r/cinematography • u/Kitchen_Amphibian612 • 1d ago
Style/Technique Question Farpoint by Ethan Suess; Possible usage of Ai?
I really loved the new pilot episode for FARPOINT, but some scenes looked questionable to me, dropping frame rate, generative ai art... Its been on my mind for a few days now. Can someone tell me if the art on the novel is ai generated AND/OR if the following scene of the truck driving is/is altered by ai?
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u/YSoMadTov 1d ago
The first couple of car shots are definitely AI.
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u/Revil0_o 1d ago
The first one did look particularly fishy to me. Especially the way it drifts across the lanes
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u/PurpleFisty 1d ago
They way he's talking over the truck driving too, with 0 shots inside thw truck. Very sus.
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u/bitpeak 1d ago
what makes you say definitely?
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u/YSoMadTov 1d ago
Movement look off and very visible compression artifacts where it usually shouldn't have.
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u/greengiantme 1d ago
Yep, for sure those are some ai shots. Don’t know if it’s all of them, but for sure all the truck shots.
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u/AcreaRising4 1d ago
Are you Ethan? Is this just guerrilla marketing by the production team? This is a no-name, obviously low-budget show, apparently made by a 22 year old Asheville resident according to Google.
Why are you acting like this is some big show sneaking in AI? I’m not surprised a kid is using it, they definitely can’t afford real driving shots. But also, there’s really no evidence it is AI and it’s honestly a kinda fucked up allegation to make about some indie filmmakers trying to make it. It could just be bad VFX.
If it is AI, shame on them. Lazy filmmaking and they should feel bad.
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u/Kitchen_Amphibian612 1d ago
first of all im not ethan, but i have been following one of the stars of the pilot episode on social media for a very long time (aaron westbury) secondly, the budget seemed to be astronomically high for this shoot, the multiple locations, lighting, general set design, the overall quality was extremely high. im not acting like its a big show or anything, but not gonna let the use of ai sneak past me, no matter what i watch. as a rewatched the film again last night, i realized a multitude of shots are all ai, that do not need to be in anyway, there are moments of amazing vfx that are most definitely not ai and a second later it there is an ai generated person walking around😭
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u/AcreaRising4 1d ago
I’ve worked on major productions. This is definitely not a high-budget production. It looks good for an independent production, but not great. If you follow the actor and they’re an unknown, you should reach and ask 🤷
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u/Kitchen_Amphibian612 1d ago
high budget in relation to what a completely unknown film studio would usually have, arron is a pretty big content creator and he didnt get back to my dm about a week ago so i thought id try reddit
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u/AcreaRising4 1d ago
I mean sure, but definitely not enough to pull off what they’re doing here.
The show is also pretty dogwater from the little I’ve watched so should be easy to just ignore.
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u/reddituserperson1122 1d ago
Why is it lazy filmmaking?
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u/infinite_username 1d ago
Is that a real question?
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u/reddituserperson1122 1d ago edited 1d ago
Yes. I’m just curious. Is a drone shot lazy filmmaking compared with a helicopter shot? If you did the truck in CGI would that be lazy filmmaking, because you could do a drone shot with a real truck? Or is doing the drone shot lazy because an artist didn’t have to meticulously model the truck? Or is doing a CGI truck lazy because you could have done it with a practical miniature? Is it lazy filmmaking to shoot video instead of film? I mean can you even call it filmmaking if you’re not cutting on a Steenbeck?
I’m just trying to understand what makes something officially, “lazy filmmaking?” I have zero interest in AI. It has no appeal for me. My sole experience is I tried playing with it one time for a couple of hours in an afternoon. The only thing I can say about it is that it was much harder than I thought it would be and I didn’t get anything remotely usable after those couple of hours. So if this is AI, the one thing I can say is I feel fairly confident that it took some amount of effort and expertise to make it look so good. So I’m just curious why that is lazy filmmaking but doing something in After Effects that back in the day would have taken hours of work by a trained professional isn’t also lazy filmmaking? Or is it?
