Both Steven (with Full Frontal) and I (with The Rules of Attraction) were the first filmmakers to take Final Cut Pro, a consumer tool, into prime time usage on feature films. I only narrowly beat him to theaters because his system crashed and he lost all his work. That’s what it means to be on the bleeding edge of filmmaking. The guy is a mad scientist and it doesn’t surprise me at all that he’s at the forefront of the greatest democratizing filmmaking tool since consumer digital cinema. No one complained when he shot a movie on an iPhone. It astonishes me that anyone is in a kerfuffle about his experimentation with AI.

@AVARY What was used before Final Cut?

@AVARY Is AI image generation a form of photography?

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I'm going to discuss AI (among other topics) at a San Diego Film Festival event next week and I told the organizer almost exactly the same thing in preparation for our chat. I noted that there was probably a discussion between neighbors a long time ago when one of them said "I love my horse and wagon but I got this internal combustion engine contraption called an automobile and I'm enjoying the hell out of it."

@AVARY Yet digital film looks like dogshit

@AVARY that movie could've been good if you didn't cut out all the queer stuff and make it Paul having a wet dream... and then totally abandon him for the second half of the movie after establishing him as a protagonist 🫠

@AVARY I’m all in on pushing the boundaries of cinema with AI tools. The trolls are flooding my DMs, but I don’t care. I’ve got something I’m chasing.

@AVARY Love you, Roger! 20 years ago I was telling my co-workers in the film industry that a day was coming when one person could make a movie by themselves, the same as one author writes a great novel. They hated me for even suggesting it. They were all lazy, uninspiring NPC's.

@AVARY I have certain scenes I am shooting on my phone for a documentary I am working on that i don't plan to use in the final version just to show people.

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@AVARY Took Red One into the field on Contagion and had to pack it with ice to keep from overheating because it wasn’t really ready for prime time. Everyone scoffed harder at digital. Now Red is a household name.

@AVARY The anti-AI in film sentiment seems to have solidified during the writers strike. They made such a stink about it that most of the young people on here just went with it. There wasn’t this much of a pushback before claims of “artists losing their jobs” and “robots creating art”

I have been specializing in cinematic AI videos for the past couple years - lots of filmmakers (some of them quite well known) now follow me here and on Instagram, and a good number of them have reached out to me to either create videos for them, or teach them workflows. The dam is close to bursting.

@AVARY Nobody called Steven a sellout for shooting on an iPhone but suddenly it's treason to let AI touch the edit bay. The gatekeeping always starts right after the gate already opened 🎥

@AVARY As false equivalencies go, this is beyond stupid. Comparing using final cut pro and shooting on a iPhone is the same as using ai which uses artists work without permission. But hey, something something "bleeding edge"...

@AVARY It's that the implications of AI on every fundamental level are so much more nuclear and no one knows what they will be, but they already see they are very bad for the basic idea of peoples' actual livelihoods above and below the line. so at least say it's apples and oranges.

@AVARY Shooting a movie from an iPhone doesn’t utilize previous works of art without due credit also know as stealing. Kind of a key difference.

@AVARY Him being right once doesn't make him right 100% of the time. Thank you for understanding this simple concept.

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@AVARY "Democratizing" man shut up. It's built on stolen labor, subscription based, and follows rules set by a big tech corporation

@AVARY This is aside from your point but I am almost certain that I was part of a the team that made Apple pull Final Cut away from professional use. I was on a well known talk show and when we switched to HD and all digital around 2008-2009 we also were the first talk show to use FC…

@AVARY CGI is bad enough. Knowing you’re watching a greenscreen not a real location already makes films that do that terrible to watch.. But at least those still have real humans and real light and some minimum threshold of overall reality to ground them. An AI film has nothing.

@AVARY so much AI video looks like it was trained on advertising, stock footage and has a marvel universe aesthetic to it...

@AVARY Shooting on an iPhone doesn’t steal other people’s art.

@AVARY He does recognize that one needs a PhD in Literature to properly prompt.

@AVARY Just because someone is at the forefront of something doesn't mean we should be praising them. Stevens past few works before and including black bag has been weak, moving ai just seems like a cry for help, especially when using in a way that replaces jobs

@AVARY Making short films and using FCP was so fun and rewarding back in the day that I’d catch myself editing for hours without a break, only problem is that I’d run out of good footage to edit bc broke

@AVARY Also back in 2002 used a Canon XL Mini DV before that was a thing. His film last year Black Bag was great!

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