With the emergence of big movies and mini-series generated by aigc, digital celebrities such as ai Jackie Chan, ai Huo Qubing, and ai Kong Fuzi have become popular. The new audio-visual track reshaped by ai has become a hot topic this summer.
The summer film "Legend" has been released for a week. In the hot discussion on the Internet surrounding the new film, "AI Jackie Chan", who represents a new breakthrough in AI technology on the big screen, has occupied the hot topic. At almost the same time, aigc produced the sci-fi short series "Sanxingdui: Apocalypse of the Future", the AI short series "Heroes", the AI short series "The Strange Mirror of Mountains and Seas: Cutting the Waves", and the "AI + real person" drama micro-short series "Love Never Dies". "Termination", the AI sci-fi cute mini-series "Fantasy Store", etc. are all online; and a "2024 China·AI Festival" will "invite" four sages, including Confucius, Laozi, Han Feizi and Socrates, to the scene. Let’s talk about the future...
What’s interesting is that the main entities that triggered this wave of traffic include not only technology companies such as Keling, Internet genetic platforms such as Douyin and Kuaishou, but also audio-visual platforms such as China Central Radio and Television and Bona Pictures. The traditional "aircraft carrier" in the industry. As Zeng Yi, a researcher at the Institute of Automation of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and an expert at the United Nations' high-level advisory body on artificial intelligence, said, "With the support of AI, revolutionary changes have taken place in many industries, such as the film and television production and media communication fields that we are most familiar with." AI Symbiosis with film and television has become a common topic in the industry.
Nearly half a year has passed since OpenAI launched the Wensheng video model sora, which triggered the discussion of "AI subverting the traditional film and television industry". The future created by AI has arrived. The leaders of the audiovisual industry have the same attitude - enter the game first and then break it.
Rooted in tradition, fantasy short dramas have become a must-have for AIGC film and television creations
As the first AI-generated feature film of China Central Radio and Television, "Hero" tells the story of the life changes of small people who suffer from low self-esteem in real life after experiencing fantasy time travel. . The entire film lasts less than 14 minutes, but it unfolds to the audience a picture of an ancient battlefield in the Cold War era, where thousands of horses are silent, blood is stirring, and even the heroic "Huo Qubing" is shown. The character creation, environmental space, scene construction, etc. in the film were all completed by AI.
As a leading company in the film industry, Bona, while handing over the feature film "Legend", also simultaneously launched the country's first AIGC generative continuous narrative science fiction short series "Sanxingdui: Future Apocalypse", taking the perspective of future science fiction. , unfolding the digital audio-visual imagination of Sanxingdui and ancient Shu civilization, allowing the audience to transcend the boundaries of time and space and feel the pulse of ancient civilization.
Including the two major industry giants, this batch of local original AIGC-generated content almost all chose to be rooted in traditional culture and Chinese civilization, starting with micro-short dramas. Why are short plays the first to "eat crabs"? Why do creators unanimously anchor traditional culture? Kang Zhen, a professor at Beijing Normal University, has this judgment: "Today, the era of inheriting the excellent traditional Chinese culture meets the era of artificial intelligence. It is crucial to turn the encounter into an opportunity."
started with short stories to test the water, because aigc's The core lies in deep learning, which requires inputting massive amounts of training data and algorithm models to generate content that is similar or advanced to the original data. For local creators, whether they are self-developed AI generation tools or those who can control both AI generation tools and traditional editing and special effects software, they are all in the "data input" learning stage. At a time when the field of short plays is in the ascendant, in the creative exploration stage of AIGC, the outstanding "small but beautiful" aspect of micro-short plays is more conducive to "reducing costs and increasing efficiency". Using traditional culture as the content support is the profound spiritual power and the charming charm of the Chinese civilization of more than 5,000 years, and it is also the mission of creators in this era.
For this reason, fantasy short dramas rooted in traditional culture have become a must-have for AIGC film and television creation. Take "Chinese Mythology", which was launched earlier by CCTV as an example, including "Mending the Sky", "Chasing the Sun", "Clamming the Sea", "Flying to the Moon", "Tasting Herbs" and "Controlling the Water". There is a legend in each episode, and it goes from scene to scene every 5 minutes. The character opens a new "copy". This process not only allows creators to work with new technological tools in as many settings as possible, but also uses myths and legends to shorten the space for empathy between the work and the audience.
