's first AI-generated continuous narrative science fiction short series "Sanxingdui: Future Apocalypse" has been broadcast online. On July 10, Bona Films held a unique "viewing party" to show it on the big screen. After reviewing the highlights of the short drama, relevant people from Bona Pictures and Douyin Group, the producers of the drama, comprehensively analyzed the birth process of this AI short drama. Jiang Defu, CEO of Bona Pictures, believes that this is not only a work of self-innovation, but also a concrete manifestation of the application of new productivity in the film industry.
With the rapid development of artificial intelligence technology, the traditional film and television industry has ushered in unprecedented changes. As a leader in the industry, Bona Pictures actively embraces new technologies and launched the AI short drama "Sanxingdui: Future Apocalypse". "Sanxingdui: Future Apocalypse" tells the story of the near future where science and technology are developing rapidly, and the ruins of ancient civilizations on the earth have undergone changes. Different characters from the three forces jointly entered the digitally generated ancient Shu Kingdom and embarked on an adventure spanning ancient and modern times, uncovering the mystery of the ancient Shu Kingdom and the Southern Silk Road 4,000 years ago, and looking for the password to save the civilization crisis.
Qu Ji Xiaojiang, head of Bona Aigms Production Center, said that the "Sanxingdui: Future Apocalypse" project had been approved as early as 2022. However, due to the long production cycle of science fiction movies and huge capital investment, the progress of the project was slow. "However, With the arrival of 2023, known as the first year of artificial intelligence, the emergence of various artificial intelligence tools has allowed Bona Pictures to see new possibilities. In the past, we needed to invest huge manpower, material resources and financial resources in industrial film production. , but now with the empowerment of aigc technology, we seem to have wings and quickly realize many IP reserve ideas. "Li Kangkang, technical director of
, said that aigc (generative artificial intelligence) is not about throwing everything to the computer, but. "Human-machine co-creation" is needed to control the content of AI through traditional film art. "There is a lot of manual intervention, such as setting up scenes, training models and controlling the consistency of characters."
However, in this In the creation of the play, we pursue a purely generative production method, without the need for on-site shooting. "In this process, the role of the screenwriter is to assist rather than replace, because AI cannot understand the emotions and norms of the script. We rely on AI for a lot of production Graphic design, especially lens design, model style and character model training also rely on the technical support of AI. AI plays a key role in graphic production and design, and artificial intelligence plays a role in creative control and problem solving, for example. Character performances, etc., all rely on humans to control artificial intelligence and then generate them. In the future, we will continue to promote the development of dynamic production. It is expected that more than 90% of the shots will rely on AI upgrade processing, and everything from design to synthesis will be processed by AI. Implementation to improve efficiency and quality. "
Interestingly, for traditional real-life shooting, simple shots are the most difficult for AI to do, and for real-life shooting, the most difficult thing is what AI is good at. Qu Ji Xiaojiang told reporters: "In fact, the biggest difficulty with AI lies in photographing people. There are still challenges in processing people's expressions and emotional interactions. If we actually shot an ancient Shu country, it would actually cost a lot of money and a lot of manpower and cost. , and we can use artificial intelligence software to generate this ancient Shu country. However, if two people talk face to face, you say something and I say something. This is the easiest for real shooting, but artificial intelligence will be difficult. Therefore, at that time. Many people suggested that we use virtual real shots to complete the characters, but we don’t do real shots, we just want to generate them. In the end, in order to achieve the consistency of the characters, we used a lot of manual intervention and also used film editing techniques.”
Digital generation eliminates the hardships of on-site shooting. Has the production cost of the show been reduced? Qu Ji Xiaojiang told reporters: "It depends on which field it is compared to. If it is placed in pure AIGC production, this is the ceiling level.Because in the current field of AI creation, sometimes it is just one person, one computer, or three or five people, and then a small team. However, the team of "Sanxingdui: Future Apocalypse" is super huge. It actually has many IPs. Project development is planned in parallel. And if compared with traditional real-life shooting, the cost is indeed greatly reduced. "
And some of the protagonists in the film will also become AI's digital assets and will appear frequently in subsequent IP works. Quji Xiaojiang said with a smile: "For example, the male protagonist in the film will have his own account and his own identity. He had a very rich life. In fact, I now feel that he is a real person. "As for the dubbing in the short play, Quji Xiaojiang revealed that it is a mixture of AI dubbing and artificial dubbing, and all the English parts in the film are AI dubbing.
As an explorer, the creation of "Sanxingdui: Future Apocalypse" spanned two years. Li Kangkang revealed: "One is the technology model of March last year under the mainstream technology architecture of the previous generation; the other is the new technology based on the architecture in June this year, which is consistent with the Sora technology architecture. Therefore, under the current circumstances, we have made some lens improvements, and we can see obvious technical generation differences. The new technical architecture is constantly iterating, which also indicates that the future iteration speed of AIGC is unpredictable, but the effect will become more and more close to real people. "
When it comes to further demands on the technical process, technical director Li Kangkang believes that the current AI drama creation still lacks an industrial-grade, professional integrated software, "This is a gap at the moment, and all our operations are Based on the model, the entire work process is split and needs to be spliced piece by piece and then moved forward. "
Bona Pictures CEO Jiang Defu hopes that exploring market trends through the AIGC short series model will make investment in long-form dramas and movies more confident and the investment direction more accurate. "After joining AI, we will have more in the movie planning process. More improvements will make us more confident in investing in long-form dramas and movies, and the investment direction will be more accurate. The three-step process from short dramas to long-form dramas to movies will also form a closed loop in Bona's industrial chain. "
Qu Ji Xiaojiang revealed: "We have a future science fiction IP universe with the theme of ancient civilization. 'Sanxingdui' is just our first step. We plan to launch long-form online dramas and TV series through the development of this IP universe. , and movies, forming a complete IP matrix, which will also involve game development in the future. The empowerment of AI technology brings more opportunities to young film and television creators, and also allows IP to quickly incubate, develop and mature, and receive feedback from the market and audiences. "Qian Lili, the person in charge of the
Douyin short drama, said that this project is not only a huge boost to the production field, but also to the creative field. Because as long as there is creativity and the application of AI technology, the creation threshold can be greatly lowered and promote creation
Text by Beijing Youth Daily reporter Xiao Yang
Editor by Cui Wei