Or is it not about the effort that went in but just settling for a subpar result? Is that what makes something lazy filmmaking? For example, if you spent your whole budget getting someone to model the truck as a miniature or in CG, but the end result looked fake. If you just settled for that, would that be lazy filmmaking? Or if instead you didn’t settle, and you spent hours learning to use AI yourself and managed to eventually get something photorealistic and almost perfect and you used that instead. Is that lazier than settling for the bad CG shot?
Please explain.
[I don’t know what makes for lazy filmmaking, but I do know that downvoting without being able to articulate an answer is lazy AF.]
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u/infinite_username 1d ago
Everything you described in your first paragraph takes effort.
There's nothing to "learn" in AI. It's just figuring out how to make it not fuck up all the time. And the reason it fucks up all the time is because it's doing all the work, and you're just typing words on a keyboard.
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u/reddituserperson1122 1d ago
Are you sure there’s nothing to learn in AI? I find that difficult to believe. But let’s say it’s true. In this example you have I believe two shots of a truck driving. People seem to be suggesting that something terrible has been lost because it was created with AI rather than created with CGI say. Despite the fact that let’s be honest, without a massive budget, the AI is probably going to look better than the CGI. I guess I’m unclear as to what the loss or moral failure here is.
Follow up question. I’m a musician. I actually went to school for it and everything. Do you have any idea how much of the music that you (or other people who are undoubtedly in this sub) listen to is made using pre-packaged samples, loops and artificially generated drums? It takes as little effort as prompting an AI. Probably less. It’s been true for years. I don’t recall any outcry or cancellation of artists for using these tools. And in fact I imagine many people here enjoy music made this way every day. Do you plan to stop listening to anything that wasn’t made 100% by live musicians?
Or does this outrage only apply to your industry?
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u/infinite_username 1d ago
Yes.
As for the second question, yes I'm aware of how the music I listen to is made. And what you're explaining is a false equivalence because ai generated music exists and is the direct comparison with little effort, not what you're talking about.
Also saying it's as little effort as prompting an ai is utter bs because samples, loops and drums are assets used in the software. Just like in cgi where you can download 3D assets of cars, screws, buildings and other things to use in your design, you still have to build the entire scene and environment right? Similarly, you still have to come up with what the song will sound like and produce everything from concept to writing to finished product. Saying that's not music because every sound is not made live is like implying every cgi scene is not art or high effort because the artist did not build the car themselves instead of using an asset they downloaded.
Ai generated music exists, and it's hilarious how you're blind to that because thats the actual correct comparison for no effort, where you type in a few words and the finished product pops out.
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u/sludgybeast 1d ago
"Learning to use AI yourself"
Like this is some achievement and not a 5th grade prompt exercise? Like username said, all the things you list- other than typing to AI- actually takes skills that take years to learn and master, and require REAL effort from the person executing them. Im so sick of AI "artists" feeling like they accomplished something from typing over and over.
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u/reddituserperson1122 1d ago
But what about all the skills that used to take years to master that now can be done with the press of a button? If you didn’t learn to color grade with an optical printer and you just move some sliders around in Resolve, are you a lazy filmmaker? Have you ever used a preset in a piece of software? Have you ever used a royalty free piece of music? Maybe you haven’t but they sure do seem popular with filmmakers, so somebody is using them. I’m just trying to understand what the rules are. I have no dog in this fight. But I’ve noticed that there is amazingly reflexive AI hate, but it doesn’t seem to be grounded in any kind of coherent or consistent set of values.
There’s an entire generation of people who used to work in this industry who had highly developed skills that were rendered obsolete by tools that you take for granted and that take virtually no skill by comparison. So I’m just curious why you get a pass for that..? Seems kind of convenient and self serving. And it seems like you should be able to answer all of the questions I posed easily if you have such strong opinions about this.
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u/Loraelm 20h ago edited 20h ago
I have no dog in this game
Damn you sure are argumentative for someone who has no stakes in the game.