From scene application to image narrative, human-machine co-creation still needs to be truly upgraded
At this year’s Shanghai International Film Festival, Yu Dong, chairman of Bona Pictures, used "AI Jackie Chan" to launch a new attempt in the movie "Legend": using The latest AI technology, combined with deepfake, restored the 27-year-old Jackie Chan after deep learning. "That is a real-life movie presented as a digital person." However, since the release of the new film, whether it is "AI Jackie Chan's acting skills" or "whether the cooperation between digital people and real people is inconsistent", it has encountered considerable doubts from the audience.
The situation of "AI Jackie Chan" is not an isolated case. Dai Qing, a professor at the School of Drama, Film and Television of Communication University of China, took several AIGC-generated micro-short dramas such as "Hero" as examples. He believed that although the works have achieved technical breakthroughs in scene synthesis and other aspects, "but they are still experimental, especially in Complex special effects synthesis and character facial recognition still face major technical challenges. At the same time, the content generated by AI is mechanized, character creation tends to be simple, and scene construction is sometimes insufficient."
What’s interesting is that once you step out of the category of “storytelling” such as movies and short plays, audiences and netizens become much more “tolerant”. "ai Qian Xuesen" travels in space, "ai sages" stage "A Hundred Schools of Thought", "ai Terracotta Warriors" sings Huayin old tunes, and "ai giant pandas" swim in digital real habitats... When the audience presets the aigc generation scene, "Fake", when they take the initiative to remove the need for immersive narrative that "fake the real", the comment area of aigc's audio-visual products is unanimously praised.
"Sanxingdui: Future Apocalypse" is more typical of "same film but different fate". As a science fiction short drama co-produced by Bona and Douyin, the technology of this new work is temporarily listed in the high-level camp of domestic original AIGC. In the updated episodes, some grand scenes and the shapes of national treasures and cultural relics such as Zongmu Masks and Bronze Sacred Trees are eye-catching, and the lens changes are as good as the movie performance. Previously, the Capital Museum opened their "Origin of Chinese Civilization" series of exhibitions with the "Exploring the Ancient Shu Civilization - Sanxingdui and Jinsha" exhibition. The appearance of the short play "Sanxingdui: Future Apocalypse" led visitors into the imaginative world where ancient Shu civilization and modern technology intertwined, and was well received by the public - "use the magic hand of technology to make cultural relics 'alive'". But online, the same short play appeared as a feature film. Netizens who were looking forward to "watching the story" marveled at the ancient Shu kingdom reproduced by digital technology, while pointing out that "the scene has to be switched every two or three seconds." The picture is not coherent enough” and “the digital person is not realistic enough”.
Li Kangkang, technical director of "Sanxingdui: Future Apocalypse", said that the play uses full-process AI creation, integrating more than 10 cutting-edge AI technologies such as large language model, change model, Vincentian image, diffusion model, super-resolution technology, and timing generation. , but currently the team still faces several major technical challenges: the problem of combining high quality and efficiency, the problem of controlling character consistency, the problem of picture consistency, and the problem of dynamic controllability, etc. In other words, the precision of the character's movements and mouth shape, the richness of the gestures, whether the eyes are expressive, and whether the micro-expressions are delicate and coherent enough, etc., all determine whether it can directly touch people's hearts, from the "supporting role" auxiliary function of scene application to The protagonist of the video narrative that can shake the emotional resonance of the audience.
Zeng Yi said: "Now is a critical period for AI to move from a general large model to thousands of industries. It is a critical period to vigorously develop AI applications and truly let AI drive new productivity and create value." AIGC-generated audio-visual products must enter the visual field In the future of narrative, we still need to wait for the real upgrade of human-machine co-creation, "but on the never-ending road of technological development, the only way is to get started first."
Author: Wang Yan
Text: Wang Yan Pictures: posters, stills, etc. Editor: Xu Yang Editor: Xing Xiaofang
Please indicate the source when reprinting this article.
