Orson Welles lost masterpiece to be reconstructed with AI

[BluBonnet]

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[Al_The_Strange]

Not sure if this is great or terrible.

[Stanis]

I'm sure. Booo

[quadruple D]

[PhysicalMediaMaestro]

Originally Posted by BluBonnet

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If you're going to reconstruct the last 43 minutes, don't do it with AI. Find the script and/or storyboards and recreate them the old-fashioned way.

[BluBonnet]

Originally Posted by PhysicalMediaMaestro

If you're going to reconstruct the last 43 minutes, don't do it with AI. Find the script and/or storyboards and recreate them the old-fashioned way.

Did you even read the story? Why am I even asking?

And do you even know what was cut from The Magnificent Ambersons? Because if you did, you wouldn't say it's missing "the last 43 minutes".

Showrunner’s endeavor will deploy a fusion of AI and traditional film techniques to reconstruct the lost footage. This includes shooting some sequences with live actors, with plans to use face and pose transfer techniques with AI tools to preserve the likenesses of the original actors in the movie. Extensively archived set photos from the film will serve as the foundation for re-creating the scenes.

Helping to spearhead the project is Brian Rose, a filmmaker who’s spent the last five years re-creating 30,000 missing frames from the movie. He’s rebuilt the physical sets in 3D models, using them to pinpoint camera movements to match with the script, set photos, and archive materials. By his thinking, he’s reconstructed the framing and timing of each scene, which will serve as the foundation for the re-creation.

“There was, for example, a four-minute-long, unbroken moving camera shot whose loss is a tragedy,” Rose said in a statement. “The camera moves from one end of a ballroom and then back up the other end [while] you have about a dozen different characters walk in and out of frame, and crisscrossing subplots. It was really ahead of its time. Yet all but about the last 50 seconds of the shot was cut.”

Tom Clive, a VFX expert on face-swapping and de-aging who previously worked for Metaphysic and recently joined Showrunner, will also be assisting.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JHKZumY8rzY

[LarryDickman]

Originally Posted by PhysicalMediaMaestro

If you're going to reconstruct the last 43 minutes, don't do it with AI. Find the script and/or storyboards and recreate them the old-fashioned way.

What would "the old-fashioned way" be exactly?

The only other comparison I can think of is using animation like they did with some of the Doctor Who episodes.

[apricissimus]

Please wait till April 1 to post something like this.

[apricissimus]

Originally Posted by Al_The_Strange

Not sure if this is great or terrible.

It's greatly terrible.

[scotchka]

Originally Posted by Al_The_Strange

Not sure if this is great or terrible.

It sucks.

[MartinScorsesefan]

I actually like the finished film as is. I would love to see a reconstruction, but if the missing scenes are truly lost, (for years WB hinted that they existed) leave the film as is.

[Gacivory]

Ew gross! Pass

[Gacivory]

This part makes sense.

The effort won’t be commercialized because Showrunner hasn’t obtained the rights to the film from Warner Bros. Discovery or Concord. If they “see a marketplace for it and a path for it outside of an academic context, then of course they have ownership of it,” Saatchi says. “The goal isn’t to commercialize the 43 minutes, but to see them exist in the world after 80 years of people asking ‘might this have been the best film ever made in its original form?’”

[Phibes]

Gag-nificent AImbersons you mean

[BluBonnet]

I think he’s rooting for the machines

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=crWKW1u55eI

Edward Saatchi, CEO of Amazon-backed startup Fable, sees AI as “possibly the end of human creativity,” at least as an exclusive phenomenon. And no, he doesn’t believe that’s a bad thing.

The exec made the provocative comments on CNBC on Friday in an interview on Squawk Box (watch the full segment above). The appearance was timed to the news that Fable’s interactive platform Showrunner has embarked on a “non-commercial, academic” initiative to rescue lost footage from 1942 Orson Welles film The Magnificent Ambersons.

“What’s coming is a world where we’re not the only creative species,” Saatchi said, “and that we will enjoy entertainment created by AIs. So, we wanted to train our AI on the greatest storyteller of the past 200 years, Orson Welles.”

[Cremildo]

Welles' estate:

We saw the various articles on ‘Ambersons’ today. In general, the estate has embraced AI technology to create a voice model intended to be used for VO work with brands. That said, this attempt to generate publicity on the back of Welles’ creative genius is disappointing, especially as we weren’t even given the courtesy of a heads up,” a spokesperson for the Welles estate wrote. “While AI is inevitable, it still cannot replace the creative instincts resident in the human mind, which means this effort to make Ambersons whole will be a purely mechanical exercise without any of the uniquely innovative thinking or a creative force like Welles.