Blumhouse Partners With Meta to Make Short Films Using Facebook’s New AI Tools
Meta has partnered with Blumhouse to test Movie Gen, its new artificial intelligence suite of tools that allow users to create 16-second videos based on text prompts.
Blumhouse, as part of the partnership announced on Thursday, has had several filmmakers — including Aneesh Chaganty (“Searching”), the Spurlock Sisters (“The Breakline”) and Casey Affleck (“I’m Still Here”) — test Movie Gen. Those creators have tried Meta’s new AI tools and then “used generated video clips as part of larger pieces,” according to a release from Meta.
Chaganty’s short film using AI content will be available to see on Meta’s Movie Gen page, while the short films from Affleck and the Spurlock Sisters are “forthcoming,” Meta said.
Moving forward, Blumhouse founder and CEO Jason Blum said he was bullish on AI tools like Movie Gen helping spur creativity.
“Artists are and forever will be the lifeblood of our industry. Innovation and tools that can help those artists better tell their stories is something we are always keen to explore, and we welcomed the chance for some of them to test this cutting-edge technology and give their notes on its pros and cons while it’s still in development,” Blum said in a statement.
“These are going to be powerful tools for directors, and it’s important to engage the creative industry in their development to make sure they’re best suited for the job.”
Thursday’s partnership between Facebook’s parent company and the horror powerhouse comes just a few weeks after Meta introduced Movie Gen. Meta doesn’t plan on rolling out Movie Gen to a wide audience until next year, when it’ll be available across apps like Instagram and Facebook.
Movie Gen allows users to create clips based on what they enter in its text prompt. If you typed “A fluffy grey and white koala bear surfs on a yellow board,” as Meta shared as an example on its blog, here’s a screenshot of what you’d get:
Meta, in its announcement with Blumhouse on Thursday, said it’s received “invaluable” feedback from the filmmakers so far. The company added Movie Gen’s text-to-audio feature will help directors create background music for their projects.
“While there’s no replacement for hands-on filmmaking experience, Movie Gen models were able to help them more quickly express their creative ideas and explore visual direction, tone, and mood,” Meta said. “We heard that
filmmakers see potential for Movie Gen as a collaborator and thought partner, with its unexpected response to text prompts inspiring new ideas.”
The text-to-video AI space was increasingly crowded, even before Meta joined the party recently. OpenAI’s Sora text-to-video tool can make clips that are up to 60 seconds long, and Google debuted Veo, its own text-to-video tool earlier this year. A number of startups are on this corner, too, like Stability AI, a London-based company that just added James Cameron to its board of directors last month.
Other filmmakers aren’t as excited about AI. Justine Bateman, at TheWrap’s The Grill conference last week in Los Angeles, said Hollywood’s adoption of AI will “burn down the business.”
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