“Collaborating with the entire history of human expression”

Danny Crichton:

So Ale and Kirby, thank you so much for joining us.

Kirby Ferguson:

My pleasure.

Danny Crichton:

I want to lay down the line, because I think the Wall Street Journal, about a week or two ago, was talking about the future of LA, and they had a massive deep dive portfolio on the filmmaking industry, and obviously it's in recession. Jobs are down 25%, 30%, many of you are looking for new jobs, new work, and a lot of this has to do with the strike two years ago, writers' rooms, et cetera. There's also an AI component here, which is that filmmaking is entirely changing in the next five to 10 years. The solutions we used in the past seem to not be what we're going to project forward. So I think I would also love to get from both of your perspectives, you're a filmmaker, you're building one of the core platforms the future of filmmaking, what is filmmaking going to look like in the next couple of years?

Kirby Ferguson:

What a nice softball question to open with. What's your background? What did you have for breakfast? Wowee. Holy crap. I'm skeptical about how much AI has to do with it, really. I'm not sure that it has much of a role. It seems like it's more a systemic economic thing, I don't think it's driven so much by AI. What do you think?

Ale Matamala Ortiz:

Yeah, I agree. I think when I talk to studios, to teams, one of the things that come more often is that films have become really expensive to create. That's one of the main reasons why some of the teams, they're not making more films anymore. So I don't attribute everything to what's happening. But I think it's going to transform, and I think on the positive side, the way that we see it is that it's going to enable to create new things that were harder to create before. We're already seeing somehow some teams are getting green-lit with projects that they were not getting green-lit before, because they were either too expensive or too ambitious to create now. So we are seeing it from a very positive side, because we are seeing how people who were in the industry are now able to create those things that they have in some folder.

Kirby Ferguson:

I think there was just some oversupply going on for a while there too. Do we need this much Star Wars or whatever?

Danny Crichton:

[inaudible 00:02:10] TV.

Kirby Ferguson:

Yeah. We've all got our playlists, we're all like, "I've got a hundred shows or whatever that I like to watch and I just don't have time to watch," and I feel like oversupply is one of the things that was going on, and we're correcting and coming out of that. That's my guess.

Laurence Pevsner:

Yeah. Well, as I think about oversupply, one of the pros and cons of AI in terms of this field is, as we talked about, it'll empower so many more people to become creators. We have vibe coding already in AI, we're starting to get into vibe filmmaking. I'm curious what you think is going to happen as more people get access to these tools to create the kinds of films that maybe previously they wouldn't have been able to because it was too expensive

Ale Matamala Ortiz:

Yeah. For us, that's what's been one of the key things since we started, democratization of who can actually tell the stories. I come from Chile, I went to film school, I dropped out from film school, but I wanted to be a filmmaker. But having the idea of creating a film back in Chile was even more crazy than perhaps creating an AI lab here in the US. Creating a film is hard, it's complicated and it's complicated everywhere, even in the traditional places, and we do believe that with these tools, with this technology, we're going to start seeing more stories being told.

We operate under that phrase of there's so many stories that haven't been told yet, and I think generative AI is going to be one of the things that will unlock those things to happen from different creators around the world. We ran a AI film festival, last edition, we received 3,000 films from teams all over the world, they created films that ranged five to seven minutes, and those were local stories or stories that were from different places of the world, that people wanted to tell that they couldn't. So we truly believe this is going to democratize who is going to be telling the next stories.

Laurence Pevsner:

Any favorites from that... Lincoln Center, right, the film festival?

Ale Matamala Ortiz:

Yeah.

Laurence Pevsner:

Any favorites that you want to call out?

Ale Matamala Ortiz:

The winner is a must watch, it's really, really good. It's a story about... Did you watch it?

Kirby Ferguson:

No, I haven't seen it yet. I want to see it though.

Ale Matamala Ortiz:

It's a story of how many images that you can create within an image. So if you take the math of the pixels who conform an image, you can create infinite... And it's a finite number, but you can create all possible images within an image, and it's a very well-narrated film.

Kirby Ferguson:

I think regular people will probably make the most exciting stuff with these tools. If you look at the history of any genre, any art, it's poor people, it's amateurs, like blues music, like jazz, whatever, it's poor people that are outside the system that are looking at these things in new ways and creating new stuff. So I think whole new genres are going to emerge out of this and new styles of filmmaking and new voices, and that's probably the most exciting realm of it to me, rather than just professionals who are trying to get cheaper or make their stuff higher quality or whatever, I think it'll be interesting to see the wild and crazy stuff that comes from just regular people.

Danny Crichton:

I'm reminded of careers like Chris Nolan, whose original film, even before Memento, was like a $100,000 budget film that he did in film school and was a demo play, and then did Memento as also a very, very cheap film, and has progressively grown to these massive Hollywood budgets. But I think to your point, this democratization means that there are many more Chris Nolans, who if they had the opportunity to have these democratized tools, to be able to show what they could do, potentially there's a lot more opening.

Now, Kirby, you've been a filmmaker a very long time, but one of the themes that comes up...

