Speed of the Mind
(Essay from “The New Machine Cinema: Foundational Essays in AI Film Theory”)
The nature of AI filmmaking is too explosive to bottle up, but early in the space, we are already seeing entirely new cinematic ideas bursting onto the scene. To understand the new machine cinema, you must study cinema in the first place. Cinema has always been about filmmakers evolving directly alongside the limitation of present day technology, and in the process, evolving alongside these limitations, thereby developing entirely new standards; it is how the language of cinema was born and how it has evolved.
It does not come out of the gate fully formed, it evolves from the very limitation it is lambasted for.
I don’t speak only of silent films but categories, from the German Expressionists who turned limited lighting into dramatic shadows, to all the international New Wave movements, directors who made handheld cameras a signature of artistic rebellion, constraint has always mothered innovation.
Most exciting is the new AI cinema. This brand new artform has begun like a nuclear missile on the film industry. I compare the birth of AI to crawling through the desert dying of thirst, coming upon a spring, and dipping a cup into the water. While drinking from the cup, someone is screaming in your ear: but the glass is half-empty! And your response is, it’s water! AI has brought us a brand new set of limitations, and how wonderful; celebrate limitation, always, for it means we’ve fell upon a brand new cinematic language. At last!
Remember the foundation of silent films lead to absolutely everything that came after. It rapidly evolved mass audience visual literacy at turbo-speed.
In this article I will discuss fast cinema, the minimal viable product, and the speed of the mind, all together.
Fast Cinema
Slow cinema is something that has found its place in recent years as a natural fit for independent film’s economic constraints—any independent filmmaker can make a slow film on their iPhone and achieve a certain level of artistry by turning the timeline of the film against itself into a frame, a form of cinema called slow cinema, where viewers relish in the experience of the passage of time, all bottled up.
Fast cinema, however, has remained largely unexplored territory except with prestige directors finding the sweet spot of art and entertainment, read, directors like Martin Scorsese, Oliver Stone, and Danny Boyle. This is because cinematic resources are cost-prohibitive, and naturally, fast films require the most amount of resources.
AI changes this equation fundamentally. By eliminating the economic pressures in cramming more content into less time, AI now enables the independent filmmaker to create the kind of fast, dynamic cinema that moves at the speed of thought itself. I call this the speed of the mind.
When directing DreadClub: Vampire’s Verdict, the number one remark I get is how fast the film moves. This was not intentional. I discovered that AI filmmaking presents two paths: you could attempt a standard pace, where shots linger long enough for the uncanny valley to take hold (and by this I don’t necessarily mean uncanny visuals, but the subconscious feeling of AI itself). Or you could embrace a more dynamic approach through heavy use of montage, flashback, storytelling, and overlay. With no economic constraints, you can do this at no cost. The film only worked because it moved fast, because it kept your attention on the filmmaking, not the AI.
The speed is a feature, not a bug.
When I watched Tasha Caufield’s Bruce Lee film, Be Like Water – a breakthrough achieving the speed of mind. When we spoke we talked about how the new generation came up on TikTok and they have short attention spans and that we are now creating new films to match these attention spans.
More and more it is feeling like all of AI, not just one branch within it, is an idea meeting its time. Looking back, it’s so obvious it was leading to this.
The Invisible Machine
The invisible cut is a principle in studio filmmaking. An audience should never be aware they are watching a film as a baseline standard. Now of course this goes out the way with cartoon language, or something like a Baz Luhrmann film. But I present AI filmmaking by contrast, not the invisible cut, but the invisible machine. When people tell us what or what we are or are not doing, the fact is, we often don’t even think about what we’re doing. All these tools are invisible and completely out the way.
But, until they can be crafted mentally, they will always be in the way. What I posit is AI has pushed us to the furthest possible point in the history of cinema where technology is no longer in your way.
Even just a taste of cinema at the speed of the mind feels like constructing a movie out of thin air. How frightening. How revolutionary.
Yes, the pieces of the movie are discordant and varied, but we are reaching into the nether, both our hands spread like Minority Report, grasping it in our fist and pulling it back into reality where we assemble it.
We are never thinking, “HA-HA, I’m an AI filmmaker and this is AI, damn you!”
We are thinking, “That piece goes there.”
We are never thinking, “But this isn’t real, I need a camera, a crew, actors, and catering, or else I shan’t be respected.”
We are thinking “How can I align the rubics cube.”
The invisible machine is an evolution beyond the invisible cut, it’s a filmmakers doctrine. For now this is afforded to us for the first time.
An audience values immersion, escape, getting lost in an experience.
Why can’t a filmmaker value the same, with the path of least resistance to his vision? Why can’t a filmmaker value immersion, escape, getting lost in the experience of making the film, completely untethered to real world bottlenecks?
Now film tools can offer this by proxy. With enough of an advanced skillset, the most complex technical wizards are in your very muscle memory. They eventually arrive at the invisible machine by sheer proxy of experience.
But they are tethered to the real world, to physical tools.
They are tethered by the financial constraints of accessing them, constraints none of us have.
This, I would wager is the same to the invisible machine by proxy, but I would also add this. When everything is flattened—when one has achieved mastery of a complex traditionally analogue (I don’t use this word literally but a catch all to the original digital vs analogue evolution), verse a filmmaker doing the same with the full AI toolset—the AI filmmaker will go exponentially further with his invisible machine than the craftsman with his analogue toolset.
When flattened, the performance would be some 3-4 fold in outcome. But actually it is quite further. To understand just how much further, we have to look at finances.
When we talk about budgetary differences between AI and tradfilm, we are not talking about 3-4 fold. I calculated that doing the performances traditionally in Carriage Ride—sixty speaking character parts, it would have cost $280,000. In AI, it cost me $30.
