Hacker Cinema
The Predator
2018 · Film · 107 min
Part of Predator Collection
Directed by Shane Black
When a young boy accidentally triggers the universe's most lethal hunters' return to Earth, only a ragtag crew of ex-soldiers and a disgruntled scientist can prevent the end of the human race.
2 negative1 mixed2 neutralfrom 5 commenters
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6 comments on Hacker News
This is a trip down memory lane!
I remember when DeepDream first came out, and WaveNet not long after. I was immediately convinced this stuff was going to play a huge role in media production.
I'm a big hobbyist filmmaker. I told all of my friends who actually work in film (IATSE, SAG, etc.) and they were so skeptical. I tried to get them to make an experimental film using DeepDream.
This was about the same time Intel was dabbling in 360 degree filmmaking and just prior to Epic Games / Disney working on "The Volume".
I bought a bunch of Kinects and built a really low-fidelity real time version of what Intel was working on. The sensors are VGA resolution, so it's not at all cinematic.
When Stable Diffusion came out, I hooked up Blender to image-to-image and fed it frames of previz animations to convert to style transferred anime. Then IP Adapter. Then Animate Diff.
My friends were angry with me at this point. AI was the devil. But I kept at it.
I built an animation system for the web three years ago. Nonlinear timeline editing, camera controls, object transformations. It was really crude and a lot of work to produce simple outputs: https://storyteller.ai/
It was ridiculously hard to use. I typically film live action for the 48 Hour Film Project (twice annual film "hackathon" that I've done since I was a teenager). I used Mocap suits and 3D animation, and this is the result of 48 hours of no sleep:
https://vimeo.com/955680517/05d9fb0c4f
We won two awards for this. The audience booed us.
The image-to-video models came out right after this and immediately sunk this approach. Luma Dream Machine was so easy and looked so much better. Starting frames are just like a director and DP blocking out a scene and then calling action - it solved for the half of the problem I had ignored, which was precisely controlling for look/feel (though this abandons temporal control).
There was a lot of slop, but I admired the work some hard-working people were creating. Those "movie trailers" people were criticizing were easily 10 hours of work with the difficulty of the tech back then.
I found use in model aggregation services like OpenArt and FreePik. ComfyUI is too far removed for me - I appreciate people who can do node magic, but it's not my thing.
I've been working on ArtCraft ( https://github.com/storytold/artcraft ), which is a more artist-centered version for blocking out and precisely articulating scenes.
My friends and I have been making a lot of AI films, and it's almost replaced our photons-on-glass filmmaking output. (We've done some rotoscoped AI + live action work.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tii9uF0nAx4 (live action rotoscoped film)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v_2We_QQfPg (EbSynth sketch about The Predator)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tAAiiKteM-U (Robot Chicken inspired Superman parody)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oqoCWdOwr2U (JoJo grinch parody)
We're going to do a feature length film at some point, but we're still building up the toolbox.
If you're skeptical about artists using AI, you should check out Corridor Crew. They're well respected in our field, they have been for over a decade, and they love AI:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corridor_Digital
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DSRrSO7QhXY
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GVT3WUa-48Y
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iq5JaG53dho
They're big ComfyUI fans. I just can't get used to it.
Real filmmakers and artists are using this tech now. If you hate AI, please know that we see this more as an exoskeleton than as a replacement. It enables us to reach the look and feel of a $100+ million dollar Pixar, Star Wars, or Marvel film without the budgets we could never have without insane luck or nepotism.
If anything, this elevates us to a place where we will one day be competing with Disney. They should fear us instead of the other way around.
Cameron doubled down on the aesthetic in Aliens, he just changed the genre from horror to action. Both films were "peak 80s" (Alien was '79) and just ooze with what must be the absolute pinnacle of science fiction vibes.
If you haven't seen these two films, you need to fix that this week. It'll change your life.
Scott tried to expand the aesthetics with Prometheus and Covenant. I felt the films did a great job of refreshing the look and feel while remaining faithful to the 80's. Unfortunately, the writing was trite and Scott's directing is averaging .200 at bat these days.
Romulus was not bad, though certainly not a masterpiece. At least it was better written and had better character arcs than Scott's recent films.
I'd rather have the performance of this series than whatever Jurassic Park or Star Wars have become.
Predator, oddly enough, has strangely been improving if you don't count Shane Black's entry.
I'm happy they keep making these, and I hope the writers and directors at the reigns keep experimenting rather than conforming to "safe" or "understandable by a general audience".
