Star Wars by Wes Anderson

May 4, 2023 8:31 AM

Wow.
posted by Pater Aletheias (57 comments total)

wow… !
posted by mazola at 8:33 AM on May 4, 2023

Wow!
posted by caviar2d2 at 8:36 AM on May 4, 2023

Perfect casting.
posted by warriorqueen at 8:36 AM on May 4, 2023 [1 favorite]

I'm caught between "this is great" and "was this made in AI?" The ScarJo voice was off and the voiceover sounded like a text-to-speech program.
posted by pxe2000 at 8:39 AM on May 4, 2023 [8 favorites]

This is great (although I wish the narrator had pronounced "Willem" correctly). It's definitely at least partially made by AI. It's got the same look as the "Tron as directed by Jodorowski" images that were posted here a while ago.

Also: Wes Anderson's Star Wars Audition Tape from Conan
posted by jonathanhughes at 8:48 AM on May 4, 2023 [7 favorites]

Not a SW fan, but I would pay $$ to watch this.
posted by davidmsc at 8:51 AM on May 4, 2023 [2 favorites]

I work extensively with AI imagery most days and I assure you this is 99% AI imagery, with a little bit of animation on top.
posted by seanmpuckett at 8:51 AM on May 4, 2023 [12 favorites]

Yes it was definitely made mostly with AI and they did a good job with the pastel props, but the whole time I was thinking I liked the one from Conan's show better.
posted by potrzebie at 8:56 AM on May 4, 2023

The reason that you should always put contextual information in an AI post is that somebody, somewhere, is going to be all 'is this AI?'. I mean, it's clearly AI to anybody who has had to look at this stuff. This post on Yahoo tells you how they did it, which is nice. "The trailer itself is a fairly crude step up from the original " says Polygon, in an article about the trailer, which goes on to explore a little bit about the Anderson style and it's current use.
posted by The River Ivel at 9:10 AM on May 4, 2023 [7 favorites]

I dunno. It felt off to me. Not quite Wes Anderson. That made it really not land for me.
posted by kyrademon at 9:16 AM on May 4, 2023 [5 favorites]

They may have taken a few cues from The Midnight Coterie of Sinister Intruders, the SNL pastiche.
posted by credulous at 9:16 AM on May 4, 2023 [10 favorites]

There's so much of this on YouTube. Harry Potter by Balenciaga. Just YouTube search and you'll find some fun AI experiments.

I thought this was well done. But I still only view this as a kind of AI carnival ride that just doesn't quite get everything right.
posted by Fizz at 9:17 AM on May 4, 2023 [4 favorites]

I thought this was great; a spot on parody of Wes Anderson and Star Wars, and well executed. Also I kind of want to watch this movie.

The fact that it's AI is the least interesting part of it. Although AI did make it possible to even create this; it would be an enormous amount more work to actually animate this oneself, or to sign up the actual actors. There's a lot of creative work here in coaxing an AI system to produce these images, it's very well done.
posted by Nelson at 9:23 AM on May 4, 2023 [10 favorites]

Wes Anderson's visual style really lends itself to this sort of thing. Static frames and flat compositions are much easier for AI to generate compared to more complex motion.
posted by theory at 9:31 AM on May 4, 2023 [3 favorites]

That's just brilliant. It's only missing a slide rule and stopwatch to measure the parsecs.
posted by Mchelly at 9:48 AM on May 4, 2023 [2 favorites]

That's a backyard BBQ I would like to attend theory...
posted by Windopaene at 9:50 AM on May 4, 2023

We're f****d.
posted by popcassady at 9:54 AM on May 4, 2023 [3 favorites]

Luke looks more like 90s Jason Schwartzman to me than Timothee Chalamet.
posted by cmfletcher at 10:02 AM on May 4, 2023

Needs more Wilhelm scream.
posted by dywypi at 10:04 AM on May 4, 2023 [2 favorites]

Perfect casting.

Scarlett Johansson and Owen Wilson, not so much. I would've gone with Zendaya and Liam Neeson.

I'd watch this movie but I'd probably wait until it came out on DVD and then I'd check it out from my local library.
posted by fuse theorem at 10:09 AM on May 4, 2023

The reason that you should always put contextual information in an AI post is that somebody, somewhere, is going to be all 'is this AI?'.

Plus it's helpful for the people on the Blue who don't care to support AI-made work and would rather not encounter it untagged in the wild.

AI art "passing" as non-AI art is what's going to make it even harder for human artists to fight back against their replacement in the creative industries (see also: the WGA strike). Even the YouTube video itself doesn't mention the AI involvement and just says it's a fan made trailer. Ick.
posted by fight or flight at 10:28 AM on May 4, 2023 [17 favorites]

Needs more Wilhelm scream.

