“The Frost:” An AI-Generated Film Created “With Human Artists”

READ MORE: Welcome to the new surreal. How AI-generated video is changing film. (MIT Technology Review)

Artists are often the first to experiment with new technology. But the immediate future of generative video is being shaped by the advertising industry, which is leaning into the often disjointed, surreal and even horrific imagery that generative AI tends to produce.

For example, the 12-minute movie The Frost is being held up as one of the most impressive — and bizarre — examples yet of this strange new genre to date. Every shot is generated by AI (DALL-E 2 and D-ID mainly) yet, it was also prompted, tweaked and guided by humans at Detroit-based video creation company Waymark.

“[AI is] not a perfect medium yet by any means,” Josh Rubin, an executive producer at Waymark and the director of The Frost, tells Will Douglas Heaven at MIT Tech Review. “It was a bit of a struggle to get certain things from DALL-E, like emotional responses in faces.”

The Frost follows a fake beer ad, “Synthetic Summer,” from British studio Private Island, which was designed to showcase the video capabilities of generative AI.

READ MORE: AI-Generated Commercials May Be Cursed Today, But Give the Tech a Minute (NAB Amplify)

According to Heaven, both examples play to the strengths of the tech that made them.

“The Frost is well suited to the creepy aesthetic of DALL-E 2,” he writes. “Synthetic Summer has many quick cuts, because video generation tools like Gen-2 produce only a few seconds of video at a time that then need to be stitched together.”

This may mean that we will start to see generative video used in martial arts videos, or music videos and commercials, he speculates.

More complex narrative video, however, still requires huge amounts of human creative input.

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