Generative AI makes a whole lot of IndieWire readers mad. This week, we’re speaking about it anyway.
The focus is Curious Refuge, a world AI filmmaking schooling hub that has ties to each main AI software program creator, is paid to coach studio film groups, and has college students in additional than 150 nations. It’s additionally a take a look at case in easy methods to cowl a topic that’s shifting so quick, and upsetting such robust emotions, that skipping it isn’t an possibility.
I first met Curious Refuge CEO Caleb Ward contained in the foyer of NuArt on Santa Monica Boulevard in March 2024, again when most individuals noticed AI as a child buzzword. The theater was packed for the premiere of “Our T2 Remake,” a crowdsourced satire of “Terminator 2: Judgment Day” stitched collectively from dozens of AI-generated scenes.
Our headline led with the information: This was not good movie. I additionally wrote that the occasion had an vitality that recalled Sundance 1995, which it did. Readers weren’t happy; Instagram response was voluminous, immediate, and blistering. (My favorites: “Narcwire” and “Fuck this shit off a cliff.”)
My opinion of “Our T2 Remake” stays unchanged, but it surely’s clear that assessing it solely on inventive deserves is a bit of like dismissing the Lumière Brothers’ 1896 “The Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat Station” as boring.
One of the “T2” filmmakers, Dave Clark, is now co-founder and Chief Creative Officer at generative AI studio Promise, with backing from Peter Chernin’s The North Road Company and Andreessen Horowitz accomplice Andrew Chen. And Curious Refuge, which Promise acquired a few yr after that screening, represents a neighborhood of greater than 50,000 AI filmmakers.
Ward launched Curious Refuge in May 2023 whereas nonetheless head of promoting at VFX college Rebelway and driving the viral wave of his AI Wes Anderson spoof “The Galactic Menagerie.” Two months later, he was all in on Curious Refuge. The first course noticed almost 500 college students in 18 hours, promoting so quick he needed to shut down enrollment.
“AI filmmaking was a very new concept at that time, and it was very, very experimental,” he mentioned. “It caught us off guard in the beginning, but we really felt like this is going to be the future of filmmaking. We started doing everything from meetups to competitions quickly.”
Today, Ward mentioned, Curious Refuge has educated over 10,000 college students from 172 nations. Its tutorial content material on YouTube sees upward of 5 million views a yr. The college hosts meetups world wide. A month-long course is $749; bundles get reductions. And, like every good AI-facing firm, it’s lean. Between full-time and freelance, Curious Refuge has a employees of 14.
Ward, talking with me over Zoom alongside his publicist, was desperate to dispel the concept AI movie schooling is a risk. When we met on the NuArt, he mentioned being on-line helped college students defend their anonymity. Today, he avoids making that declare.
“I’d say while there was hesitancy maybe two years ago, the technology felt very confusing,” he mentioned. “Now I think a lot of the tools are easier to use, and so it just appeals to a larger group of working professionals.”
Maybe. There’s additionally the utter ubiquity. He hosts a weekly net present devoted to reviewing the most recent generative AI instruments; the most recent episode featured eight. “It is crazy that you can even have a weekly web show [to] talk about the new tools from the last seven days,” he mentioned. (Current favourite: He ranks the just-launched Seedance over Google’s Veo 3.)
So the place does this go away us? Like the identify says, we’re IndieWire, however a part of that’s the Future of Filmmaking. We have a century of proof that proves nobody wants AI to make a film; the filmmakers I do know are much more vested in determining easy methods to get their movies produced and seen. However, it will be the height of delusion to believe that the Twentieth-century model of creating motion pictures and TV will stay preserved in amber.
I’d think about “T2” was a stunt that gained’t be tried once more. Not solely has the purpose been made (and continues to be made, with Runway’s annual AI festival that’s coming to an IMAX near you), however for Ward it additionally delivers the improper message. In our dialog, he leaned into the concept AI isn’t meant as an all-or-nothing idea.
“These tools, we really feel empower artists as much as they want to be empowered through them,” he mentioned. “If that is just in helping you to create storyboards in those early days to inform your physical production, great. If that means creating an entire AI film that wouldn’t have existed otherwise, great. The artist is in control, and we ultimately want to support the artist in whatever creative journey they want to go down.”
For now, AI in filmmaking stays a Rorschach take a look at: Some see a software, others a risk, and lots of a distraction from the already brutal work of getting motion pictures made. Curious Refuge is betting that extra filmmakers will see it as a talent price having, even when they by no means intend to make an “AI film.”
What’s sure is that the know-how isn’t going away and neither are the arguments. The Lumière brothers’ practice has pulled into the station; whether or not you select to board is as much as you.
Then once more, I requested Julian Sol Jordan, the 24-year-old filmmaker I profiled last week, for his tackle AI. Verdict? “I still think it’s gross.”
✉️ Have an concept, praise, or criticism?
dana@indiewire.com; (323) 435-7690.
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