creating high-definition textured images. To get the AI to generate images, it creates prompts that include phrases like “sci-fi research station near a mining cave,” “35mm footage,” “dark and beige atmosphere,” and “salt flakes on the wall.”
The look of the film also matches Stelzer’s editing style as an amateur auteur. As he uses artificial intelligence to create still images for “Salt,” Stelzer uses some simple techniques to animate the scenes, such as shaking parts of the image to make it appear as if it’s moving or zoomed in. Crude, but effective.
“Salt” is going to college
“Salt” has a small but fascinating following on the Internet. As of Wednesday, the Twitter account for the film series had nearly 4,500 followers. Some of them asked Stelzer to show how he makes his films.
Savannah Niles, director of product and design at AR and VR experience builder Magnopus, followed along with “Salt” on Twitter, saying she sees it as a prototype for the future of storytelling — when people actively participate and contribute to a narrative. It helps build AI. He hopes that tools like Stelzer can make it cheaper and faster to produce films that today can attract hundreds of people, take several years and cost millions of dollars.
“I think there will be a lot of that, which is exciting,” he said.
It is also used as a teaching aid. Northern Illinois University professor David Gunkel, who follows the films on Twitter, said he previously used a short sci-fi film called “Solar Spring” to teach his students about computational creativity. Released in 2016 and starring “Silicon Valley” actor Thomas Middleditch, it is believed to be the first film to use artificial intelligence to write the script. Now, he said, he plans to use “Salt” in his communications technology classes in the fall semester.
“It creates a world where you feel engaged, immersed,” he said. “I just want to see more of what’s possible and what’s going to come out of it.”
Stelzer said he has a “somewhat cohesive” idea of what the overall narrative structure of “Salt” will be, but isn’t sure he wants to reveal it — in part because the community’s involvement has already detracted from the story in some ways. as planned.
“I’m not sure if the story in my head is actually going to play out like that,” he said. “For me, the appeal of experimentation comes from intellectually, creatively, the curiosity to see what I and society can come up with together.”