Or perhaps ... Willem scream.
posted by chavenet at 10:31 AM on May 4, 2023 [8 favorites]

*tilts head*
posted by wenestvedt at 10:39 AM on May 4, 2023 [5 favorites]

I would've gone with Zendaya and Liam Neeson.

Liam Neeson? In my Star Wars? I dunno, seems like a stretch…
posted by mbrubeck at 10:40 AM on May 4, 2023 [5 favorites]

I probably saw it here first, but here's a great description of how SNL put together that MCSI sketch:

https://web.archive.org/web/20230212013924/http://www.alex-buono.com/how-we-did-it-snl-the-midnight-coterie-of-sinister-intruders/
(Alex's site seems down, so archive.org link)

I'm pretty sure there was a video available at one time as well, but that seems lost.
(edit: yes it was here: https://www.metafilter.com/139368/Possibly-more-exacting-in-detail-then-Andersons-work-itself)
posted by stobor at 11:06 AM on May 4, 2023 [2 favorites]

I would absolutely see this over whatever the latest show is on Disney+.
posted by lock robster at 11:27 AM on May 4, 2023 [1 favorite]

Wes Anderson's visual style really lends itself to this sort of thing. Static frames and flat compositions are much easier for AI to generate compared to more complex motion.

So Wes Anderson is an AI? I knew it!
posted by Abehammerb Lincoln at 11:29 AM on May 4, 2023 [1 favorite]

Liam Neeson? In my Star Wars? I dunno, seems like a stretch…

Hah, I'll take that hit! I was in a hurry to come up with a tall actor and didn't bother googling first. But damn, it's hard to find someone who isn't already attached to the SW movie/TV universe. How about Dolph Lundgren?
posted by fuse theorem at 11:40 AM on May 4, 2023

The joke with the casting is that all (or at least most) of the people are in Anderson's stable of actors that appear regularly in his movies. Thus, Owen Wilson pretty much has to be in the movie. Some roles were cast sort-of appropriately; Wilson as Vader is obviously ridiculous so it's the last one.
posted by LionIndex at 11:45 AM on May 4, 2023 [6 favorites]

The Owen Wilson thing is funny if you imagine him never taking off the Vader helmet and somebody else doing the voice over. Like Daniel Craig and Stephen Colbert being stormtroopers in the recent movies.
posted by straight at 11:58 AM on May 4, 2023 [4 favorites]

fight or flight: "AI art "passing" as non-AI art is what's going to make it even harder for human artists to fight back against their replacement in the creative industries (see also: the WGA strike). Even the YouTube video itself doesn't mention the AI involvement and just says it's a fan made trailer. Ick."

I get what you're saying here, but this isn't like someone said "Hey ChatGPT give me Star Wars, but Wes Anderson" and this popped out, whole cloth. This fan-made trailer is in and of itself a creation, by a person using a tool. I can understand dislike of the tools the person used. But tools don't do anything on their own, and we have a very long history of developing better tools for creative work that make the act of creation more accessible to users. I mean, I don't devalue work done in Photoshop because the person didn't use a film camera in a real darkroom, or ink on paper, or oil on canvas. In most respects I feel that this isn't really that different. Someone had to come up with the idea, generate a script, create the scenes, and put their creation out there for us to see. How good the output is will still be determined by their vision, their faculty or skill with the tools, and how hard they are willing to work to make it look like they desired.

I'm all for hating on a lot of what is going on with AI right now, but I'm not icked out by this specific use case as a one-off joke. If you want to rail against AI-generated "news" now, THAT I can get behind, let's burn that in a fire together...
posted by caution live frogs at 11:59 AM on May 4, 2023 [15 favorites]

I think an actual movie made like this with AI would be dull and charmless, but as a silly joke, stuff like this or US Presidents with mullets makes me laugh and I have a hard time getting upset. Because they're not supposed to be good and they're not really the sort of thing a human artist would have done if the AI didn't exist.

AI making dumb jokes that aren't worth the time and effort it would take a human artist to make them seems like an okay use of the technology.
posted by straight at 12:05 PM on May 4, 2023 [6 favorites]

Someone had to come up with the idea, generate a script, create the scenes, and put their creation out there for us to see.

Caleb Ward claims at least that “the core idea, script, shot list, scenes, animations, description and tags” were all machine-generated. “Whenever I needed a script, I simply asked ChatGPT to write one.”

(I’m not sure exactly what he means by “the core idea” being conceived by AI.)
posted by mbrubeck at 12:20 PM on May 4, 2023 [1 favorite]

The joke with the casting is that all (or at least most) of the people are in Anderson's stable of actors that appear regularly in his movies. Thus, Owen Wilson pretty much has to be in the movie.

