The film director winning awards with AI | Ben Hansford

0:00AI is a crew. AI is a team. AI is the Navy SEALs. You can give it a mission and whether or not you love the results, it is going to accomplish it. I always think about like, you know, Jack Nicholson technically is a tool of Stanley Cooper. Jack's going to do what Jack's going to do. Yes. Right. And Stanley can nudge it and he can say some things. But when he calls action, Jack's going to Jack. I've never seen anything shift as quick as people's opinions on AI. There was a phase about a year ago where I felt like everyone needed help. And now they don't need help anymore. They need answers. We are actively watching budgets decline and distribution become more complicated.

0:34And Gen Z and Gen Alpha are just, you know, they're floating away from sort of modern studios. AI is their answer and they know it. They just, they now have to kind of bring it all together. The shift has gone from like, we hate you to please help us.

0:47Parth Patil:The Token Grantee Program gives$1 ,000 a week in tokens to high potential creators already deep in AI. Across film, gaming, comics, print, and digital art. There are no tool restrictions. The freedom to choose is the point. Grantees also get access to my own custom fleet of agents and an ongoing collaboration with me. The goal? To close the gap between an idea and the world. Ben, welcome. And Parth, why don't you introduce Ben? Selecting him, how'd he met, that kind of thing. Ben and I met, I think, three years ago now, maybe four. But Ben Ben and I met in LA. He hit me up through a shared Slack channel we're in with a bunch of guys from, actually traditional Hollywood, more traditional Hollywood guys.

1:34Parth Patil:And Ben was the first person I met in traditional film and entertainment that was experimenting with AI. At a time when almost no one was experimenting with AI in Los Angeles, right? I was like, oh my God, I can have a conversation with one person. I don't have to go to San Francisco for this. you know and uh and ben would come over to to my place and just hang out in the lounge and we would just hack uh i would i would show him the latest agents and then he was playing with image and video models back then when they barely worked um and yeah and and and so yeah this is this is ben he's a professor at usc and teaches film and uh also just very deep in the latest in ai from coding agents to image and video and what it means for entertainment pipelines.

2:19Yeah. And full disclosure, Reid, I owe this to Parth. Like I owe literally, because he's right. Like at this time, it's a, we're pre-Dali, we're pre-mid journey. Like all you're doing is, you know, you're on GitHub. I burned one GPU. I got, you know, I killed one computer with a virus. Like it was the wild, wild west. And I started reaching out to some friends because I was like, this is the future. This is absolutely the future. Most of them disagreed. I was even at FMX in Germany, and they told me I was crazy. And then a mutual friend of mine in Parth's was like, you've got to meet Parth. He is the holder of the keys.

2:54And I went and met with Parth. And I think my joke is that, you know, when Neo meets Morpheus and he gets red-pilled, I met Parth and I was red-pilled from there on. It could be red-pilled or given you were going, Keymaster, we could even go back to Ghostbusters. Oh, let's go Ghostbusters. For those people who've seen the original, I might be dating myself. So say a little bit about kind of in addition to meeting Parth, how did your early AI experiments start? Like what was the kind of like the, oh, like this is the future. I got to start even though everything's broken right now. So I actually I get a really lucky break, which is I'm a commercial director.

3:36so you know my I make my bread and butter directing commercials and so my my world has always been very visual in fact I can I can date it all the way back to like I was the neighborhood dungeon master so so I start telling stories as a kid and everything is visual for me and then I become a commercial director but probably about four and a half years ago I start playing with generative AI and I get this immediate bump I get this immediate superpower which is I start winning more and more commercial jobs with it. So I'm starting to do treatments, you know, and even just like being able to do better image manipulation, being able to do like really like gorgeous style frames that no one knows where they came from.

4:18I start winning more and more commercial jobs. And at the time I'm teaching directing at USC and I start bringing in like I literally, one of the students would always blow like a fake DJ Khaled air horn. He'd be like, and the whole class would yell, new tech and each week I would show them a new AI tool and they're all rough they're all just raw you know we're running I'm running a chrome remote off my desktop but then what starts to happen is as I'm showing the students these things my students start to win all of USC's sort of internal awards so they win like the coca-cola refreshing filmmaker award and the Heineken award because their treatments are getting better and then at the time the head of the directing track just steps in and is like, what the hell is all this AI stuff?