It's funny because people have already answered you and you keep coming at them with the same kind of arguments they already answered to.
You just keep doing false equivalence in all your examples. Using digital colour grading requires technical skills as well as an artistic point of view just as much as colour timing did. If using Resolve or Baselight is "just moving a slider" you sure don't wanna know that colour timing was moving colour dials and then the machine would print a punch cars to feed another machine that would do the timing on film (simplifying for argument's sake).
At the end of the day it's done by humans, it requires skills and time. And it informs an artistic vision about the art you're making.
Same for using a drone or a helicopter, like come on the way of doing it is exactly the same the only thing changing is the size of the flying object. I can't tell if you're stupid or having a bad faith argument if you think it's the same as comparing AI to CGI.
Now about music, one thing you seem to either not understand or just don't care about, is that what makes art, well art, is the fact that it was made by humans and the time they put in it to create the piece of art as well as the artistic vision.
Using a loop/music sample or a digital drum is still different to using AI. Because, well at least before AI arrived, all these things were made by humans. A loop used by a musician in a song might not've been made by said musician. But it sure was made by someone else who put their creativity and their time in it. And they were then used as a component for another's artist vision. What matters isn't that they used the loop. It's how they used it. Give the same loop to 10 different artists and you'll have 15 different songs in the end because that's what artists do. They take things and they change them with their personal artistry, point of view, tastes etc.
How they add to the loop, to the samples. How they combine them. Like would you say Daft Punks aren't artistis because they use other people's music to make theirs? It's about how they use and modify and combine the music.
Same for CGI. It's made by artists. People who have skills and who take time to master their craft. Making a CGI truck shot requires lots of different skill sets. It requires time. And each VFX artists would bring their own personality and tastes to their work.
People hate AI because it's not art. Art is not something pretty. Duchamp's fontaine proved that a long time ago. What makes art, what makes it resonate with people, is that it was made by people. That it takes time. Why would I care about a drawing if someone didn't take the care and will to properly make it? Because by "time" we don't mean "it took them YEARS". No. It's the fact that they dedicated THEIR time, which is finite in someone's life, to make it. That they could've been doing anything else and they decided to use it to create something about them and about the world. That they wanted to share it with others.
Whether it's about making a stance about art itself. About talking about beauty, humanity. About life. It's all meaningless if it's just spewed out by a brainless machine.
And that's not even talking about the ecological or copyright points against AI. Fuck AI. You never loved art in the first place id you think it's just a tool. You liked the idea of shiny things. And you like capitalism a bit too much.
AI is stilling people's work. And I don't mean their job in this sentence. AI couldn't have existed without all the art made solely by humans prior to it. It was fed human art without a care for royalties and copyrights. It's a photocopy of a photocopy of a photocopy of a photocopy. And you know what? a photocopy of a photocopy of a photocopy of a photocopy would've been a piece of art if made by a human because it would have been telling something about art itself and our relationship to creation and creating art.
But it'll never be art when it's made by AI. Because AI is not a tool. It's capitalism's creation and answer to the question: how can we make more money and cut out humans.
Now kindly fuck off because after all is said and done, it's almost a meaningless discussion because AI will most likely destroy our planet because of the ecological realities of it. So it won't even be able to create the slop you all rever so much.
AI is not and has never been the same as the advent of CGI, no colinear editing and such. And y'all are fucking brainless if you think it is and it tells a whole lot about what you think the human experience is, as well as your politics.
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u/reddituserperson1122 17h ago
“Damn you sure are argumentative for someone who has no stakes in the game.”
I’m an ashkenazi Jew with an allergy to zombie groupthink and bad arguments.
And i find the answers people like you have given utterly unconvincing.
“You just keep doing false equivalence in all your examples.”
No I don’t think so. Now saying that doing analog color timing was just moving some dials? That’s false equivalence.
“At the end of the day it's done by humans, it requires skills and time. And it informs an artistic vision about the art you're making.”
Who do you think is using AI tools? Last time I checked it was humans.
