German neuroscientist Fabian Stelzer is in the process of making a 1970s-style science fiction film called ‘Salt’ using only generative AI art tools like DALL-E 2, Stable Diffusion and Midjourney. Apart from his own, a tool called Murf produces all the voices you hear.
With the aim of creating a “community cut”, Fabian has told his Twitter followers that the film is about space travellers who arrive on a planet to find some very odd, mutating salt deposits, and then allows them to choose the film’s direction. Taking his methodology to even greater lengths, he’d ideally like to encourage members of the community to write their own scenes using generative models.
“We’re on the verge of a new era, really. To me this is as big as the invention of photography, and to be honest maybe as big as the invention of writing.”
Fabian Stelzer
Fabian works by entering a plain text descriptions of what he wants, for example “film still from a 1980s sci-fi film, screenshot from film, photography, 35mm, grainy, VHS distortion, cinematic lighting.”. Each two minute segment takes about two hours to materialise . As generative AI art tools can only currently produce still images, clever editing, heavy use of the Ken Burns effect and deepfake tools create a sense of motion.