Sometimes an interviewee will surprise you with something you didn’t even foresee. “This film is one of the first to use entirely artificial intelligence to generate sequences,” says Florian Frerichs (last supper), director and co-writer fantasy novellaBased on the novella by Arthur Schnitzler that inspired Stanley Kubrick Keep your eyes openmentioned in our Zoom chat.
The film, which stars Nikolai Kinski and tells the story of an upper-middle-class couple drawn into a secret world of erotic fantasies, opens on Wednesday at the 31st Oldenburg Film Festival , and he was not fully prepared for the news. “What do you mean?” he asked.
“I think this was one of the first movies to do that,” Frerichs explained, sharing the use of artificial intelligence in the film’s dream sequence, when the protagonist, Jacob, played by Kinski, escapes from his partner Amelia (played by Lauryn Price) finds out about her dream. “We’re doing animation there.”
Frerichs now had everyone’s full attention. “It’s something very unique and new because in the book, this dream sequence is very surreal,” he emphasizes. “It would have been very difficult to film. In fact, it’s never been filmed on any other film based on a novella.
“With the help of artificial intelligence and my two friends Sven and Victor (who ran the whole operation), we actually gave this dream sequence a face,” Frerichs added. “Whether you like it or not, this is done with the help of artificial intelligence.”
So, what is the experience of working with artificial intelligence, and what are the challenges? “Our team put a lot of work into this AI. It wasn’t just like we told the AI ‘do this and do that’ and then it came out. We actually spent six months doing research and Try. “It was a lot of trial and error, prompting – and then also learning the art of negative prompting, which is more important: telling it what not to do, rather than telling it what to do. So, it was a very, very big time to come up with this dream sequence. A unique post-production experience, otherwise we wouldn’t have been able to shoot it on such a limited budget.
Kinski is now excited to watch the final version of the film. “I haven’t seen the last version yet [with the AI sequence] So I was curious to see it,” he shared.
The actor called “the prospect of artificial intelligence and human interaction fascinating,” adding: “I think this is just the beginning of a crazy new era.”
Does artificial intelligence scare or worry Frerichs? “We put a lot of work into our machine designing this dream sequence for our movie,” he told us THR. “So, I’m not worried about any animators etc. losing their jobs. My experience with artificial intelligence is that it’s a tool and you need to put a lot of creativity into it to get something out of it. That’s what it’s about,” the filmmaker concluded Why I can proudly say we have an artificial intelligence sequence that enhances the entire sequence and movie. “
