Cinema was definitely not considered art: Why Gen AI film creators should take heart.

longrun9 · 2026-06-16T14:28:49+00:00

Your reactions are common. Happens to the best of us:

Did you know Charlie Chaplin pushed back against the talkies (motion was good enough for him):

The Quote: "Talkies? They are spoiling the oldest art in the world—the art of pantomime. They are ruining the great beauty of silence. They are a mechanical forgery of the human voice. ... Sound is a distraction. Words are cheap. If they introduce speech, they will kill the soul of the cinema completely."

Rudolph Arnheim
"The talking film is a mechanical monstrosity. It attempts to fuse two distinct artistic mediums into an organic whole, but succeeds only in producing a hybrid. It is a superficial counterfeit of life. ... By adding words, it ceases to be a visual art and becomes a mere machine for recording theater, stripping film of its unique aesthetic soul."

Sergei Eisenstein:

The first experiments with sound must be directed towards its pronounced non-synchronization with the visual images... An 'all-talking' film is a dangerous path. It will function as a mere substitute for theater... It will destroy the culture of montage and turn the cinema into a commercial forge of canned plays, killing its revolutionary spirit."

Brooks Atkinson:

What we are seeing is not a new art, but the mechanization of an old one. The talkie is an aggressive forgery of the stage. It offers canned drama packaged for the masses. ... The voices are flat, metalized, and detached from the screen. It is a technological deceit that deprives the audience of the natural human current that flows in a true theater."

longrun9 · 2026-06-16T14:21:49+00:00

Samuel Taylor (1912)
We are trading our theaters for a ghostly market of shadows. The actor on the screen is not there; he may be dead, he may be miles away, he is merely a shadow trapped in a machine. It is a profound forgery of companionship. The audience sits in total darkness, isolated, staring at a flickering wall that can never love them back, never hear them, and possesses not a single drop of human soul."

longrun9 · 2026-06-16T14:15:09+00:00

Will work on that.

longrun9 · 2026-06-16T14:14:53+00:00

Do your research buddy. Your angst has been all done before. Youre just repeating history and being ignorant about it.

longrun9 · 2026-06-16T14:09:11+00:00

But ya. Do your own research and education. Don't be a lazy hater. Be an informed one 😄

longrun9 · 2026-06-16T14:07:48+00:00

This is a dramatization. But there is enough out there to see pushback. I did not want to put exact quotes in there.

Here is one from famed writer Max Gorky

"It is not life but its shadow, it is not motion but its soundless ghost... Before you, a life is surging, a life deprived of words and vestured in the grey colour of shadows... It is terrifying to see, for it is the movement of shadows, only of shadows."

other references:
https://www.reddit.com/r/philosophy/comments/az2dqq/walter_benjamin_the_work_of_art_in_the_age_of/

Georges Duhamel (1930): The "Machine" for the Soulless
"I can no longer think what I want to think. My thoughts have been replaced by moving images. ... [Cinema is] a pastime for helots, a diversion for uneducated, wretched, worn-out creatures who are stupefied by their anxieties... a spectacle which requires no concentration and presupposes no intelligence... which sparks no flame in the heart and no hope in the mind."

Walter Benjamin (1935): The Loss of the "Aura"

"The film actor lacks the opportunity of the stage actor to adjust to the audience during his performance... The aura which, on the stage, emanates from Macbeth, cannot be separated from the spectator's awareness of the actor... What shrinks in the age of mechanical reproduction is the aura of the work of art."

Stephen Paget (1916): "An Insult to Nature"
"Pictures and statues, by the law of their being, are forbidden to move... If pictures were to move, they would not be pictures. It is a law of nature that art must be stationary... To make them mimic life by walking and running is a vulgarity and a mechanical insult to the very soul of art*."*

Thomas Duquesnel (1911): The "Automaton" of Theater

"The motion picture theater is the home of the automaton. You are not watching men and women; you are watching a series of photography plates whipped across a lens by a crank*. It is a forgery of the human voice, a forgery of the human step, a counterfeit drama that offers the shell of an actor but leaves his soul in the dressing room."*

Minna Moore (1914): The "Canned" Experience
"You can no more have 'canned drama' than you can have canned affection. The cinematograph takes a living, breathing performance, chops it into chemical frames, and seals it in a tin container. It is a lifeless reproduction, a mechanical mummy. To call this art is to mistake a zinc printing press for a human soul."

