05/29/2024
Here is a conversation with the director of the award-winning documentary Age of AI and the AI film Seeing Red
A little background. Juan is a formidable director, designer and animator. I’ve known Juan for many years and we’ve worked together many times in the past. Subsequently he moved to LA and we’ve stayed in touch.
In late 2022, Juan directed the film that brought to the screen a discussion between Eric Schmidt (ex-CEO of Google), Daniel Huttenlocher, the Dean of the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing and Henry Kissinger on the future and implications of AI, entitled “Age of AI and Our Human Future”. While the film centered around broader AI implications like robotics and future employment issues, Juan chose to bring this important conversation to life using generative AI in many of the sequences. You can see the film here
Juan, how did this documentary come about? The production company Sandblast brought me on. I don’t think honestly that they were aware of the AI explosion that was about to happen in 2022. The AI capabilities were literally coming to life in front of my eyes. I found that whatever I was doing was becoming obsolete – in a matter of days!
One thing I found is that in generating images and video in AI it can look beautiful, but AI keeps offering me things that is not what I’m asking for and you have to fight it. You have to put in very specific parameters or it’s not going to work. Right now, AI is a little stubborn.
How did you work with the prompts? Well first, the order of the prompts is very important and strangely, you can write the same prompt and hour later and you’ll get a totally different result. AI is even better at certain times of the year or moments in a day!
Earlier this year Juan made a film that was created in its entirety with generative AI called Seeing Red. For this 5-minute piece, viewable on Juan’s Instagram () he generated over 100 separate shots and marked a significant step in creating original video using generative AI. This piece is pre-Sora (which is still to be released), and what it took for Juan to create this dazzling array of images is the discussion in our hour-long interview.
Astonishingly, this entire piece took just 3 days. When you step back and think about achieving such a complex film any other way, the days would stretch into weeks.
Check out the rest of the conversation. You can see it on Linkedin or Medium () . I also included links to the "Age of AI" documentary, his film "Seeing Red" as well as links to the many AI apps Juan used.
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/conversation-juan-delcan-peter-corbett-wheae
