Tyler Perry Halts Expansion On His Atlanta Film Studio After Being Shocked By AI Film Generator
Media Mogul Tyler Perry Says We May Not Need Sound Stages To Make Movies Anymore
I love Hollywood movie sets. I think most of us do. As film and TV fans, we all certainly admire the often memorable, even iconic settings of the movies and TV shows we watch so much. Sets built on sound stages give actors an extra level of realism for their performances, which is undeniably communicated to those who watch and appreciate their artistry. They are real, tangible things in an increasingly unreal virtual world.
Years ago, I interviewed Dawn Brown, a set designer for movies such as Star Trek, Batman & Robin and Watchmen. She told me while working a project, she’d sometimes eat lunch on the set for the film’s Wayne Manor. Way too cool.
What fan of say The Brady Bunch or Cheers wouldn’t want to hang out at the Brady Residence dining on pork chops and applesauce or down a cold one alongside Cliff or Norm at Sam Malone’s Boston bar. Maybe you’re more a java junkie, so Central Perk on Friends would lure you in more as a set you’d love to actually visit in real life.
Now, according to filmmakers such as Perry, Dawn will have to stick to eating her meals in the commissary. Wait a minute. No sound stages? Maybe no studio let alone a watering hole commissary?
Um…… Maybe.
Tyler Perry is an incredibly talented entertainer. He’s an actor, writer, producer, director and also a wildly successful businessman, so the entertainment industry will take notice to his pausing or outright cancelling his studio expansion plans. This is unfortunate for so many reasons, primarily because other studios may also cutback like Perry, so all those jobs involved with expanding media centers could be scaled back.
I understand and respect the financially based decisions which lie at the heart of all businesses, but this seems knee jerk in the extreme. We’ve had blue and green screens for decades in film production and though set creation may have been scaled down accordingly, Hollywood still uses real world sets.
Of course this near magical AI tech does not only do away with the need for sound stages and sets, it can also readily conjure up any settings imaginable. You need a snowy day scene - it’s made to order digitally. Spooky nightmarish night scenes for a horror movie on your production shopping list, no problem, type in your request and AI spits it out.
Is there a danger that such vending machine film making will become stale or predictable? Sure. Who cares says the media companies - we’re saving money!
I guess it will get to the point where everything will be created digitally like The Matrix or Star Trek’s Holodeck. Video games, movies and TV shows will become interchangeable ripoffs of one another. Maybe natural quirks like randomness will be so built into these coded algorithms, the AI will fool all of us all the time. Fooling actors that they are in say a futuristic space station such as Deep Space Nine will be a quaint, ancient relic of our low powered AI past. When I interviewed actress Nana Visitor, who played Major Kira in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, she said just that - the highly detailed, enormous sets her and her costars acted in convinced her she was really working in outer space. Now Tyler Perry’s staff will simply push a few buttons and give us a cheap computer knock-off. Sad.
So I caught this story too, and while I can understand being spooked by the new image synthesis kit, I don't see half the danger here that Tyler Perry does. And this is especially so for his styles of movie, which are always about the acting talent and not the locations or cinematography.
I'll be frank: no AI is going to be able to pull off brilliant cinematography, and the fake CGI sets are already quite bad - AI sets will be worse, especially since you cannot fine tune them easily because of the way neural networks work. What I do see here, however, is great opportunities for bargain basement sci-fi movies and TV shows, which I think is an interesting possibility - because if ever there were genres that thrived on low budget productions it's sci-fi and fantasy! 😁
But character stories, drama, and comedy...? I really don't think the film industry need to be afraid of AI in this context. And I love your Nana Visitor point here. We might add Ian McKellen breaking down in tears on the set of the films adapted from The Lord of The Rings appendices: when the actors aren't happy, something usually gives.
We'll see what happens, but optimistically I have some hope this might finally draw people away from excessive CGI schlock, which might actually be a good thing all around.
All the best,
Chris.