Peter Chung
patreon
Podcast 39 - Robert Valley - Part 2
🕑 Added 2024-05-20 11:48:05 +0000 UTCThe second part of my dialogue with Robert Valley. He was busy finishing his third Love Death and Robots episode for the upcoming season. He couldn't say much about it, and we turn to talking about our approaches to directing. I end up relating a lot of what you've heard me say in my teaching talks. This is a good example of the kind of conversation I have with fellow directors when I try to explain some of the principles of filmmaking I teach. The ideas are mostly never identified as filmmaking tools and aren't described in an established filmmaking vocabulary.
We talk about the way AI generated film is changing the role of animators and directors. Increasingly, filmmakers need to focus on mastering the conceptual tools as AI will execute the technical aspects more quickly and accurately. This is the big shift artists need to make going forward.
At one point, Robert asks me to name a single piece of music or a song I could listen to forever. I didn't come up with an answer during the talk, but thinking later, it's probably Maggot Brain by Funkadelic's Eddie Hazel.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Inr22ZBmdw
Transcript is attached.
Comments
Douglas gregory
Hello Peter, would you reach out? I am having trouble contacting you concerning some missing art that I assume you sent back in January or February. Much appreciated.
Coagulopath
Robert needs to remember that technological change can also create work. 2D animated films died out in the early 2000s because they were expensive and slow and difficult to make. If those barriers were removed, we could start making them again. Imagine a world where Pixar and Disney released a whole slate of animated films each summer instead of just one, or where small studios could compete with the big players (this is already starting to happen, IMO—shows like Love Death and Robots and Primal have better animation than any 90s TV cartoon, and are basically movie-quality). Ralph Bakshi once said that Heavy Traffic cost a million dollars in 1973, but if he'd had access to modern technology, it would cost a tenth of that. As a counterfactual: imagine animated films suddenly cost ten times more to make than they currently did. Nobody would be like "yay, more jobs for artists!" Instead, no studio would finance an animated movie ever again, and the industry would probably cease to exist. Technology will also let us work longer on animated films, making them better and tighter than they currently are. Imagine boarding and animating 5 different versions of a scene, and then choosing the best one. Not possible now. Maybe possible soon! The thing I worry about is the loss of individual style. A benefit of drawing by hand for ten thousand hours is that your art starts to become inalienably yours: Milt Kahl could not have imitated Takeshi Koike's style on demand (or vice versa) even if he'd wanted to. But once it's possible for anyone to rip off any art style, what happens to individuality? Will all films just converge on the most "commercial" look possible (boring shiny Pixar/Marvel slop)? I think technology has potential to make movies far better, but also far worse.