And there went the FPP's premise flying so far over my head that it left the Earth's atmosphere.

I guess now I have to be more careful which Wes Anderson films I watch in the future.

Back to the potential dangers of using AI to imitate an artist's work, I would think a movie like Wes Anderson's remake of Star Wars would be too inside baseball to appeal to anyone but his most hardcore fans.
posted by fuse theorem at 12:29 PM on May 4, 2023

The Fourth Hope.
"In a fast bid to rid the empire of the malevolent Darth Vader, a rag tag group of simulated AI storyline characters attempts to replay history, one droid at a time.
posted by clavdivs at 1:06 PM on May 4, 2023 [1 favorite]

Cute, but no George Lucas in Love - short movie - Star Wars - YouTube. May the fourth be with you.
posted by zengargoyle at 1:29 PM on May 4, 2023 [1 favorite]

It's incredibly disingenuous to equate visual and video machine learning to software tools like Photoshop.

Machine learning relies on the scraping of the work produced by human artists, and does not compensate them for that appropriation whatsoever. In its current iteration, it is 100 percent exploitative of other people's work. I don't care how much 'effort' someone had to put in when creating the prompts that spat out this video anymore than I admire how many times a ringmaster has to crack the whip to get an elephant to dance around on its hind legs.

Photoshop is, um, not that at all. If you can't see the difference between these two things, then you have almost no understanding of how modern photography/cinema/visual art is created.

--someone who pays artists for their work on a regular basis.
posted by jordantwodelta at 2:06 PM on May 4, 2023 [16 favorites]

this is so perfect.
posted by bluesky43 at 2:17 PM on May 4, 2023

Here's a question for you: are videos like this fun because of the images they contain, or are they fun because you get to see how a mind interprets one thing in terms of the other? If it's the latter, then this video being mostly the product of a machine generator (a much more accurate term than AI for this) makes it substantially worse, because there was no internal process to try to sort the two things out, it's just slapping two ideas together, and any actual cleverness involved was accidental.

Also: I doubt that 99% of this was machine-generated. Maybe 90%. Probably whatever little bits of wit you can observe, like the credit of Adam Driver for Chewbacca, originate from a human mind. If all the structure of a thing was someone's idea, but all the image generation came from a computer, then what would you say is the proportion between the two?
posted by JHarris at 2:37 PM on May 4, 2023

It was Adrien Brody as Chewbacca. Trying out some prompts with ChatGPT, it is happy to make that suggestion all on its own. (It also cast Tilda Swinton as “a mysterious Jedi master” in the same response. Does this mean she gets to play Yoda?)
posted by mbrubeck at 2:58 PM on May 4, 2023

Something about Yoda's mouth made me think he was supposed to be Fred Armisen.
posted by Mister Moofoo at 3:10 PM on May 4, 2023

It's incredibly disingenuous to equate visual and video machine learning to software tools like Photoshop.

Adobe integrating its own image generator into Photoshop, trained on licensed images. Machine learning is coming soon to an awful lot of classic software tools.
posted by BungaDunga at 3:11 PM on May 4, 2023 [1 favorite]

This take on the X-men is older and more lo-fi, but clearly made with love.
posted by jomato at 3:41 PM on May 4, 2023 [6 favorites]

This looks much better without the cheapo voice-over.

(Maybe a twee xylophone/uke soundtrack?)
posted by ovvl at 4:48 PM on May 4, 2023 [1 favorite]

stobor, I'm exhausted and also in awe reading that account. I knew a lot goes into those weekly SNL films but .. wow, as they say.
posted by credulous at 5:25 PM on May 4, 2023

Scarjo looks way more like Millie Bobbie Brown.
posted by Ursula Hitler at 8:26 PM on May 4, 2023 [1 favorite]

It was Adrien Brody as Chewbacca.

Now I want to see Adrien Brody as Chewbacca in The Pianist.
posted by flabdablet at 8:42 PM on May 4, 2023

(I’m not sure exactly what he means by “the core idea” being conceived by AI.)
I had just finished reading Monica Ali's book Brick Lane - so to test out Bing Chat (in "creative mode") I asked it if it could recommend how to adapt the book to make an opera. Bing looked at a synopsis of the book and then digested it to suggest an outline split into five summarised acts. Where necessary it re-arranged the book's ordering to work a little better for opera - picking our the timing and subject of the key aria and the content of the final act. As a follow up question, I asked what sort of music it would use - and it suggested a mixture of specific Bengali instruments and folk song structures - mixed in with those of London from the 80s to the millennium. It even speculated a little about the likely commercial success of such a production (it was confident ). All that took maybe 5 minutes.

