Comment by troupo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by troupo | Hacker News Reader

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You should watch how movies are made sometime. How a script is developed. How changes to it are made. How storyboards are created. How actors are screened for roles. How locations are scouted, booked, and changed. How the gazillion of different departments end up affecting how a movie looks, is produced, made, and in which direction it goes (the wardrobe alone, and its availability and deadlines will have a huge impact on the movie).

What does "EXT. NIGHT" mean in a script? Is it cloudy? Rainy? Well lit? What are camera locations? Is the scene important for the context of the movie? What are characters wearing? What are they looking at?

What do actors actually do? How do they actually behave?

Here are a few examples of script vs. screen.

Here's a well described script of Whiplash. Tell me the one hundred million things happening on screen that are not in the script: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kunUvYIJtHM

Or here's Joker interrogation from The Dark Night Rises. Same million different things, including actors (or the director) ignoring instructions in the script: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rqQdEh0hUsc

Here's A Few Good Men: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6hv7U7XhDdI&list=PLxtbRuSKCC...

and so on

---

Edit. Here's Annie Atkins on visual design in movies, including Grand Budapest Hotel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SzGvEYSzHf4. And here's a small article summarizing some of it: https://www.itsnicethat.com/articles/annie-atkins-grand-buda...

Good luck finding any of these details in any of the scripts. See minute 14:16 where she goes through the script

Edit 2: do watch The Kerning chapter at 22:35 to see what it actually takes to create something :)

I can't upvote this enough. This topic in the media space has generated a huge amount of naive speculation that amounts to "how hard could it be to do <thing i know nothing about>?"

> "how hard could it be to do <thing i know nothing about>?"

This is most Hacker News comments summarized lmao. It's kinda my favorite thing of this place: just open any thread and you immediately see so many people rushing to say ''well just do X or Y'' or ''actually it's X or Y and not Z like the experts claim''. Love it.

In this case, it’s movies and TV, which most people enjoy. So there’s a superficial accessibility to the problem which encourages this attitude.

Of course, HN being the place that it is, the same type of comments are made about quantum entanglement and solar panel efficiency.

I agree with you.

At the same time I am curious in the "that person has too many fingers" sense at what a system trained on tens of thousands of movies plus scripts plus subtitles plus metadata etc. would generate.

I thought about it for a bit and I would want to watch a computer generated Sharknado 7 or Hallmark Christmas movie.

Of course normally other people contribute to a movie after the writer. My comment mentioned three of the important roles. This whole thread is about tech that automates away those roles. That's the whole point.

I think you've misunderstood the objection.

Lets pick something concrete. It's a medieval script, it opens with two knights fighting. OK so later in the script we learn their characters, historic counterparts etc. So your LLM can match nefarious villain to some kind of embedding, and doubtless has trained on countless images of a knight.

But the result is not naively going to understand the level of reality the script is going for - how closely to stick to historic parallels, how much to go fantastical with the depiction. The way we light and shoot the fight and how it coheres with the themes of the scene, the way we're supposed to understand the characters in the context of the scene and the overall story, the references the scene may be making to the genre or even specific other films etc.

This is just barely scraping the surface of the beginnings of thinking about mise en scene, blocking, framing etc. You can't skip these parts - and they're just as much of a challenge as temporal coherence, or performance generation or any of the other hard 'technical issues' that these models have shown no capacity to solve. They're decisions that have to be made to make a film coherent at all - not yet good or tasteful or creative or whatever.

Put another way - you'd need AGI to comprehend a script at the level of depth required to do the job of any HOD on any film. Such a thing is doubtless possible, but it's not going to be shortcut naively the way generation an image is - because it requires understanding in context, precisely what LLMs lack.

> but the result is not naively going to understand the level of reality the script is going for…

We can already get detailed style guidance into picture generation. Declaring you want Picasso cubist, Warner brothers cartoon, or hyper realistic works today. So does lighting instructions, color palettes, on and on.

These future models will not be large language models, they will be multi-modal. Large movie models if you like. They will have tons of context about how scenes within movies cohere, just as LLMs do within documents today.

This is such an incredibly confident comment. I'm in awe.

So, we went from "just hand off movie script to automated director/DP/editor" we're now rapidly approaching:

- you have to provide correct detailed instructions on lighting

- you have to provide correct detailed instructions on props

- you have to provide correct detailed instructions on clothing

- you have to provide correct detailed instructions on camera position and movement

- you have to provide correct detailed instructions on blocking

- you have to provide correct detailed instructions on editing

- you have to provide correct detailed instructions on music

- you have to provide correct detailed instructions on sound effects

- you have to provide correct detailed instructions on...

- ...

- repeat that for literally every single scene in the movie (up to 200 in extreme cases)

There's a reason I provided a few links for you to look at. I highly recommend the talk by Annie Atkins. Watch it, then open any movie script, and try to find any of the things she is talking about there (you can find actual movie scripts here: https://imsdb.com)

That’s the same thing with digital art, even with the most effortless one (matte painting), there’s a plethora of decisions to make and techniques to use to have a coherent result. There’s a reason people go to school or trained themselves for years to get the needed expertise. If it was just data, someone would have written a guide that others would mindlessly follow.

There's two reasons to be hopeful about it though: AI/LLMs are very good at filling in all those little details so humans can cherry pick the parts that they like. I think that's where the real value is in for the masses - once these models can generate coherent scenes, people can start using them to explore the creative space and figure out what they like. Sort of like SegmentAnything and masking in inpainting but for the rest of the scene assembly. The other reason is that the models can probably be architected to figure out environmental/character/light/etc embeddings and use those to build up other coherent scenes, like we use language embeddings for semantic similarity.

