The 95-minute action-fantasy movie Hell Grind cost $500,000 to produce in 15 weeks and screened in Cannes.
Please note the use of the term “in Cannes” and not “at Cannes.” Hell Grind did not screen at the Cannes Film Festival. Rather, it screened in the city of Cannes during the festival.
Either way, it is practically guaranteed that in the decades to come, Hell Grind will have more impact on the future of movies, entertainment, and culture than all the tedious, gay romance titles that screened at Cannes this year.
Put your prejudices aside and watch the first 22 minutes here:
That’s all AI, every second of it, every frame, every sound, every actor….
According to the company behind it, Higgsfield AI, of the $500,000 spent, $400,000 went into computing the costs.
“You can’t go into AI and say make me a 95-minute cool video,” Adil Alimzhanov, one of the content leads who worked on the movie told the Wall Street Journal.
“You have to understand camera composition, which shots are changed. Like you can’t have two close-ups back to back, you have to start with an establishing shot,” he added. “You still need those filmmaking skills.”
You also need a detailed, 3,000 word prompt for each 15 second clip that precisely defined “requirements like style (8k IMAX, photorealistic), lighting (natural light only, ‘contre-jour’ backlight, camera on shadow side) and the type of camera it should look like it was being shot on (‘cine lens,’ 180-degree shutter motion blur).”
The AI also had to be told to respect “the laws of physics with wording like: ‘gravity and inertia respected—mass has real weight, correct contact shadows, no floating props.’”
And it’s only gonna get easier.
Again, set aside your prejudices as you comprehend what this means. There’s nothing about Hell Grind THE MOVIE that interests me. The characters are too smug and the overall tone is self-consciously too-cool-for-school for my tastes. Hell Grind wouldn’t get a minute of my time if it were live action.
But it’s not live-action. A computer did that. A computer created a $75 million movie for $500,000 that comes thisclose to fooling you into believing it is live action.
Allow me to explain it this way: this was AI a mere three years ago…
Look at Hell Grind today.
Now imagine what Hell Grind could look like in three years.
Imagine how much lower the costs will be in three years.
Imagine how much shorter those 3,000-word prompts will be in three years.
I’m no seer, but watching ten minutes of Hell Grind gave me the same feeling I had when I saw the first DVD, when I first tried Netflix Streaming, when I first understood internet sites could host movies we could all access… That feeling told me everything was about to change.
The purists are raging against “AI slop” because it lacks humanity, as though we have not been watching and enjoying the humanity found in animated and computer-generated movies for decades.
The fascist gatekeepers raging against “AI slop” are only interested in protecting their gatekeeper status, so they will lie about the dangers of AI, hoping to regulate it into mush, hoping to blacklist and boycott the coming flood of Hell Grinds as a means to stop people who don’t belong to their leftist country club from producing movies without their approval.
They’ll try.
And like those who tried to scoff away rock ‘n’ roll and the idea that the Earth might be round, they will lose.
This cannot be stopped.
The true democratization of the visual arts has arrived. Imagine a world of art without the artists who hate us, without the art that only expresses contempt for us, without the art that makes reprehensible people rich? That day is here.