Trigger Warning: Gonna talk about sexual assault and physical abuse below.
"caregiver" is a big red flag for me. I'm on the autistic spectrum. My parents took a different tact and let me become an emancipated minor at 15. I'm not gonna say they did their best or that that was a good thing to do... I cannot as an adult fathom just letting the kid go to the wolves... but I survived.
There is a massive contingent of people that HATE autistic people and feel like it's something to be "fixed". A lot of them frame that hate as helping.
There are tons of laws and very questionable care giving organizations. The history is brutal. Frequently they are handed over to people who get into the role of caring for these people because they want to beat and rape people who can't complain (see Jimmy Savile). This isn't that dissimilar from the highly publicize Britany Spears conservatorship. There is money in taking care of an adult with "the mind of a 12 year old" also you can beat and rape them if you wanna.
There is an old and "hippie dippie" model for spectrum disorders where they refer to them as indigo children and they claim that kids used to be called that because the baby was replaced by fairies and now speaks truths beyond their years. Look at the classic traits of a vampire. Being scared of water, can count things very fast, maybe has surprising strength and old wisdom.
Autistic people aren't extra wise, they span the range of dipshit to genius like any other category of people. Autistic people do spend a lot of extra energy trying to predict a world that is confusing and hostile to them and when they vocalize how they navigate said world, it creeps people out who have to deal with a society that says lying is wrong but the rule actually is "fuck it, do whatever you can get away with."
If you get hooked up to "caregivers" that take away your agency and you are an outlet of justifiable (to the abuser) sadism for them you can't run far enough. The state will put you back in their arms.
Autism Speaks is a eugenics organization. Autism does not mean a person is unaware of the world around them, actually quite the opposite. Also the messaging that autism can be a super power is the same thing in disguise (see the most recent Predator movie or Baby Driver). It's a sensory disorder. It's not a lack of emotion, it's that overload frequently makes it difficult to respond to people and situations as "normal people" expect so abuse becomes a default mode for "caregivers". There are organizations that are CURRENTLY advocating for electric shock or physical harm to help "correct" autism.
Yeah... (speaking about the perspective of a hypothetical person in a situation of abuse) Change your name, run away, hop trains. RUN if you can because you're autistic enough to see that people will always abuse you in any situation where you're put into the care of the ghouls that own your name. Even the Arc and Autism Self Advocacy Network have some massive problems including putting autistic people with weird abusive special interests into positions to hurt people who just want to live their fucking lives.
I recently saw this video by a fellow I really relate to where he lays out all the things I say in a fit some times but... yeah. They lay it all out. The history of helping the disabled is pretty wrought with not checking in with the disabled. Also, I think they are a hilarious humorist and the rest of their stuff is fun.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sOlEjWaejAw - You Don't Seem Autistic - or - How I Learned to Love the Meritocracy _ Woohooligan Comedy
Given the quality of big budget films like The Last Jedi and The Predator, I would say they have attacked the wrong target.
Or maybe the battle has already been won.
I'll ramble on... I don't know, I certainly think that older action movies engage me more than new super hero movies in terms of characters. To some extent I guess it boils down to the fact that it's hard to suspend disbelief and make the protagonist relatable when he's got magic powers that he only uses while wearing spandex/latex.
Even the soldiers in The Predator seem more relatable and develop in more interesting and believable ways. Given their backgrounds, they react to the circumstances in plausible ways. The film doesn't hand you their backgrounds by having the first 30 minutes be some sort of genesis story and a montage, but by having the characters do what they do in a way that tells us more and more about them as the film progresses. I wouldn't call The Predator "subtle" but everything is relative.
It's seen as facile within the industry. Hence the reputation and lack of prestigious awards recognition. Easy to write, cheap to produce, and now in the digital era, the jump cut scare tricks and camera effects can be inserted by the dozen. See the trailer for Blumhouse's The Nun to get a sense.
But with the blockbuster success of films like It, Get Out, and A Quiet Place we will see something never witnessed before in cinema history: the coming of the big budget horror flick. I think The Conjuring 2 budget was upwards of $40M. And it looked terrific. The upcoming Venom and Shane Black's The Predator are no doubt deeply influenced by classic horror tropes.
But for the real deal. Still nothing compares to the classics. I finally got to screen David Cronenberg's Videodrome the other night. Holy Guacamole. They don't make anything quite like that anymore ;)