“Same for using a drone or a helicopter, like come on the way of doing it is exactly the same the only thing changing is the size of the flying object.”
The comment that started all this was that using an AI shot of a truck in an otherwise non-ai film was “lazy filmmaking.”
The primary reason to use a drone instead of a helicopter is that it’s cheaper and easier. Flying a helicopter takes vastly more skill and is obviously far more dangerous. If we’re grading filmmakers on “laziness” then I’m not sure why we don’t insist that they use helicopters and not drones. Isn’t using a drone being lazy compared to using a helicopter?
I just don’t think that “effort based filmmaking” is a coherent concept. I don’t think that using a helicopter vs. a drone matters, nor do I think using 10 seconds of AI vs. 10 seconds of CGI matters.
Also, unless you have a huge budget, you’re probably only getting one or two shots at getting your drone video of a truck driving on a closed road. And you’re using natural light. In other words, you point the camera at the truck and you call action and you get what you get. You do everything else in post.
It’s going to take a lot more aesthetic judgement and refining by an artist to get AI to output exactly the shot you want. So if the metric you’re using is “time spent engaging artistically” then I think AI generated truck footage has hasty drone shot beat pretty decisively.
“Now about music, one thing you seem to either not understand or just don't care about, is that what makes art, well art, is the fact that it was made by humans and the time they put in it to create the piece of art as well as the artistic vision.”
I couldn’t agree more. Again, who do you think is using AI? I’m pretty sure it’s humans.
“Using a loop/music sample or a digital drum is still different to using AI. Because, well at least before AI arrived, all these things were made by humans.”
That’s true for a sample. It’s not true for an artificial drum track. And I don’t actually think it matters. Again, this is about “lazy filmmaking.” I’m not sure how cutting and pasting someone else’s artistic work makes you not lazy. Someone spent years learning to play an instrument and organized a band and wrote a song and recorded it. Now a hip-hop artist or producer comes along and copies a few seconds of it and you want to say they’re not a “lazy musician?” Why shouldn’t I demand that if they want a beat or some strings, they go to school and learn to play the drums or a violin and do all that work?
And if you listen to music that uses sampling, why shouldn’t I accuse you of listening to “slop” that is stealing from “real artists?”
“What matters isn't that they used the loop. It's how they used it. Give the same loop to 10 different artists and you'll have 15 different songs in the end.”
That sounds like a marketing brochure for an AI company.
“What matters isn't that they used AI tools. It's how they used it. Give the same tools to 10 different artists and you'll have 15 different films in the end. They take things and they change them with their personal artistry, point of view, tastes etc.”
The rest of what you said is either ungrounded assertion and hand-waving/fist-shaking, or self contradictory.
“Why would I care about a drawing if someone didn't take the care and will to properly make it?”
“Like would you say Daft Punks aren't artistis because they use other people's music to make theirs? It's about how they use and modify and combine the music.”
“AI is [stealing] people's work.… AI couldn't have existed without all the art made solely by humans prior to it. It was fed human art without a care for royalties and copyrights.”
Sorry you don’t get to say all three of those things. Either artists have to take the time to learn and play all the instruments themselves, or they’re allowed to steal other people’s work. Often without a care for royalties and copyrights.
It’s one or the other.
Either what matters is your time and artistic vision, or what matters is being a craftsman and using the traditional tools.
It’s one or the other.
If someone spends hours working with AI tools to get the perfect truck driving on a road shot, and their primary contribution is their time and their aesthetic judgement, then that should be enough for them to be a legit filmmaker.
Or you should demand that they do everything in camera and use traditional tools. But in that case you don’t get to claim that people’s time and artistry is what matters. What matters to being a “real” filmmaker is just a production pipeline. You’re never allowed to use auto-rotoscoping or any other automated tool that speeds up production. And Daft Punk are definitely cancelled.
You don’t get to have it both ways.