5:09And I'm like, it is the future. And then, you know, met with the dean. And so as far as I know, USC has the oldest AI program in America. And what I can release now is that it's even a year older than USC thinks it is because I started, you know, I started teaching AI to students almost four and a half years ago.

5:28Parth Patil:You've seen the arc of the technology, at least in Los Angeles, which is definitely like the the first wave, the second wave, we talk about this. How would you say like the industry, the entertainment industry's attitude towards AI has shifted in your time in it? Yeah, and like, you know, I was alive for the internet era, but I can say without a shadow of a doubt, I've never seen anything shift as quick as people's opinions on AI. I mean, we go from literally three and a half years ago, basically where the writer's strike is, Everyone hates it to today where, you know, I had a meeting at a studio two days ago and I realized I was leaving with this feeling of they know, you know, there was a phase about a year ago where I felt like everyone needed help.

6:17And now they don't need help anymore. They need answers. They are like, you know, we are actively watching budgets decline and distribution become more complicated. and Gen Z and Gen Alpha are just, you know, they're floating away from sort of modern studios. And so AI is their answer and they know it. They just, they now have to kind of bring it all together. So yeah, so the shift has gone from like, we hate you to please help us, if that makes sense. Well, isn't it still kind of mixed in it? Like, especially because the folks who are, you know, kind of older, you know, are like, yeah, still.

6:59And there's almost a conflict, whereas the new folks realize this is just where it's moving to, so I might as, and I have this amazing superpower, should I go? So how does the dialogue work currently? You nailed it, Reed. It's age. Like I used to joke, it's age, not stage. Because I'm watching, I work with both undergrad and grad students. And then as a director, I'm working with some of the greatest filmmaking professionals in the world. So like, you know, the world-class storyboard artists who have worked with everyone from, you know, Scorsese, I'm fortunate enough to be on both sides. And the 19-year-olds read, they jump in, they have no bad habits.

7:41They have no like wiring, you know, flooring to undo. They just jump in with both feet. Whereas I am seeing, you know, more seasoned professionals who've been at it for longer it's not only resistance it's like a it's a disdain like they would rather spend the time arguing with you about how it doesn't work right you can come in and like I can talk about it now like I want a can lion for a project that just has AI all over it but I still get in arguments with people about how AI will never be you know sort of award-winning material and it's a but but I can I can just say from a personal and indisputable point that like no it absolutely is but people will still spend more time arguing with you and again but students on the flip side I read I was joking with Parth I I was presenting kind of like how to use green screen with AI build VFX environments those kind of things and one of my students he just goes yo prof B why do we need green screen and I was suddenly like, Reed, I had that moment.

8:47You know when your mom can't reset the microwave after a power outage? I felt like that. I was like, oh God, I'm about to be old. Like whatever he's going to say, he's about to make me old. And he's like, why don't we just use depth mats and then turn them into luma mats and then just keep people like that. And I was like, you are right and I am old. All right, thank you.

9:08Parth Patil:I see the same thing in programming too. It's the experienced programmers tend to be the most resistant and then the ones that are the most naive tend to be the ones that learn the most and and uh have less uh less less institutional baggage that's holding them back definitely yeah yeah for sure what is something that you can finally make or do now that would have been impossible or too expensive a few years ago oh my god parth how long do we have how long is this a three hour what is this director's cut um we'll make sure we have enough time for this I mean, this is, so I'll start, you know, again, I tend to approach everything either as a director or a dungeon master.

9:48So the director in me, I now have made, again, award-winning spots. We had a spot that aired during the Sugar Bowl. Like, I'm using AI in commercials now, which I could not have done a year ago. Like, I do think, like, the sort of, you know, the accretion of visual quality is finally at a point that we can use it on air. It can show up on your big screen TV. It can run during a bowl game. So I'm really excited about that space. And then on the personal space, thanks to you, I have finally been able to read. I'm a part of like a subset of being a dungeon master. You also have to be a comic book nerd.

10:25That's like my... Yeah, so that comes with the title. By the way, I was also a dungeon master and also a comic book nerd. So I totally get it. Oh, Reed. Oh, my God. All right. So you'll absolutely love this. So this is something that came from talking to Parth for a while. It was like, I've always been a huge comic book nerd. And, you know, this part is fact. There are more players in the NBA than there are comic book illustrators. So when you think about it, there's less than 500 professional comic book illustrators, people who can go and finish a book for you. And that's assuming you have the time, the money, the resources to even get involved with them.

