Festival de Cannes, or the Cannes Festival, or the Cannes Film Festival, is an annual film festival held in Cannes, France.
Considered among the largest European film festivals, Cannes previews new films in all known genre, from all around the world.
And this time, an Irish computer artist, provides a glimpse of what artificial intelligence can do, and managed to win one of its categories.
Glenn Marshall won the Jury Award at the 2022 Cannes Short Film Festival for his AI film The Crow.
The film tells the story of a dancer turning into a crow, and is set in a bleak and post-apocalyptic-looking world.
My AI film 'The Crow' wins Jury Award at Cannes!https://t.co/WHDsI7UzJM pic.twitter.com/Ww1DGyBbxw
— Glenn Marshall (@GlennIsZen) August 24, 2022
This isn't the first time Marshall earned public recognition for his work.
Previously, he created an AI-generated Daft Punk video, among others.
To create The Crow, he used his past experience, but applied it with a different approach.
Whereas his earlier methods are more about turning text unto visuals, this time, The Crow uses an underlying film as an image reference.
“I had been heavily getting into the idea of AI style transfer using video footage as a source,” Marshall told The Next Web.
"So every day I would be looking for something on YouTube or stock video sites, and trying to make an interesting video by abstracting it or transforming it into something different using my techniques."
"It was during this time I discovered Painted on YouTube — a short live action dance film — which would become the basis of The Crow."
Marshall extracted frames after frames from the five-minute-long video, and fed the information to CLIP, a neural network created by OpenAI that can learn visual concepts from natural language supervision.
He then prompted the system to generate a video of “a painting of a crow in a desolate landscape.”
With further tweaks and a little cherry-picking, the end result depicts a dancer in a black shawl mimicking the movements of a crow.
"It’s this that makes the film work so well, as the AI is trying to make every live action frame look like a painting with a crow in it, so I’m meeting it half way, and the film becomes kind of a battle between the human and the AI — with all the suggestive symbolism," Marshall said.
Marshall plans to add some 3D animations to his works. Marshall is also exploring ways to use CLIP's guided video generation, so he could add detailed text-based directions, such as specific camera movements.
Although 'video styling' is nothing new in the AI world, it's beginning to creep into the mainstream. I think 'The Crow' is playing its part. I'm getting accelerated interest from high profile bloggers, journalists and TV stations,citing it as a glimpse into the future of cinema. pic.twitter.com/gYwJkJDCyC
— Glenn Marshall (@GlennIsZen) August 30, 2022
In the meantime, Marshall believes that The Crow could attract mainstream recognition, not only because it's a work of an AI, but also because it's at Cannes.
Marshall confidently said that The Crow is eligible for submission to the British Academy Film Awards.
"I haven’t got a speech prepared, but I fantasize about collecting an award, in the role of a herald of AI, and proclaiming to the star-studded audience that [for] each and every one of you, actor, director, set designer, costume designer, artist, composer […] . AI is coming, and you’ll find yourself in a very different job soon — or out of a job all together," he said.