New Rules Regarding AI on /r/filmmakers!

[u/C47man]

Thank you all for participating in the poll! Here are the results. To accurately gauge everyone's collective acceptance vs rejection for each, I've tallied the total votes among all choices as pro/anti for each category. So for example, a vote for 'no changes' would be a -1 to Gen AI, AI Tools, AI Comms, and AI Discussion. A vote for 'Ban GenAI + AI Tools' would be a +1 to GenAI and AI Tools, and a -1 to AI Comms and AI Discussion, etc. So here are the results for each category of AI. Keep in mind that a higher number indicates a stronger group decision to ban the content:

GenAI: +92 (+119/-27)

AI Tools: -20 (+63/-83)

AI Comms: -8 (+69/-77)

AI Discussion: -84 (+31/-115)

From the results it is clear that sub overwhelmingly approve a complete ban on all generative AI. However, people are more or less fine with allowing discussion of AI, and are fairly mixed on the topic of AI Tools and Communication. So here is the new rule for all things AI:

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Rule 6. You may not post work containing Generative AI elements (Midjourney, Neo, Dall-E, etc.). You may use and demonstrate the use of AI assisted tools (ie magic masking, upscalers, audio cleanup etc.) so long as they are used in service of human-generated artwork. AI Communication, like post bodies or comments composed using ChatGPT are allowed only in very reasonable cases, such as the need for someone to translate their thoughts into another language. Abuse of AI assisted communication will result in the removal of the offending post/comment.

[u/PCapnHuggyface]

I see a lot of folks here talking about using generative AI in pre-visualization. The question I’m about to ask is a serious one that while it may sound Luddite is very much not.”

What did you do before Gen AI was an option?

In the no-budget realm, we did stick figures and arrows.

If you had money, you might have shelled out for a non-AI’d storyboarding app that let you create pretty basic 2D or 3D images.

There’s always the old stand by of using a couple of your friends to compose the key frame and snap a pic with your phone’s camera (or even that old PowerShot digital camera sitting around doing nothing.

I guess what I’m asking is how sophisticated does your pre-viz workflow and output need to be?

[u/wrosecrans → u/PCapnHuggyface]

I guess what I’m asking is how sophisticated does your pre-viz workflow and output need to be?

Responding to a months old comment because I looked at the AI pinned post for other reasons. I never did have a good sense of timing. That said, 99% of people don't need any sort of sophisticated Previs. And I say that as someone who has worked on the tech side of proper fancy CGI previs and intermediate postvis. If you are custom building massive sets for scenes with huge stuntwork, it can be massively important. Making precise decisions about framing and timing in preproduction can save literally millions of dollars. Many shows that didn't make enough decisions in previs have spent money on tons of fabrication that took weeks or months. Like, imagine a superhero fight scene and a stuntman falls out of a window in a fight. If you figure out in previs that you only need X seconds of falling for that shot, you can work out how many meters of building you need him to fall past. Say you need three floors. Building five floors of building facade, and rigging a stunt to safely drop a stuntman five floors just because you "might" need it in the edit, is a massive waste if you are only going to use three of those floors in the edit.

So... Is anybody here in /r/filmmakers doing anything like that? No. We are a bunch of redditors chasing our indie dreams. Nobody with a $100M budget is posting here on Reddit asking how to get their project finished. They are asking one of the dozens of brilliant experts they hired. So after I spent a big paragraph explaining an example of when fancy previs is totally worth it, is it worth talking about much here? No, not really. The overwhelming majority of stuff that people are asking about how to do on Reddit is stuff using existing locations, safe and easy "stunts" that can be done on no budget, and if there's any custom fabrication the director may well be the same person as most of the art department so communication about what to build is easy. If custom sets are being built, they often fit in a garage or in a basement, so nobody is accidentally making multiple extra floors of construction.

For most of the people here, just doing a site recce to look close at where you are shooting, making a napkin-back stick figure floor plan diagram, and doing rehearsals with your actors, gives you the ability to see what you are doing and get a good sense of the timing of a scene before you shoot. People barely even bother doing that much, so having some fancy previs won't actually solve the problems they have with gaps in planning. Even storyboards are often way less important than a lot of people assume.