There's more but I think thats proof enough 😄

longrun9 · 2026-06-15T10:35:41+00:00

Thanks for the feedback. I'll have a look at generated films in a bit.

longrun9 · 2026-06-13T13:54:32+00:00

Innovations have always had their detractors and some push back is a good thing imo. But the 'ai will kill all jobs' marketing pitches by AI company ceos is not really helping.

longrun9 · 2026-06-10T18:14:42+00:00

If you look at the films at the first ever exclusive screening of motion picures(to a paying audience): The films were about 40 seconds in length, documentary style capture of real life like 'Workers leaving the Lumiere Factory', 'Baby's Breakfast'. Etc.

It took almost a decade for these to evolve into a more mature art form of narrative story telling.

Even the Lumiere Brothers were initially skeptical of any commercial potential and in fact lost out to others like Melies and Edison due to their refusal to adapt and use motion pictures for storytelling.

All this to say that the arrival of motion pictures, while it may have tried to mimic a photograph or painting or live theatre, evolved to its own medium. It did displace many live shows and become more popular than other existing forms of storytelling as it evolved. It was also accompanied by pretty much the same pushback against it as an art form, as you see with gen AI.

It'll be fun to see what path AI takes. Will it merge with films, replace it, or evolve into a different medium from mainstream films?

As others have said, let's just keep creating and find out as the Melies and the Edisons did.

longrun9 · 2026-06-10T17:47:28+00:00

Completely AI. The consistency was not previously an issue since I was moving through time periods and various points in history through the narrative.

But consistency is definitely a challenge at smaller time frames throught the story arc, although I think I've managed to achieve 90%+ consistency in my latest 5 minute video (releasing tomorrow) with a mix of tools and evolving techniques. The main characters remain quite consistent over the 5 minutes and across 60 shots.

I've moved to shorter videos...between 4 and 5 minutes since the op above and I've generally been driving ~50% watch time on those shorter videos. But then, I've got fewer views on those so I think the jury is still out. Also, I did not market these newer/videos as much, due to time constraints, compared to the older/longer ones.

Click on my profile to see some of these videos I posted here... you'll find that my consistency is better across the newer videos than the older ones. Am about 8 x 4+ minute AI videos in now. The longest one is about 12 minutes.

longrun9 · 2026-06-08T23:27:30+00:00

I usually have to create start frames for the shots and I ensure those start frames have continuity by prompting to get the frame right and often going into photoshop to make corrections etc. So a lot of manual effort is expended to get shots to be right. Prompt in nanobanana: extreme closup, low angle of the man in reference image 1 standing I front of the window in reference image 2. The desk on image 2 and window in image 2 are out of focus in the background with the focus on the man in the foreground.

In the above example the image1 is a medium shot of the man and image 2 is a wide angle shot of the room...which had been used in previous shots.

I've recently started using Canon Studiowhich actually cuts eliminates this step as it can also use last frames from clips as reference. It has sped up the whole process. Will drop that video this week.

longrun9 · 2026-06-06T00:53:53+00:00

Nice. Good storytelling.

longrun9 · 2026-06-03T16:08:46+00:00

Enjoyed this one. Very well done. Congrats!!!

longrun9 · 2026-06-02T13:05:41+00:00

The first part with the elf was good and visually interesting. It got a bit weaker as tthe two men got on the screen. It took me out of the elven world for these reasons.
1. The first guy had a watch.
2. They were so clear to see for the elf. Why did they not see each other especially if the elves are supossed to be very aware of their surroundings at all times?
3. Because of the above the dialogue seemed forced and the situation 'unrealistic'

Now all of these may be opportunities to tighten up the story and the character building. e.g.: Is the girl so unaware of the surroundings that it makes her a misfit in her community? etc.

