As Hollywood tests the waters with artificial intelligence, Blumhouse has partnered with Meta on a series of short films that use the recently announced Meta Movie Gen, the tech giant’s AI tools that create video and corresponding audio.
Blumhouse produced three short films that were made with the help of Meta Movie Gen from filmmakers Casey Affleck, Aneesh Chaganty (Searching), and the Spurlock Sisters. The short films were part of a pilot program run by Meta that is meant to garner feedback from the creative community about their text-to-video tools.
Blumhouse was approached by Meta to work with filmmakers to help test the generative AI tools. The company says they will continue to test Meta Movie Gen, which is not yet available publicly, with creatives in to 2025.
“While we’re not planning to incorporate Movie Gen models into any public products until next year, Meta feels it’s important to have an open and early dialogue with the creative community about how it can be the most useful tool for creativity and ensure its responsible use,” said Connor Hayes, VP of GenAI at Meta, in a blog post on Meta AI’s website where the partnership and Blumhouse-produced short films were announced.
Jason Blum added in a statement: “Artists are and forever will be the lifeblood of our industry. Innovation and tools that can help those artists better tell their stories is something we are always keen to explore, and we welcomed the chance for some of them to test this cutting-edge technology and give their notes on its pros and cons while it’s still in development. These are going to be powerful tools for directors, and it’s important to engage the creative industry in their development to make sure they’re best suited for the job.”
The first of the short films to be released was Chaganty’s i h8 ai, with the short films from Affleck and the Spurlocks due out later today. Meta says that the filmmakers collaborated with the company’s generative AI researchers working on Meta Movie Gen and offered feedback based on their experience with the AI tool.
Meta isn’t the first company to put its AI video generation tools in front of Hollywood. As Bloomberg reported in March, OpenAI met with studios and media executives about its product, Sora. Earlier this week Adobe announced that its Firefly Video Model, the company’s answer to image-and-text-to-video generation, would be launching several tools in beta for limited public use.
AI research company Runway has been releasing generative AI video tools, most recently its Gen-3 Alpha in June. In September, Lionsgate inked a deal that will see Runway train a new generative AI model on Lionsgate film and TV library.
