Feature, Technology

5 Biggest Benefits of Artificial Intelligence in The Film Industry 0 6513

Artificial intelligence is continually developing, and it is a form of technology that is here to stay. With its’ power slowly changing the face of the film and entertainment industry over the past years, it goes without saying that Artificial Intelligence (AI) is making an impact.

Within the industry, many have become rather frightened, fearing the development and creation of AI, with its’ knowledge and ability to understand and mimic the thought process of the human mind. The advancing of deep learning workstations is seen as a risk, challenging the role of jobs, creative power and careers of humans within the film industry.

However, with these fears, comes an extensive amount of benefits that the film industry can gain through the addition of Artificial Intelligence within the film industry.

With its’ power and understanding ever-growing, many tasks are already being transferred to the hands of AI, with positive results already being seen across the board. These positive results have helped to create momentum and excitement from both filmmakers, developers and even scientists, helping to drive future progress on Artificial Intelligence within the film industry whilst helping to transform the film industry forever.

What Are The Advantages Of AI In The Film Industry?

Becoming a Producer

Many companies have begun trialling the use of Artificial Intelligence within the film industry. One online platform ScriptBook offers script analyses and automated story generation and have stated that their devised algorithms within AI have the ability to predict the success of a film, simply by reading and analysing the script.

A helpful and handy tool for any film making company, the addition of Artificial Intelligence can save revenue by analysing the chances of success of the film before the development process has begun. This can be achieved through both the directors and the crew having the chance to understand the potential of the film, instead of taking a risk and creating an entire film that is likely to be a Box Office flop.

Along with ensuring Box Office success, AI can also help analyse the success of the script, offering writers the chance to make amendments or remove chapters entirely, and start anew.

Streaming

It’s no secret that streaming providers such as ‘Netflix’ or ‘TiVo’ are quickly becoming game-changers within the entertainment industry. Able to provide users with their favourite TV shows and movies from any device at any time.

Along with creating the technology to offer efficient streaming, organisations such as Netflix and TiVo were also quick to jump and get involved, incorporating artificial intelligence into their business model. Each company offers the users a personalised experience, with related films and programmes to their individual likes being recommended and promoted across their site. This removes the need to manually search and scroll the site themselves while helping to accurately target and market appropriate entertainment with great success.

This development helps to improve the user’s experience, while also keeping them hooked and remaining on their platform, this will prevent users from logging off and potentially switching their attention to another streaming site.

Moderation

Within the film industry, each streaming platform has a different set of rules and regulations that they have to abide when catering to their audience. A prime example can be seen in the creation of password-restricted channels. These can help lock and monitor the age of those viewers wanting violent and explicit video content. Streaming sites such as Netflix, however, will allow this kind of content to be seen freely without any age restrictions heavily enforced.

Because of this, broadcasters have to specifically choose which content that they choose to be displayed on their platform, whether it is television or a streaming service. Yet with the use of AI, broadcasters can now analyse content at speed, this helps to discover whether it includes either mature or sensitive scenes that should not be seen by a particular age category.

By using this handy feature, broadcasters and streaming services can easily moderate content, giving the correct age ratings in order to stop those too young or vulnerable from viewing inappropriate content.

Automatic Subtitles

A complex and tedious task that many filmmakers would endure for hours on end and that is the synchronizing of subtitles in line with lip movement in both TV and film. A process that needs to be done with the utmost perfection, as even the smallest delay in timing, can result in audio and subtitles becoming quickly out of sync.

By using Artificial Intelligence to complete this role instead of humans, AI can speed up and simplify the entire process while massively reducing the amount of timing and spelling mistakes experienced.

In order to do this correctly, Artificial Intelligence systems can synthesize speech and analyse the vocabulary used in the video. After AI has reviewed the vocabulary once, it can then generate subtitles in many different languages, taking this hugely time-consuming task away from the filmmaking team, creating a faster and more efficient editing process.

Movie Marketing

Another top benefit of Artificial Intelligence within the film industry and that is the ability to train automated systems that can be used to deliver interesting content for both film marketing and advertisements of the latest films. Through using AI within production houses, this piece of technology can be used to analyse large amounts of data, such as audio, images, text, language and design concepts.

The benefit of Artificial Intelligence, is that it can use this visual content to create an effective marketing campaign, helping to drive both traffic and revenue for the film about to be released.

Examples of how movie marketing has been used, can be seen in the creation of both posters for billboards but also the creation of trailers for the latest, upcoming films. An example of AI being used to create a trailer can be seen in the success that was Morgan.

By analysing successful trailers of the same genre, AI can pull all the visual content together to create an amazing piece of marketing that promises to be a box office success.

Summary

The development of Artificial Intelligence within the film industry can be used to help simplify many different aspects of both filmmaking and content creation. For the current role of AI within the film industry and be seen as the acting and supporting film producers and creators.

Whether this is through the reviewing of scripts, creation of fast and correct subtitles to the editing of trailers for guaranteed success, AI has a number of valuable benefits.

With further research and development required, there is no answer as to how far artificial intelligence can go with helping and adding to the film industry.

A fear for many, the idea that technology, however maybe taking away the need for humans within the film industry is incorrect. With the use of AI, filmmakers can create successful, inspiring films that are guaranteed to be a huge success, allowing them to focus on perfecting and creating the best results possible.

This was a guest blog post by Charlotte Johnson.