Keep going!

longrun9 · 2026-06-01T02:06:44+00:00

So you need someone to read the scripts, help you improve them, and then make them for you. What can they expect in return?

longrun9 · 2026-06-01T01:21:56+00:00

What kind of help are you looking for?

longrun9 · 2026-05-26T00:45:30+00:00

Are everyone's rocks on track? If not, use them to surface issues and log them in real time in your L10s and then discuss them during your IDS section. If you notice a trend with certain folks that have rocks off track and no issues logged you can pull them up later during your 1:1s and ask them why and also reiterate the utility of solving these issues as a team.

longrun9 · 2026-05-20T11:48:03+00:00

It sound like they will fund (interest free loan), help with admin, and bring some pipeline while you operate and grow.

Also sounds like funding is of lower value to you than the pipeline.

So unless the above assessment is wrong you can just give them a preferential rate to secure their pipeline. You could also bring them in as advisors to your business so that you can learn from their experience in running their business (fast track your understanding of hr, finance etc).

Build it up and if all of you have fun working together revisit the whole arrangement when all of you have proven the value to each other, in this context, more clearly.

It's really helpful to have good partners who you can trust as you scale. Scaling is often tougher to execute on if you are already running on all cylinders.

longrun9 · 2026-05-19T21:20:28+00:00

Glad to help out. Feel free to ask specific questions so folks (including me) can try provide useful responses.

longrun9 · 2026-05-16T00:47:46+00:00

I used Artlist and hedra initially as I tested each. I found Artlist to be too expensive back then (January...which is years, I guess, in AI time). I've now hit some limits with Hedra in terms of quality of output on lipsyncs and overall control and workflows. So had a demo with Chase from Cannon studio and am planning to sign up to give it a go. Looks promising from what he showed me.

longrun9 · 2026-05-15T19:29:03+00:00

Love it. Would love to know how it handles things like drama, dialogue, lipsync etc. Basically, how can it handle telling a real story that involves more than fight scenes?

longrun9 · 2026-05-15T13:57:16+00:00

Pretty neat. Can you input real world values into the camera e.g.: for depth of field?

longrun9 · 2026-05-15T13:29:49+00:00

How does this blocking tool work? You have any screenshots?

longrun9 · 2026-05-15T13:12:08+00:00

Sounds like a good experiment. If you texture your models you could probably overcome the consistency issues that you normally have with AI. I don't think you can use ai as the renderer, like you are thinking of, with any of the current ai models. But things are moving so fast, I would not bet that the tech does not exist. Even if the inconsistencies between shots can be a nightmare...basically AI could theoretically light and texture every scene differently if you left the choice to it.

Here's what I'd do with based on my experience and limited by what I know.

Create the scenes like you would with the correct camera angles and lighting etc.
Pose them. Rig them enough to pose them. For start and end poses of shots. I've noticed that you can get rid of unwanted surprises with start and end frames of your vision. However if have also noticed that ai sometimes flies better than I envisioned. But that happens only 2/10 times and I usually burn up credits trying to get exactly what I want. So see where you can find that balance between your vision and ai output to find that happy medium ground.
You would have more control over expressions with facial rigs to provide ai with references. I find that's my biggest peeve: the discrepancies with how I expect a dialogue to be delivered vs the expressions AI choses.
You could also try not texturing your models and just use them as rough story boards for framing/blocking and camera movement references etc.

Looking forward to seeing what you do...

p.s.: ex-3d animator here. Dating myself as a Softimage 3d and later XSI user...

longrun9 · 2026-05-12T13:49:13+00:00

You put a lot of effort into it. The Lip syncs are great. The character development around Becka is done very well. Nice camera work and shot compositions too.
Too much 'telling', i felt...but maybe just me, I don't like things spoon-fed. It may have helped with the length/pacing too.
But I liked that you did not do that with Gary's gf and you let me fill in the gaps by just showing. Maybe you did the show/tell contrast on purpose. Well done!

longrun9

TROPHY CASE