What Can Film History Teach Us About AI Filmmaking?

New technology has changed filmmaking before. The hard part has always been figuring out when the technology helps the story and when it gets in the way.

The conversation around AI filmmaking feels new, but one part of it is very familiar. Film has always had to figure out what to do with new technology, and the first few years are usually awkward.

When synchronized sound arrived in the late 1920s, filmmakers had a problem they had not dealt with before. Cameras were noisy, so to keep them from ruining the recording, crews put them inside soundproof booths. That fixed one problem and created another, because a camera in a booth could barely move. This came right after silent filmmakers had become incredibly sophisticated with camera movement, so some of the first talkies looked more limited than the films made just before them.

Filmmakers knew it, too. In 1928, Sergei Eisenstein, Vsevolod Pudovkin, and Grigori Alexandrov published a statement warning against simply attaching recorded dialogue to an image and turning cinema back into photographed theater. What they wanted was sound used as counterpoint to the image rather than laid on top of it, and nobody had worked out how to do that yet.

Eventually they did. Cameras got quieter and microphones became easier to move, and directors started thinking about sound as part of the filmmaking rather than something the production had to work around.

Color had its own version of this. Becky Sharp became the first feature photographed entirely in three-strip Technicolor in 1935. Technicolor was closely involved in how productions used the process, and Natalie Kalmus, the company's color director, pushed filmmakers to be deliberate about how much color they put on screen and where they used it. Getting more color into a movie was already easy by then. The craft was in deciding when color helped a scene and when it became a distraction.

CGI went through something similar, much more recently. Jurassic Park is remembered as a breakthrough for computer-generated imagery, but there is surprisingly little CGI dinosaur footage in the movie. The filmmakers mixed digital dinosaurs with practical creatures from Stan Winston's team and chose between them based on what each shot needed.

Even the digital animation was tied to the craft that came before it. Phil Tippett and his team helped develop a system that let experienced stop-motion animators physically pose an armature and translate that movement into the digital dinosaurs, so the technology changed underneath them and the knowledge in their hands carried over.

AI filmmaking is in that first awkward stretch now. A lot of AI video still looks like AI video, where you notice the generation before you notice the scene, and the industry is still working out where these tools belong inside a production. Sound, color, and computer-generated imagery each went through the same phase, and each became useful once filmmakers learned when the technology helped the story and when it got in the way.

The interesting work starts when the technology stops being the reason for the shot. A director still has to decide where the camera belongs. Someone still has to decide what the performance should feel like, where the cut happens, whether the light is right, and whether any of it is helping the story. The right answer for a given shot might be to generate it, shoot it, or build it with animation, practical effects, or traditional VFX, and often it is some mix of those.

That is the idea behind our belief that the story has to come before the technology.It is also a big part of the work involved when you actually try to make a film using these tools.

Film has been combining new technology with older craft for its entire history, and the job on any given shot is still making the scene work.

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