That's how I've been using the image generators - lots of experimentation and throwing out the stuff that doesn't work. Then once I've got enough good generated images collected out of the tons of garbage, I fine tune a model and create a workflow that more consistently gives me those styles.

Now the models and UX to do this at a cinematic quality are probably 5-10 years away for video (and the studios are probably the only ones with the data to do it), but I'm relatively bullish on AI in cinema. I don't think AI will be doing everything end to end, but it might be a shortcut for people who can write a script and figure out the UX to execute the rest of the creative process by trial and error.

> AI/LLMs are very good at filling in all those little details so humans can cherry pick the parts that they like.

Where did you find AI/ML that are good at filling in actual required and consistent details.

I beg of you to watch Annie Atkins' presentation I linked: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SzGvEYSzHf4 and tell me how much intervention would AI/ML need to create all that, and be consistent throughout the movie?

> once these models can generate coherent scenes, people can start using them to explore the creative space and figure out what they like.

Define "coherent scene" and "explore". A scene must be both coherent and consistent, and conform to the overall style of the movie and...

Even such a simple thing as shot/reverse shot requires about a million various details and can be shot in a million different ways. Here's an exploration of just shot/reverse shot: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5UE3jz_O_EM

All those are coherent scenes, but the coherence comes from a million decisions: from lighting, camera position, lens choice, wardrobe, what surrounds the characters, what's happening in the background, makeup... There's no coherence without all these choices made beforehand.

Around 4:00 mark: "Think about how well you know this woman just from her clothes, and workspace". Now watch that scene. And then read its description in the script https://imsdb.com/scripts/No-Country-for-Old-Men.html:

--- start quote ---

    Chigurh enters. Old plywood paneling, gunmetal desk, litter
          of papers. A window air-conditioner works hard.
          A fifty-year-old woman with a cast-iron hairdo sits behind
          the desk.

--- end quote ---

And right after that there's a section on the rhythm of editing. Another piece in the puzzle of coherence in a scene.

> Then once I've got enough good generated images collected out of the tons of garbage, I fine tune a model and create a workflow that more consistently gives me those styles.

So, literally what I wrote here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42375280 :)

Not sure why you jumped there. I was thinking more like ‘make it look like Bladerunner if Kurosawa directed it, with a score like Zimmer.’

You’re really failing to let go of the idea that you need to prescribe every little thing. Like Midjourney today, you’ll be able to give general guidance.

Now, I don’t expect we’ll get the best movies this way. But paint by numbers stuff like many movies already are? A Hallmark Channel weepy? I bet we will.

> Not sure why you jumped there.

No jump.

Your original claim: "Submit a whole script the way a writer delivers a movie to a director. The (automated) director/DP/editor could maintain internal visual coherence, while the script drives the story coherence."

Two comments later it's this: "We can already get detailed style guidance into picture generation. Declaring you want Picasso cubist, Warner brothers cartoon, or hyper realistic works today. So does lighting instructions, color palettes, on and on."

I just re-wrote this with respect to movies.

> I was thinking more like ‘make it look like Bladerunner if Kurosawa directed it, with a score like Zimmer.’

Because, as we all know, every single movie by Kurosawa is the same, as is every single score by Hans Zimmer, so it's ridiculously easy to recreate any movie in that style, with that music.

> You’re really failing to let go of the idea that you need to prescribe every little thing. Like Midjourney today, you’ll be able to give general guidance.

Yes, and Midjounrey today really sucks at:

- being consistent

- creating proper consistent details

A general prompt will give you a general result that is usually very far from what you actually have in mind.

And yes, you will have to prescribe a lot of small things if you want your movie to be consistent. And for your movie to make any sense.

Again, tell me how exactly your amazing magical AI director will know which wardrobe to chose, which camera angles to setup, which typography to use, which sound effects to make just from the script you hand in?

you can start ,with a very simple scene I referenced in my original reply: two people talking at the table in Whiplash.

> But paint by numbers stuff like many movies already are? A Hallmark Channel weepy? I bet we will.

Even those movies have more details and more care than you can get out of AIs (now, or in foreseeable future)

> Again, tell me how exactly your amazing magical AI director will know which wardrobe to chose, which camera angles to setup, which typography to use, which sound effects to make just from the script you hand in?

I think you're still assuming I always want to choose those things. That's why we're talking past each other. A good movie making model would choose for me unless I give explicit directions. Today we don't see long-range coherence in the results of movie (or game engine) models, but the range is increasing, and I'm willing to bet we will see movie-length coherence in the next decade or so.

By the way, I also bet that if I pasted exactly the No Country for Old Men script scene description from up this thread into Midjourney today it would produce at least some compelling images with decent choices of wardrobe, lighting, set dressing, camera angle, exposure, etc etc. That's what these models do, because they're extrapolating and interpolating between the billion images they've seen that contained these human choices.

AFAIK Midjourney produces single images, so the relevant scope of consistency is inside the single image only. Not between images. A movie model needs coherence across ~160,000 images, which is beyond the state of the art today but I don't see why it's impossible or unreasonable in the long run.

> A general prompt will give you a general result that is usually very far from what you actually have in mind.

Which is only a problem if I have something in mind. Alternatively I can give no guidance, or loose guidance, make half a dozen variations, pick the one I like best. Maybe iterate a couple of times into that variation tree. Just like the image generators do.

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