11:02So one of the things I'd always dreamt of was like, you know, essentially like comic book creation for the masses. Right. Kind of beyond AI, like actual not only to be. And so, you know, if you imagine like it's called Block Block and it is TikTok for comic books. So imagine a place to sort of, you know, develop, create, share and explore comic books online in a super safe space. And, you know, see above, there's only 500 comic book illustrators or fewer. So, you know, that, you know, given that every human being you meet has a story, let's say we've got at least a billion storytellers and 500 people who can draw it.

11:41We need AI tools to help here. and so what I did was I integrated all these you know fantastic you know front-end comic book tools with AI and so you know what BlockBlock allows people to do is you go in you create your comics you can lay out your word balloons you can you know you can change the size of the neck you can curve the neck you can you know we've got the big sound design like it's the ability for you to create comic books in an instant and then it's also the platform for you to share them on And so, you know, for me, I mean, part like what couldn't I do a year ago? Is all of it a good answer?

12:18Like, I mean, it's everything, right? It's everything from like the front end to being able to finally develop my own, you know, app that runs both on Android and iOS. It's the database system. It's the security system. It's, you know, being able to, like, even invites and Cloudflare and just, I can't tell you how mind-blowing it is. Reid, and I apologize, Parth. I feel like I'm saying everything to you that you've already heard me talk about. No, no, no, no. I love hearing it, man. This is what we're doing this for. Yeah. Okay, cool. Yeah, so Reid, you know, for me, what I'm realizing, too, is like, as I go through and I'm developing all of this.

12:58By the way, thanks to y 'all. Now, you know, now that I've got my foul tokens, I can send everything to friends and let them go wild. What I began to realize, too, was, you know, there's this iceberg of creation. Right. Which is, you know, then you think about the iceberg analogy. There's like 10 percent that's above water. But in reality, what's really going to sink your ship is the 90 percent that's below water. Right. And so it's one thing to develop. I think we've all like vibe coded an AI powered to do app at some point in our life. Like that's our that's our modern hello world. So we've all we've all done that.

13:35But then it kind of stops there and you never really get to realize like, oh, what you didn't do is tie that into a database system. What you didn't do is tie that into GitHub publishing. What you didn't do is build a Cloudflare system that keeps it secure. what you didn't like and so you begin to realize like the depth of the work you have to do becomes so much greater and now all along the way you know i have i have claude writing and codex checking what claude is writing right now and sometimes i'll flip that just to you know spice up life but i i just think like even the ability to think this way didn't exist before right for me to to explore deep enough to learn what I don't know didn't exist before.

14:17And so I just think this growth journey has been insane, but it is only now that I can do this. So one of the things that Parth mentioned to me only by this phrase, so I'm going to ask, talking raccoon? Oh, sure. That's my code name. That's our safe word. for when I... Okay, now I understand. Yeah, man. I mean, so Talking Raccoon was, I guess I can't name the client yet because I haven't won the job, but there was a project that had a Talking Raccoon in it. And, you know, we were just chatting about how difficult it would be in these VFX teams that would come in. And then what do you use for facial motion capture?

15:04You know, are you using marketless motion capture? Are you, you know, like, what are the different systems? And then do you want to use Maya? Do we want to do hair in Maya? Do you want to do spleens? It was just all these stories. And then suddenly I had this moment of like, well, wait, I wonder if this just works in AI. And then the reason I think this is such an important story is we're now at a spot where you just go and test it. We no longer have to sit in a big boardroom or on a bunch of Zoom calls discussing like, do we think the raccoon can talk? Do we think that this, can we do blah, blah, blah.

15:37I literally read. I just acted out the part of the raccoon and and then, you know, piped it through. Like there's a great thing called live portrait and comfy UI. And so now and then within 30 minutes, I went from does this work to I have this gorgeous talking raccoon. Who's me saying everything I want him to say. And then I used to move AI. So he's acting like I act in the wide shots like read this ability for us to bypass. all of that and get straight to creation, right? That we're moving out of this. And again, democratization is even too light a term to me. Like we're beyond democratization.

