IBM Watson Created The First-Ever AI-Made Movie Trailer For 'Morgan' (popsci.com)

An anonymous reader shares a Popular Science article: For a film about the risks of pushing the limits of technology too far, it only makes sense to advertise for it using artificial intelligence. Morgan, staring Kate Mara and Paul Giamatti, is a sci-fi thriller about scientists who've created a synthetic humanoid whose potential has grown dangerously beyond their control. Fitting, then, that they'd employ the help of America's AI sweetheart IBM Watson to build the film's trailer. IBM used machine learning and experimental Watson APIs, parsing out the trailers of 100 horror movies. It did visual, audio, and composition analysis of individual scenes, finding what makes each moment eerie, how the score and actors' tone of voice changed the mood--framing and lighting came together to make a complete trailer. Watson was then fed the full film, and it chose scenes for the trailer. A human -- in this case, the "resident IBM filmmaker" -- still needed to step in to edit for creativity. Even so, a process that would normally take weeks was reduced to hours.

Comments

Re:Pattern Recognition

[judoguy]

In the real world, no studio will ever make much use of this. My oldest son is a trailer editor in Hollywood and he has great stories about the process.

The studios subcontract trailers out to the trailer houses, usually multiple ones for each film. Then they micromanage the crap out of the process at each house. Then they sometimes take all the trailers and re cut in house to come with a Frankentrailer that some committee agrees on. That's often the best case scenario.

My son has been made to make up dialog that's not in the movie at all before. The talent couldn't be gotten to record something so he was instructed to create a line from phonemes cut and pasted into a file. I kid you not. Sometimes a studio will bring in the dailies and have him start picking stuff knowing that the actual film might not even have the scenes after the final edit.

And then there is the fact that many trailers of different length and content are made for different markets and media.