Hacker Cinema
Sunspring
2016 · Film · short · 9 min
Directed by Oscar Sharp
Sunspring is a short film about three people living in a weird future, possibly on a space station, probably in a love triangle. You know it's the future because H (played with neurotic gravity by Silicon Valley's Thomas Middleditch) is wearing a shiny gold jacket, H2 (Elisabeth Gray) is playing with computers, and C (Humphrey Ker) announces that he has to "go to the skull" before sticking his face into a bunch of green lights. It sounds like your typical sci-fi B-movie, complete with an incoherent plot. Except Sunspring isn't the product of Hollywood hacks—it was written entirely by an AI. To be specific, it was authored by a recurrent neural network called long short-term memory, or LSTM for short. At least, that's what we'd call it. The AI named itself Benjamin.
3 positive2 neutralfrom 5 commenters
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5 comments on Hacker News
>Best Screenplay Goes to the Algorithms
No, it doesn't, according to the article itself:
>The judges at the film festival placed Sunspring in the top 10, though it did not win.
Why not? They have done it for movie scripts - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunspring
It would be interesting to see what it generates from a Moebius or Miyazaki Corpus
Compare Sunspring (2016).
https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2016/06/an-ai-wrote-this-movie-and-its-strangely-moving/
Hey, I'm one of the creators of this -- I trained the LSTMs that wrote the computer generated segments in this film. The ballet choreography was generated with a context-free grammar, because I couldn't find enough material to make a ballet choreography LSTM.
Here's our film from last year, Sunspring, which was written entirely by an LSTM trained on science fiction screenplays: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LY7x2Ihqjmc
It's worth noting that this year I used subtitle files rather than screenplays to train our LSTMs, so we only had dialogue rather than dialogue + action descriptions. The Ars Technica article explains everything.
> Interesting that the AI is able to produce a meaningful storyline without fully understanding characters
Does it? I think the actors and film makers did a pretty good job of creating a film with meaning and characters, despite not having much to work with. In fact a lot of the fun of this is watching the actors try to make something out of the word salad they've been given.
Edit: If you want to see the script unembellished by the cast and crew it's here https://www.docdroid.net/lCZ2fPA/sunspring-final.pdf.html
It's a damn thing scared to say. Nothing is going to be a thing.