Original Crow Director Alex Proyas Teases AI-Generated Movie Sensoria

Movies

Can AI be a force for good and innovation? Alex Proyas seems to think so. The director of beloved 90s films The Crow and Dark City (and some not-so-loved films like Gods of Egypt and Knowing) has made a new movie entirely out of artificial intelligence. Called Sensoria, it appears to be a dystopian sci-fi film that will inevitably draw comparisons to Dark City. Proyas has been teasing this for weeks with a series of teasers that show off some of the visuals. The description on one says that Proyas’ intention with Sensoria is “to sustain an audience over 90 minutes and convey [his] own HUMAN vision via the machines.” One of the trailers gives a vague plot synopsis:

Proyas just released a “full-length teaser” for Sensoria, which you can see below:

The URL given at the end of that video leads to a broken link, so I don’t know if this is a crowd-funded endeavor or what. But I do find this fascinating. AI has been cast as the death knell of cinema, and I’ve worried about the loss of humanity it would bring to art as well. But Alex Proyas is doing something different and trying to use it to free himself of any limitations that collaboration would necessitate. This isn’t a studio mandate to save money on actors and writers; this is an artist using artificial intelligence to realize his unadulterated vision without having to worry about studio mandates, or actor availability, or budgetary constraints. Sensoria may be a failure; I don’t know what stage of development it’s in, but based on the teasers, the visuals look like a weird animation/live-action hybrid that, in some shots, looks almost as creepy as The Polar Express. (That movie could give Pennywise nightmares.) But this could be early in production, so maybe it’ll be cleaned up later on. And even if it does fail, it’s a step along the road to realizing a new filmmaking technique. The AI wasn’t used to write the movie; from a creative standpoint, Sensoria comes entirely from Proyas, or at least Proyas and whoever wrote it. And I’m sure actors will be picketing about it at some point – or, at least, firing off mean tweets between soy lattes. But I like that someone is tinkering with this to see if it can be used to create real art instead of standing in place of it; if it does, it will open up doors for budding creators who don’t want to go through studios, or whom studios don’t want to give the time of day. I also grin at the thought that Alex Proyas is trying to advance the medium while others are simply ripping off his work.