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I'm a freelance film reviewer and blogger with over 10 years of experience writing for various different reputable online and print publications. In addition to my running, editing and writing for Thoughts On Film, I am also the film critic for The National, the newspaper that supports an independent Scotland, covering the weekly film releases, film festivals and film-related features. I have a passion for all types of cinema, and have a particular love for foreign language film, especially South Korean and Japanese cinema. Favourite films include The Big Lebowski, Pulp Fiction and 2001: A Space Odyssey.

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Competition: Win King of Thieves on DVD *CLOSED* 0 3882

***This competition is now closed. Thanks to all who entered! The two winners will be contacted soon!

This coming Monday sees the DVD and Blu-ray release of King of Thieves, the latest film from acclaimed director James Marsh (Man on Wire, The Theory of Everything), which features a cavalcade of legendary British actors including Michael Caine, Ray Winstone, Jim Broadbent, Tom Courtenay, Michael Gambon and Paul Whitehouse who team up to pull off a brazen heist. You may know the job from our own headlines as “The Hatton Garden Heist,” described as the biggest and most daring heist in British history.

It’s a good slice of old-fashioned heist movie fun which morphs in its latter half into something with surprising touches of the dangerous and sinister as suspicions and loyalties start to inevitably turn.

To celebrate the film’s release, we have two copies of it on DVD to give away, thanks to the lovely folk at Studio Canal.

thoughts-on-film-king-of-thieves-competition

To enter the competition simply answer the following question: in which classic British film does Michael Caine famously say the line, “you were only supposed to blow the bloody doors off!”?

a) Alfie
b) The Italian Job
c) The Ipcress File

Please email your answer to rosstmiller@thoughtsonfilm.co.uk with the subject heading “King of Thieves competition.” Please also include your delivery address details so we can easily send the prize out if you win.

Now for the technical part:

  • UK residents only
  • Entrants must be 18 or over
  • Winners will be chosen at random
  • The prize for each entrant is one DVD copy of King of Thieves
  • Prize is non-transferable
  • Competition ends on Sunday January 27th at 11:59pm GMT
  • Prize will be sent from PR/studio

King of Thieves is available to buy on DVD and Blu-ray from January 21st. You can already rent/buy the film digitally.

Best of luck on the competition!

Movie Review: Monsters and Men 0 6465

A spate of films have appeared on our screens as of late that feel like they only really could have been made now, as a sort of culmination of what has come before, a breaking point, explored in ways that hold a mirror up to how the situation is presently, whether set modern day (Assassination Nation, The Hate U Give) or in the past (BlacKkKlansman).

The latest is Monsters and Men, a thoughtful, ambitious and keenly-judged feature debut from writer-director Reinaldo Marcus Green that deals with the ricocheting effect of a black man being gunned down by police officers who purportedly perceived he was a threat to them, despite a videotaping witness suggesting he didn’t have a gun in his hand as the cops attested.

It’s a film of three distinct parts threaded together by how one event ripples through individual lives, evoking the Oscar-winning Moonlight in form at least with its three-tier structure as each of the character-driven pieces present us with their own angle on the specific situation that drives the plot and the societal themes at large. As it starts out it makes you believe you’re only going to see things from one perspective before revealing a really well-played contrasting and complimenting set-up that’s both narratively and thematically satisfying.

There’s the key witness filming the event, Manny (Anthony Ramos) who has just started a new job to provide for his wife and young daughter who has to weigh up the negative effect uploading the video to the web will have on his family’s life against his need to let the world see what actually happened. There’s the strong-willed black police officer, Dennis (John David Washington, who also starred in the aforementioned BlacKkKlansman), within the system who wasn’t directly involved with the shooting but who is colleagues with the officers responsible and with a family of his own to think about every time he heads out to patrol the city streets. And finally a young baseball star-in-the-making, Zyrick (Kevin Harrison Jr.), who is inspired to take protesting action after watching the footage.

In the middle police-focused segment, it refreshingly touches on the idea of the danger cops put themselves in every day as much as it lends vital weight to the argument that there is really no excuse for a group of officers to gun down an unarmed black man. “One cop’s mistake and now we’re all to blame,” explains Dennis when a dinner date turns sour once conversation turns to the shooting. “I thought you were different, that maybe you were part of the solution” retorts the family friends who brought the topic up. Both lines ring in your ears.

John David Washington as Officer Dennis Williams in “Monsters and Men”

It’s the film’s strongest and most thought-provoking segment, evoking the likes of Rampart (directed by one of this film’s executive producers, Oren Moverman) and even TV’s The Shield, if not in visceral immediacy then certainly in the ways it explores interdepartmental attitudes, procedures and loyalty in the face of intense, albeit sadly all-too-common occurrences on the street.

As a whole it’s a bit more of a studied, comparatively subdued experience than the far more rambunctious, fired-up The Hate U Give. Nevertheless, in its own quietly powerful way, it explores the micro and macro effects of violence and killing at the hands of police officer that are an unfortunate regular occurrence in America, asking difficult and necessary questions that really stay with you.

Is this an inevitability of modern day life in America? Is there a solution? Why should it be allowed to continue? Where does police protecting themselves end and police brutality begin? The words “Black Lives Matter” never actually cross the lips of anyone in the film but it nevertheless pulses through every scene. In the wake of Charlottesville in particular, it’s a film that takes on more weight, making you think as it compels with its story filled with excellent performances, involving soundscape (the amplified sounds of the New York City streets is brilliantly achieved) and memorable score by Kris Bowers that’s at once sorrowful and hopeful, encapsulating the film’s ethos that these terrible things happen but there’s light at the end of the tunnel that things might some day change.

Monsters and Men is in UK cinemas from Friday January 18th.

8 out of 10