16:21This facilitation, this speed at which we can move and test and iterate and explore and know within a half hour, not only does this work or not work, it's like I went from does this work to this is amazing. And then I think maybe part of what you were also implying is like, I then read, I was like, why aren't I doing a talking raccoon show? Where's my, you know, we bear bears of live action talking animals in the woods? Like, this is how we think now. It's insane.

16:54Parth Patil:And it almost feels like, I mean, specifically like the new kind of motion capture. I mean, I think Gen.ai feels like a new kind of VFX, but there's also this like new kinds of mocap with like Luma and all these like facial acting. It almost feels like the Andy Serkis is now anyone can take an Andy Serkis kind of approach to create a character creation. Yes. My precious. Yes. Although I might even part, I might even double down and say like Andy Serkis is more valuable now than ever. Yeah. Right. The person who understands the medium, I've had good fortune to work with people like T-Pain. And we did some music videos together.

17:35And one of the things he mentioned was he had to learn to sing poorly so that auto-tune would transform him into that perfect T-Pain voice. And to me, that's also what Andy Serkis is doing. It's sort of learning the sort of values and limitations and accentuations of the system. understanding these sliders in live portraits so that you can so that he can adjust his performance to be perfect for the medium right um right like in for example bring it back to talking raccoon as i'm maybe that's the whole episode title here ben hansford talking raccoon um is that they had you know they have these beady little eyes so i really had to go huge with the eyebrows like your performance has to get bigger and your head has to move more to sell more like I I think the if you're a budding actor learning to perform in these mediums is going to be like actors of old learning the difference between a close-up and film and a wide shot in film between being on stage and you know and being in front of the camera like if you can develop those habits because now Parth you can be anyone anywhere yeah like I did you remember when I when I showed you the, I'll call it the space film for privacy reasons.

18:50Reed, there's a project I'm developing, and it was all an animated deep space film. And I play all the characters, you know? And so it's always my face doing the work. I'm transforming my voice in Eleven Labs. Like, whoever's going to take over those roles in our troop, in the Parth, Reed, Ben troop, that is, it's going to be like Shakespeare troops of old. like people being able to play lots of roles, develop more, develop faster, like create what you want to create when you want to create it. Like it's pretty dreamy.

19:26Parth Patil:Yeah, it is. It's surreal to see, man. I feel the same way, even the small experiments that I'm doing with Reed when we're like trying to parse, you know, we're working on some comic books too. You know, we're messing around. Yeah, yeah, exactly. I'm going to send you an invite to Block Block. Excellent. Both of y 'all. Excellent. What is one thing that you think filmmakers should be learning right now that isn't taught in film school? Obviously, it starts with the letters A.I. I hate coming back to A.I. like this. I really do. I just can't. I can't imagine people proceeding without it. And like if you don't mind like a long answer getting longer, I'm watching what's happening with like backrooms and obsession.

20:08Yeah. Which are just both phenomenal. own. But underpinning both those stories is they were both made at relatively shoestring budgets. So developing filmmakers are going to have to do more. It is probably going to have to show up on other platforms. It is going to come in different formats and they're going to have to do it for less. I hear everyone hating on AI right now. Everyone's like, AI is killing us. AI is taking away jobs. Which is, can we swear on this show? I can't. Yes. Okay, cool. It's bullshit. It's not AI. your budgets have been going down for two and a half years. I'm a director.

20:43I've been watching our budgets constantly get shrunk. So now what's happening is in a world where you have to do the same, but with less, you have to find tools to supercharge yourself. And in fact, I might even take a step back and read. I was telling part, like, I know everyone keeps calling AI a tool. Everyone's like, well, it's just a tool. It's just, it's not a tool. Like my hammer is a tool. My saw is a tool. My paintbrush is a tool. But I can't put my I can't go to bed and put my hammer down and say, build me a bird box while I sleep. Right. And wake up in the morning and see a bird box.

21:19But I can I can go to bed and tell Claude like, hey, redesign the front end of BlockBlock to be more like this for anyone who's doing desktop development. And Claude, you check whatever. Sorry, Codex, you check whatever Claude posts to the GitHub. I can't tell my hammer to do that. AI has autonomy. AI can build momentum. AI is, again, coming back to everything being film crew or being director or dungeon master. AI is a crew. AI is a team. AI is the Navy SEALs. You can give it a mission. And whether or not you love the results, it is going to accomplish it. I always think about, you know, Jack Nicholson technically is a tool of Stanley Kubrick's.