Kirby Ferguson:

Hey. No, I just started, it's been like a year.

Danny Crichton:

Someone did ask me today, "What year did you graduate?" And I was like, "This is getting a little more sensitive than it used to be when I was straight out of undergrad." But you've had this theme in your work for a long time around remix, this idea of recombining previous material, and remix culture is something that we see in certain fields, certain subcultures, and then others, it's verboten, it's considered offensive, you're not an original artist. Talk about AI and remix, and what do you see the future of the culture there?

Kirby Ferguson:

It's super fascinating, because AI is a remix, of course. It's deep learning, it's based on training on existing stuff and then creating new stuff out of the old stuff, and I think a version of that is what we do for all sorts of creativity. So it mirrors us, I think, in a way, where frankly, some of the human imagination magic is not there in what deep learning is doing. There's obviously a lot of stuff that is not in there, in the mix, mysterious aspects of the human imagination are not there. But there's this interesting parallel between the two, between how they create things, how it creates things and how we create things.

So it's interesting just learning about how AI works and using it, because I do think it is this mirror of how we work. We don't create out of nowhere, we all learn music, we read books, we watch movies, and we start copying what other people are doing, and then we start putting our spin on it and combining it with other things that we get from other places. So it's this really interesting, the two sides, I think we can learn more about creativity by using these tools.

Laurence Pevsner:

Yeah. When I was in undergrad, I had an English professor who said, "All of everything you've read is just a remix of the Bible, the Iliad and the Odyssey, and if you just read those three works, then you know everything else, every other reference that's coming." I'm wondering, as we think about AI as it enters into film, what do you actually think even defines AI in film? I'm thinking about we've had CGI forever, and that's a form of using computers to advance film technology. Do you think there's a distinction, or are we just looking at a curve of different kinds of advancing technology that we're just going to keep using as filmmakers adapt and use new tools?

Ale Matamala Ortiz:

Yeah. To me, I think we're using, even us with the AI film festival, we're using AI as a preface to say, "Some AI was being used to create this idea," but I don't think we're going to be talking about AI films in the near future. That's going to be about films, and most likely, it's going to be new kinds of films. Now, we're talking about films, such as talking about remix, this is the things that we have been doing in the past, this is the things that we know we can create.

But I do believe that as this technology progresses with new capabilities, such as real-time interactive outputs and multi-shot sequences, I think we can aim to have different kind of stories, different ways of telling stories, that perhaps are going to blend what we today know as films and what we know about video games, and it's going to be perhaps as a mix, and maybe it's going to be named differently and have a completely different naming for that, and I think then we're going to start talking about that new medium rather than this is made with AI or not.

Kirby Ferguson:

Yeah. My guess is there's going to be a gray area between AI or they're just going to blend together into one giant thing, like filmmaking and AI will blend together. I can see AI being a lot like CGI was, I can see it doing a lot of that work, like generating special effects and composites and stuff like that, I can see it taking over a lot of that work, so I think they're all going to blend together. I would guess, I'd be curious what you think, going to a particular platform rather than... Like, "I'm using Photoshop now," and instead, it being more like, "I'm using Photoshop, but I'm using Runway..." Here's a good idea, you can steal this, Runway and Photoshop, or whatever's in Photoshop, sort of like Perplexity is now, there's multiple tools within your tool and you can call on them when you need them.

Ale Matamala Ortiz:

That's great, because we have just released something on actual that-

Kirby Ferguson:

Are you shitting me? This wasn't planned. Oh my gosh.

Ale Matamala Ortiz:

Yes. We understand that the best workflows are the workflows that you bring, the best things that are possible for you to create, whatever you want to create. So we just announced yesterday a tool that's called Workflows, where you can start combining different models, third-party models, our models, different tools and capabilities into whatever you want, and create that as a standalone or use case package app that you can reuse and share with your teams.

So one thing that we have learned, working with artists for over eight years, and us ourselves being an artist, that no artist has the same workflow. Everyone has their own unique way of working and they want to use different things at different times, so we want to provide them with the best that we can offer from whatever it is in the market.

Kirby Ferguson:

Does Runway have an API?

Danny Crichton:

Let me ask. As a filmmaker, when you think about authorial vision, we have this real focus on a director is in charge of the shot, director is in charge of the film, all the shots, all the things, and you obviously work with teams and editors, et cetera. I think one of the biggest challenges with Hollywood, over the last 15, 20 years, is that teams got very, very big. You watch the credits for a blockbuster, hundreds, thousands of people involved in producing one of these films, hundreds of millions of dollars at stake, and that prevents you from having that single authorial vision, you have to work with a huge level of collaboration. I'm curious, when you think about AI, is it a collaborative agent for you, does it empower the authorial vision, and how do you think about the future of filmmaking in that regard?

Kirby Ferguson:

Yeah, that's totally how I think of it. I really like Ethan Mollick book Co-Intelligence on this subject. I like the idea of it being a quirky, brilliant, weird collaborator, that's the way I look at it, that's brilliantly good at some things and incredibly inept and stupid at other things. So yeah, I definitely look at it as a kind of collaboration. But I don't think of it as I'm collaborating with a machine, I'm collaborating with the entire history of human expression, everything that was on the internet that it got trained on, I'm collaborating with that. So to me, it's this social thing, where you're collaborating with the human imagination itself, and the culture and voice that all of us have developed over the decades.