So it seems like the AI models are pretty good at not just showing you how visually "Star wars characters rendered in the style of Wes Anderson" but also creating a mapping between the elements which lets you spit out a suggested narrative. It maybe all works best when the styles feeding in are very distinctive: Wes Anderson's visual composition and Star Wars voicovers, for example.

Comparing with actuals source material for trailers - lets say the original 1976 Star Wars trailer and Wes Anderson's Asteroid City we can see that the missing element is snappy dialogue spoken by the actors themselves.
posted by rongorongo at 11:29 PM on May 4, 2023

aah you're right, I was getting Adam Driver mixed up with Adrian Brody. Truthfully, I don't know a lot of big Hollywood actors that are popular now. I don't pay movies a lot of mind. (Adrian Brody seems less clever as a reference than Adam Driver would have been, since Driver is a pretty big person.)
posted by JHarris at 11:33 PM on May 4, 2023

This looks much better without the cheapo voice-over.

It's funny that, after all the comments criticizing using AI for production, voicing fears over the replacement of human artists, etc, there's a pan of what's likely the one part of the whole video voiced by the actual human fan who made all this.

I'm not disagreeing with said pan—it very much sounds like fanmade videos usually sound—but it does sorta underscore why fans would be drawn to the AI route. Most things that most people make are bad, so those people will look for ways to make things that are better.

(I both agree with jordantwodelta that AI in its present form is inherently unethical, and I agree with caution live frogs that using AI to create things can be a labor of love. I do not think that AI will replace live-action fan goofery any time soon, and would love for people to find a way to make a suite of far-less-unethical AI tools so I can find these videos amusing in less-morally-complicated ways.)
posted by Tom Hanks Cannot Be Trusted at 2:38 AM on May 5, 2023 [1 favorite]

there's a pan of what's likely the one part of the whole video voiced by the actual human fan who made all this

I would be pretty surprised if that were not an AI voice. There are some very weird inflections that don't read as stylistic choices to me, and the lispy sound suggests low-sample rate audio.

Anyway, this is a lot of fun and I like it a lot and the AI concerns are real (if there's not a reckoning really, really soon about how the models are trained, we're in a lot of trouble).
posted by uncleozzy at 5:20 AM on May 5, 2023

It's cute but feels like it's about ten years late.
posted by octothorpe at 6:37 AM on May 5, 2023 [1 favorite]

Yes, the voiceover was also computer-generated, as stated in the interview with Caleb Ward linked above. “Instead of hiring a voice actor, I used an AI voiceover generator for the VO artist.”
posted by mbrubeck at 7:00 AM on May 5, 2023

This is neither interesting (in and of itself) nor creative. It is exactly the sort of soulless, ersatz, off-by-many error, barely-even-mid version of a Star Wars/Wes Anderson mash-up that you'd expect from AI. It's three broad tics from the two inputs splattered across an a single odd aspect ratio. There's nothing FUN about it. Owen Wilson as any character saying "Wow" is a joke that was dated 10 years ago. Every other face is off-center by 1-8%. Adrien Brody as Chewbacca should at least provoke a raised eyebrow. Why is literally everyone's tic a head tilt?

One of the things that humans are good at is making interesting choices, where AI makes average choices. Presidents with mullets is interesting because it's an unexpected mash-up (which, duh, is a human choice). Anderson and Star Wars is an obvious mash-up, so it requires thoughtful, off-beat, different choices about how the mash-up will work. To be interesting, it would have to actively avoid the obvious. But AI cannot deviate from the obvious and so we get this.

[NB: Pater Aletheias, none of this is a criticism of you. If you hadn't shared this, I wouldn't have had an opportunity to think through some ideas I've had about AI. Thank you for sharing!]
posted by aureliobuendia at 10:25 AM on May 5, 2023 [5 favorites]

I found out when I was looking for Star Wars things to show on MST Club last night that this isn't the first Wes Anderson/Star Wars mashup. In fact, it's not even the second. One was by Feingold Films, the other produced (I think) by Team Coco.
posted by JHarris at 1:48 PM on May 5, 2023 [2 favorites]

Thanks to the power of AI, what would have once been a single drawing on a t-shirt of a very Wes Anderson poster for an imaginary Wes Anderson remake of Star Wars can now be stretched to an entire minute of video! Huzzah! Progress!
posted by egypturnash at 2:25 PM on May 11, 2023

Guardian article: Please stop using AI to make Wes Anderson parodies - I like the observation about Wes Anderson himself being by far and away the most skilled creator of parody Wes Anderson trailers.
posted by rongorongo at 10:47 PM on May 11, 2023