22:03In The Shining, he's technically a tool, but Jack's going to do what Jack's going to do. And Stanley can nudge it and he can say some things, but when he calls action, Jack's going to jack. And I think the same thing is happening with AI. And I think people are, I don't know why people keep trying to undersell it. But to me, that's why when you ask, like, what do I think filmmakers need? They have to evolve these tools. You have to, like, I mean, even, sorry, I'm going on. No, but, like, Jack, it's you can handle the truth. You just need to.

22:41Exactly. And that's, but getting people to their read is like. Yeah. Yeah. So when people panic about AI and creativity, what's the thing you wish you understood? And Parth mentioned something about a student protester. I'll start with the protester story, and I think that'll kind of answer the whole thing, which is like one of the times. I've had a protester almost every semester, which I love, by the way. They're all 19. They should be yelling, fuck the man. So I like it. So a protester showed up at class, and he literally told me, very sweet. He was like, I'm here to protest your class. And I told him, I was like, class is about to begin.

23:21I was like, this is fantastic. Will you do me a favor? Will you sit in on the class? We're going to be watching a bunch of students work. And then let's chat after class. So he sat in on the class. It was kind of lucky for both of us. It was one of the days we were doing a project presentation. And he got to watch how every student, even though they were all using the same tool, had a project that was so definitively them. Like one student had taken a voice recording that he carried from his dead grandmother. She was in China. It was one of the last messages she left him about how he was an accident.

24:01And his mom had to go back to, I mean, it's just, I'll get goosebumps and start crying talking about it. He took that and reenacted the whole story with AI with his dead grandmother as the voiceover. We had all these students using the same exact tool, and every project was so definitively personal. It was so definitively them. Not only did none of them look the same, none of them shared the same anything. And so afterwards, it was really sweet. The protester waited for all the students to filter out, and we're saying goodbye, dapping each other up. and uh he came up and he's like i have to tell you i'm really impressed with what the students are doing and i was like you know thank you so much that that that means a lot they're incredible students he goes i still don't like what you're doing though and i was like right on i was like yeah i mean yeah fuck the man fuck the man but but i think that's the point that's what people don't understand is they're they're so busy yelling into the void they're not watching what filmmakers are actually doing with it.

25:08Or maybe even at times, I don't think they see what, how personal filmmakers are, what sort of personal project filmmakers are making with this stuff. And I think that that's to me a huge regret. I wish people, more people saw it.

25:22Parth Patil:Ben, I think you have a question for Reed. Oh man. Or maybe Parth, who knows? I have lots for both of y 'all. I will. I'll start here, Reed, if you don't mind. I mean, I got and this goes back to me fanning out earlier in our call over you you are you are to me like one of the great blue flame thinkers of our time and I think that span if you don't mind and you can edit this out I think that spans well beyond technology I think the way you are interacting with the world the way you are engaging with politics the way you're engaging with world leaders the way the way you comport yourself the way you operate in the world the I just think you're top of the tops you're one of the greatest apologies for the compliment I I would love you know so again kind of bringing it back like I do think moving forward we do have to have a framework we AI needs a framework because otherwise we're gonna keep we're gonna stay in this realm of like the people who are angry are going to get angrier and the people who are passionate about it are going to get more passionate about it and i'm you know to coin to steal someone else's phrase i worry about our discourse getting more course uh that's uh scott galloway prof g i i worry about our discourse getting more course given that you've literally met with world leaders given that you see this from the the top of the mountain do you have ideas on what framework we should adapt with AI for the betterment of humanity.

27:00I know it's big. It's huge. There's a couple quick things, I think. One, people have to experience the benefit. Like part of what shifts the discourse is they go, hey, I get it. It's at least in these things good for me. It's a little bit like your protestor is like, well, what the students are doing is cool. I don't know if I like you teaching the AI to them, but what the student is doing is cool. And it's like seeing some of the benefit. And the way that, like in government leaders, it's like make a medical assistant available to everyone who has a smartphone or has access to a smartphone because then the level of human elevation.