Read the story behind Sunspring, the sci-fi short in which the screenplay was written by an AI.
Sunspring, the world’s first film in which the script is written by an AI, was released online on 9th June, 2016 by technology news website Ars Technica. The 9-minute long short film stars Thomas Middleditch (of Silicon Valley fame), Elisabeth Grey and Humphrey Ker. Although the plot of the film is pretty incoherent and obscure, the film has generated quite a buzz recently among film enthusiasts due to its unconventional pre-production method.
Let’s take a look at how this revolutionary film was made.
It is an experimental science fiction film written entirely by an LSTM (long short-term memory) recurrent neural network AI bot named Benjamin. The AI was conceived by BAFTA-nominated filmmaker Oscar Sharp and New York University AI researcher Ross Goodwin. Director Oscar Sharp made the movie for Sci-Fi London, an annual film festival that includes the 48-Hour Film Challenge, where contestants are given a set of prompts that have to appear in a movie they make over the next two days.
The AI was originally named Jetson, but in a weird dramatic turn of events, the AI asked to be renamed Benjamin instead! (How cool is that? Maybe the dystopian future in which the earth is ruled by Terminators is not very far away!) Benjamin was fed with the scripts of many critically acclaimed and/or popular sci-fi films like Blade Runner, Alien, Terminator, Transformers, X-Men, Star Wars, Star Trek, etc. Sharp and Goodwin gave Benjamin some prompts like the title and the setting to get it up and running, and Benjamin produced the screenplay out of a printer, complete with dialogues and stage directions! The script was modified by Sharp and the film was shot in a day.
The plot turned out to be set in a dark futuristic world. To a casual viewer, the film may look like an art-house short film with good production values, lacking high-octane explosions or aliens trying to invade earth! Neither the plot nor the dialogues are the strong suits of the film and may leave viewers bamboozled. This film doesn’t mark the beginning of an age where AIs will replace human beings as screenwriters. But it has surely revolutionized the aspects of filmmaking. The film is worth watching for its bold foray into AI-based screenwriting. It’s a bizarre sci-fi novelty worth the time for every movie buff!
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