The Heaviest Machine
Foreword for Post-Scarcity Cinema: Essays on AI Film Theory, Volume 2 of The New Machine Cinema
There is no question here. The AI toolset will create an explosive outcome of the sort we can’t fully conceive yet, because we are limited by the status quo. To imagine outcomes beyond our current understanding of labor, economics and production, we enter in the realm of futurology, and this is generally derided as make-believe and unprovable. The question should still be asked: what happens when notions of labor, economics and production are upgraded? What new outcomes await?
The question, what is coming? What we can’t imagine; innately leaves us unsatisfied, but I find there is great value in enjoying the snapshot in time where what might be has not been impeded by what has come.
No one can question what if. It is a full proof fallacy.
What helps me is to quantify the unknown through weight. The cinema analogue is based in resistance, therefore is heavy. The AI is based in invisibility, therefore is weightless. And how exciting is this, to imagine the weightlessness of production, of imagination unchained.
Film theory speaks about the invisible cut, which posits an audience should not be aware they are watching a film. I present AI in terms of the invisible craft. The director should not either.
The Weightless Machine
We are never thinking, “HA-HA, I’m an AI filmmaker and this is AI, damn you!” We are never thinking, “But this isn’t real, I need a camera, a crew, actors, and catering, or else I won’t be respected.” We are thinking oh, this shot belongs there. That assembly belongs here. That delivery can go there. A film with no resistance.
The weightless machine is not just an audience ideal, but a filmmakers ideal. For now this is afforded to us for the first time, a weightless cinema, following the heavy machinery in the cinema production of the past.
It is an engineering principle success is the path of least resistance. This necessitates invisible tools, but tools that are responsive to us at the quickest possible pace. An audience values immersion, escape, getting lost in an experience.
Why can’t a filmmaker value immersion, escape, getting lost in the experience of making the film?
Now film tools can offer this by proxy. With enough of an advanced skillet, the most complex technical considerations are in your very muscle memory. They eventually arrive at the invisible machine by sheer proxy and experience, but with heavier machines.
The heavy machines, and I speak figuratively, serve as a filter. In the past there was a notion the value in heavy machinery requires status, clout, and skillset specifically because it is not available to the commoner.
Much of the fear and pushback against AI is borne from this elitism—once an invisible machinery is available to the commoner, heavy machinery becomes devalued.
One, this is an unconscionable, anti-progress attitude.
Two, a new hierarchy will organize regardless, heaviness emerges as a product of nature.
The continuum was as such the tools were always there to weigh us down, all the way from the spectrum of the beginning of cinema to the present moment. There is no ideal in how heavy the machine should be and our own skillset. Even as the machines became lighter through the digital revolution, we have collectively decided on a sort of sleight of hand.
Computers already do everything, but we are still enjoying the clout afforded to heavy craft.
Generally, we portend the heaviest machine is the ideal one because it requires more craft to overcome, integrate, to make invisible.
Simple as this. It is my proposal that the weightless machine with equal craft can create far greater outcomes than ever before seen. Imagine a machine so light it is responsible in a light speed, neural interface, our thoughts coming alive with no resistance.
The future of the new is no longer delirium, but possible too.
In this proposal we are not standing around saying, the machine isn’t heavy enough, if only it were heavy so I could have a challenge. We are taking on the challenge, in a Niestzchean sense, to do so without machine. One person and their will alone, easy as they can walk or breathe, they can make films, as fluid as an extra sense.
This is not science fiction. This is the logical, furthest extension on the continuum of streamlining production that has been underway already.
The art does not come easy, simple, or unfixed, the art emerges for the first time without the limitation of technologial bandwidth.
Before AI, the tools were always there to weigh us down.
To put it the other way. Least resistance. When everything is flattened—when one has achieved mastery of a complex traditionally analogue (I don’t use this word literally but just to catch all ‘old’), verse a filmmaker doing the same with the full AI toolset—the AI filmmaker will go way further with his weightless machine than the analogue director with his heavy machine, because he is not inhibited by real world heaviness.
When flattened, the performance would be multi-fold in outcome.
Let’s use budgetary differences as an example. Between AI and tradfilm, we are not talking about multi-fold but exponential. I estimated that doing the performances traditionally in my stop motion and 2D animated AI film, A Very Long Carriage Ride—sixty speaking character parts, it would have cost $280,000. With AI, it cost me $30.
This is not three or four fold, this is an improvement of 10,000x. This is so monumental we speak of the difference between gravity and no gravity. Heaviness vs the weightless machine. To go along with the coming lightness of economics, labor and production practices, we now have the weightless cinema to meet.
So great is the revolution it is best expressed in terms of scarcity verse post-scarcity.
But where does this land, having access to a one hundred dollar movie, in terms of outcomes? Where is your effort better spent? Mastering analogue tools and coming up with cinema as we know it, or mastering the AI toolsets of a $100 movie and stepping into the actual future?