Ale Matamala Ortiz:

Yeah. To me, I think I see it as there are different layers for that. One is, as a creator, as a creative, the way that we design our tools and our software and our models are to be a collaborator, to empower artists to do the things that they want to create and to help them achieve their ideas. We're not creating or designing systems that are one-pronged, one shot, give me a final output. But I do realize there are some use cases that might be very powerful on that end, and that's more the consumer side of things rather than the creative workflow.

But even within the creative workflow, I do think that the collaborator can also expand to be something that can be more autonomous, to give you some results that perhaps you were not thinking and maybe are too complicated to do, or maybe you just need someone else that can run and do that thing. So when we think on a feature film, a creator might have some ideas, take this as a place, and maybe they have one scene that happens here and they want to have fine control over that scene, and we want to provide as much control as they can to achieve that idea of that scene. But perhaps within that same feature film, there is a sequence film of a car going through Manhattan that is one-minute long, maybe we can think on systems that are more autonomous, that can create multi-shot scenes, that can deliver a longer take with different scene cuts, that can also work for that creative.

On the other side, more on the consumer side of things, I think there is a future where we will be generating videos to consume on-demand for different use cases, for learning, for support, for entertainment in some cases, that perhaps are going to be a little bit more disposable, even for entertainment, but they're going to be run on its own by the machine. But the way that we are approaching it today is to be a collaborator for artists.

Danny Crichton:

So the corollary to you is earlier today you were talking about this pattern between gaming and film, so when I think of film, I think of Paul Thomas Anderson's film is in theaters right now, he did it for VistaVision, available in four theaters anywhere in the world, one of which happens to be in New York, but that is the definitive, in a very specific, that is the way he wants it to be watched. With AI, you certainly have this capability to say, not only can it be different formats, it can be in different languages, we can auto-translate, including with lips, it can be dubbed. It doesn't look like the 1990s Japan dubs of anime. Now, it's completely professional, you can't even tell it wasn't in the original language. And you could potentially change plot lines, it could be adaptive, the story itself could change, the film could change.

Does this worry you, does that change the definition of filmmaking? Is that a spectrum from, it is my vision, it is my frame and that is the only answer. Or is there a world where you say, "Look, it's a choose-your-own adventure. My film is a world, an environment, it's something that you can explore. I'm crafting that world and I'm world building. But ultimately, the AI and the 3D engine that's underwriting it can actually do most of the heavy lifting."

Kirby Ferguson:

I think the scenario that you outlined there, where it can translate it and convincingly convey it to cultures that don't speak your language, that seems like a total win for me, that's a complete victory, because otherwise, they don't see it and they don't know it exists. So even if it's an imperfect representation of it, in the way that dubbing or subtitling was up until now, but I think that's an improvement, that it actually has a voice in it, the voice is synced to your mouth or whatever that seems like a total win for me and that seems like a total victory. So I think anything that can extend the reach of a filmmaker is definitely a huge win, so I love that aspect of it.

Laurence Pevsner:

Yeah. Bong Joon Ho calls the captions the one inch barrier between us discovering all of the film out there.

Danny Crichton:

Mostly from an American perspective. I think everyone else figures out the barrier. The barrier or the dam was broken.

Laurence Pevsner:

No, he wasn't saying it in a kind way.

Danny Crichton:

Yeah, exactly.

Ale Matamala Ortiz:

Yeah. To me, this is one of the most interesting opportunities, to be honest, for filmmaking. We shouldn't be designing this type of technology to continue doing everything that we have done in the past the same way. We should push for new ways of working and new ideas and new ways of telling a story. So for me, it's like today we have films that end, why do they have to end? Why they cannot keep going? Why not a viewer can take action and continue the story, or maybe see it from a different angle? Why a TV show also has to end? Why do we have only one season finale? Why we can't have the same season finale from a different character, from a different point of view? And I think those are all of the opportunities that now we can start considering. I'm not saying that we are there yet, but these are the challenges or the opportunities that we should be looking at.

Kirby Ferguson:

Yeah, that's super exciting, because we always stick with these existing paradigms. The internet started as sort of like a magazine or a newspaper or whatever, and TV started as a live show, a variety show or whatever, so we're always building on top of this preexisting concept that we've got, but what it actually becomes is something else that nobody could have imagined.

Laurence Pevsner:

We might get that infinite jest David Foster Wallace predicted.

Danny Crichton:

I was thinking more like The Sopranos, a very specific final shot in which it cuts to black with a smash cut, and in your world, it would turn back on and the next season would continue on.

Laurence Pevsner:

[inaudible 00:18:06]

Danny Crichton:

Well, Alejandro, Kirby, thank you so much for joining us.

Kirby Ferguson:

My pleasure.

Ale Matamala Ortiz:

Yeah, thanks for inviting us.

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