On Monday, District 9 and Gran Turismo director Neill Blomkamp unveiled his latest project: a 13-minute sci-fi short titled Nightborne that’s loosely based on Peter Watts’ 2014 novel Echopraxia. The short comes from Blomkamp’s new AI startup / production company, Barley Studios, and features characters whose voices and faces are modeled after human actors. But every single one of Nightborne’s shots was made with ByteDance’s Seedance 2.0 text-to-video generator.
News
Neill Blomkamp’s new zombie AI ‘film’ is just slop warmed over
No amount of clever editing can make this Seedance-generated mess interesting.
Neill Blomkamp’s new zombie AI ‘film’ is just slop warmed over
Details
No amount of clever editing can make this Seedance-generated mess interesting.
In an X post about the short, Blomkamp described it as a “test start” meant to demonstrate what generative AI is capable of, and he said that he wants “to tackle a full feature in this format” at some point in the future. Blomkamp seems to think that Nightborne is a strong proof of concept that might get people intrigued to see what he prompts next. But as polished as the “film” might be compared to most of the AI-generated videos floating around the internet today, it still bears many of the ha
Set against the backdrop of a military conflict between the US and Syria, Nightborne tells the story of an American pilot who sustains life-threatening injuries when her helicopter is shot down. Though most of the pilot’s body is badly injured, she’s still technically alive and her head is intact. Those things make her the ideal candidate for Project Nightborne — a governmental program that turns brain-dead soldiers into remote controlled, weaponized zombies. And because the military has an endl
Analysis
Like basically every other AI-generated film that has come before it, Nightborne is really a collection of very short video clips that have been edited together to tell a simple story. Nightborne frequently cuts from shots of its zombified main character to documentary-style interviews with people involved in Project Nightborne. These cuts give the film — which was edited by Austyn Daines — a way to obfuscate the fact that Seedance 2.0 is only capable of generating a few seconds of video footage
Blomkamp’s creative voice feels almost nonexistent
When you really take a good look at Nightborne’s visuals and listen closely to its audio, it’s easy to pick up on how much gen AI is in the mix. Signs in the background are often written in complete gibberish, and characters deliver their lines with unusual emphases that make them come across like people who don’t actually know what they’re saying. According to Blomkamp, “real concept artists” contributed work to the project, and 32 human actors agreed to have their likenesses used on-screen. Bu
Stay informed with the latest news on Wararka.so — your trusted source for Somalia and world news.