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 (again analogue is the wrong word) OR mastering the AI toolsets of a $100 movie?
That is 10,000 times a benefit to the invisible machine.
And while this seems like an enormous number, consider the real world constraints of mastering an analogue craft. You are just one piece in the mechanism. With the invisible machine, you are the film itself.
There is no question here. The analogue toolset will afford films as we know them. AI toolset will create outcome of the sort we can’t even imagine. The analogue is based in resistance. The AI is based on infinity. And how exciting is that? Think for a second the speed available to us.
The New Maximalism
Without budgetary constraints and with infinite tools at our disposal, maximalism becomes the perfect haven for AI cinema. This doesn’t start and end with fast cinema—imagine the full promise of Welles, Zeman, Gilliam, even Wes Anderson; a branch of big, ornate productions that traditional films could never gather due to the sheer limitation in resources. I am thinking more along the scale of films by Bonderchunk, like War and Peace, or Waterloo, films with tens of thousands of extras; crossed with the ornate maximalist fairy tale theater.
Remember, we are talking infinite means, so the films should be infinite in scale.
The New Docufiction
When we talk about speed, we are also talking about a speed of rigor. With a faster form of thinking, we race past old outcomes and out solutions, beyond the immediate cliches that come to mind which most filmmakers immediately go with. Because speed allows us to arrive upon foundation as an afterthought, we open up an entire ocean to consider beyond mere cliches.
New possibilities emerge, such as docufiction. Imagine a fake documentary taking place on another planet, National Geography style, with a dry British voice-over ala Planet Earth.
But now imagine this concept with meta-concepts within it. A conceptual thesis of another planet. A documentary to go with this planet, a found footage horror film to go with it, and so on.
Speed is not about speed, it is about covering longer breadth in a shorter period of time, allowing us to blow past the typical cliches. Rapid innovations only occur with the least amount of resistance between ideas, availability, and execution. In an industry that is totally captured through fundraising, intellectually slow films are all you will ever get, cliches represent the path of least resistance.
The Minimum Viable Product
The minimum viable product in filmmaking terms I use to mean the path of least resistance. This is the area most directors start and end. With the invention of the camera, these were the silent films developing basic visual language. With AI, I do not speak of fast cinema as an evolution of this visual storytelling language, instead, that fast cinema is the beginning of a brand new cinematic language entirely: the speed of the mind.
What happens when the basic proof, the path of least resistance, the minimum viable product, begins with the impossible? The beginning point then is not basic visual language. It is speed of the mind.
We are all building the walls, paving the road, decorating the home. We assume it will just be more films. But audiences are looking for AI films to accomplish what traditional filmmaking never could.
A Film at the Speed of Mind
The new machine cinema at the speed of the mind is fulfilling the promise of Martin Scorsese. His entire approach to cinema, from the rapid-fire editing in Mean Streets to the groundbreaking montage structure of Goodfellas and his subsequent crime epics; all represent an attempt to capture thought patterns on film. This mirrors Howard Hughes in the Martin Scorsese film, The Aviator, when told about how his latest airplane broke all speed records: “She’ll go faster.”
Scorsese never saw his films as fast, it was just how his mind worked, and cinema was a means of expressing his mind on screen. Like tennis champions who are just tuned at a way higher level, their regular accustomed play is to an outside observer, light speed. But Scorsese also believed his films had hit a wall, that there were faster models at the speed of consciousness itself. “She’ll go faster.”
He was unknowingly anticipating AI films achieving the speed of the mind.
Studies have shown that visual processing speed increases exponentially with each generation. Meaning our grandparents watched slow melodramas and sitcoms, and could not process short form TikTok style videos of today. It moves too fast for them. Our ability to absorb and understand rapid visual information is evolving at breakneck pace. What comes next? The answer is infinity.
And what will be found in infinity?
Whatever that you Seek Shall be Found in Infinity
It is not just on screen but in the conceptual formulation of film, as with rigor, we are now faster problem-solvers. Things that might have entered your mind six months after the production of a film, you can arrive at during its production.
This means not only faster films, but better and more thorough ones. We’re making movies that move at the speed of the mind, and with AI, every area achieves a thoroughness achieving in the highest possible standard in the arts, for the first time, available to you and I without requiring a bankroll and a committee demanding creative oversight.
In the production of A Very Long Carriage Ride, I still longed for even faster, seamless craft. I remembered Noland Arbaugh, patient zero in Neuralink, and how he described speed of the mind in roundabout terms, and how Neuralink allowed him to play shooter videogames at an elite level.
Perhaps when we are no longer tethered to keyboards and mouse clicks, and cycling between divergent AI technologies, only then our minds can directly fulfill the promise of the speed of the mind.
But we are only at the very dawn of the new machine cinema, for it is not just the evolution of cinema, it is evolution itself. As our minds race away from our constraints, and new frontiers reveal the future we always wondered about, we should not fear our inability to perceive what happens next, but anticipate that AI will lift humanity and machine together to see things at the speed of the mind. This is why I push back on the fear response. There is an assumption of a frightening future, without realizing, it’s us controlling this future, not an anonymous fighting Borg. The future will be warm, strange, and human, same as it will be augmented, bold, and machine. We are not replacing ourselves, we are emerging.
An Audio Performance of “Speed of the Mind”: https://youtu.be/xfpFqvh9nLM
ABOUT: Hooroo Jackson is the director of the first fully AI feature film ever made, Window Seat (2023) and the first AI animated feature film ever made, DreadClub: Vampire’s Verdict (2024). His book of essays, The New Machine Cinema: Foundational Essays in AI Film Theory is the first theoretical framework built around the new medium of AI cinema.