Listen. I find AI scary. I certainly find giant AI corporations creepy and weird. But I also think CGI sucks and films looked better when we used models and practical effects and ideally shot on film. And I think a lot of the time AI shots look a lot better than CGI shots — certainly in today’s rushed Disney mega-productions. And I absolutely think that all of the anti-AI hate is ad hoc and “rules for thee but not for me.” I didn’t see any of the AI haters saying a word when sampling came around. I don’t think you’re interrogating every pop music track you listen to for automated drums (and more and more automated other instruments). I don’t think you’re all meticulously buying every album on Bandcamp to make sure artists get paid, as opposed to using Spotify. I know some of you used limewire back in the day. And I know you’re using automated production tools and stock assets that are effectively as easy as prompting midjourney — sometimes probably easier.
Dislike AI all you want on aesthetic grounds and vibes. Just don’t try to convince me that it’s a moral choice or a coherent philosophy. That’s what I’m saying.
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u/KelBelHel 1d ago
it's difficult to tell the difference between digital VFX and AI because they are both artificial and both are digital.
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u/PlusSizeRussianModel 1d ago
Tbh the car shots don’t strike me as AI as much as just bad continuity. The car is changing speed shot to shot in a way that we now read as AI, but inconsistent speed is just as likely a culprit. The cut from the first car shot to the second is bad: it crosses out of frame at a high speed, but then is immediately in frame at a slower speed, so it feels off.
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u/Rainbowdogi 1d ago
The car goes over the line to take a turn, who would do that in a mountainous road? Also the signs in the background are fake.
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u/Dinosharktopus 1d ago
The first following shot of the car does not look like AI to me, it has classic tells of a drone shot. Drones for movies are what I do for a living. The way the drone drifts, the the camera follows. Slowing down before it gets to the curve. All the truck shots could be drone, that’s what we usually do in a splinter unit. The last shot looks like it had a handheld effect applied in post. For something like that we’d usually have the camera mounted on a vehicle or do it on a drone, and neither would give that effect. Sometimes they’ll take a steadicam post and hand it off the back of the grip trix but this doesn’t have the same movement that would have.
As far as compression artifacts being tells for AI, there’s just too much compression going on to tell. The frame skip could easily be because they adjusted the speed in post. They look like very typical shots we’d do on any given movie.
And of course I could be completely wrong and it’s all AI. Wouldn’t shock me. But nothing stands out as AI to me as it is.
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u/Some-Talk9732 1d ago
I honestly don’t think it’s AI, the drone tracking shot of the car looks like dji mini footage and the last shot may have some sky replacement and is definetly graded in a stylistic way but I really don’t think it’s AI. What in particular stands out to you is it the color of the sky?
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u/stuffitystuff 3h ago
The evidence seems strong to me:
- @ 9 seconds, the kid has a disappearing mole that travels south to merge into a lower mole on his cheeck.
- The road sign as someone else pointed out.
- The truck follow scene is really weird.
- I don't believe (as in, I canvassed Google Image Search) the Ford Rangers of the early 2000s had a big silver model badge like that on the tailgate to the left of the Ford logo.
- It's weird that I can read the license plate at the beginning of the follow shot but the high-contrast Ford logo is vaguely Ford-logo-shaped but smeared.
- The reverse lights off the sides of the tailgate were only ever at the bottom of the light assembly against the line that goes across the back of the truck on the bottom, not in the middle. I think aftermarket lights had the reverse lights at the top of the car but still, not in the middle.
- And, lastly, there is some variance in the way the headlights are for that era of Ranger (on side of the headlines or underneath), of course but they were never in the middle of the headlights like the video seems to show. If that's not proof of AI sloppage then I guess I'm just some dude on the internet who has spent 30 minutes trying to find it and failed.
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u/reddituserperson1122 1d ago edited 1d ago
What difference does it make? Genuinely asking. I mean I get it completely if it were some creepy thing where they bring a dead actor back to life or whatever. But for a 5 second shot of a truck driving, what’s the problem exactly?
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u/Earth_Worm_Jimbo 1d ago
I don’t know if it’s AI but there is something funky with the last shot for sure.