Directeur photo depuis + de 30 ans, film, numérique, 3D et IA. Lorsque le temps le permet, je partage (blog, cours, livre). Curriculum designer.
Joined January 2007
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Pascal Montjovent retweeted
So I recently badgered my cinematographer @steveyedlin into making my ideal iPhone still camera app. It shoots RAW, bypasses the iPhone's look processing and instead uses the same image processing we use on our movies. apps.apple.com/app/apple-sto…
Pascal Montjovent retweeted
This is perhaps one of the great ironies of our time: China is increasingly shaping the future of AI, yet very few people in the West have the faintest idea how its key thinkers see it - its philosophers, sociologists or ethicists.
As is too often the case, we - much like the frog in the well - assume our own AI debate covers every possible view, when much of it springs from the same cultural soil, built on assumptions about what defines us that we don’t even know we’re making.
Take for instance the assumption that intelligence is a key part of what makes us human. It’s so intuitively obvious to us that we literally named our species after it - Homo sapiens (Latin for "wise man").
If you think about it, just this assumption explains a large share of the anxiety: if intelligence is what makes us human, then artificial intelligence - or super intelligence - threatens the very thing that makes us us: we’re about to compete with artificial or super “us”. No wonder this feels existential.
But China has a tradition of thought as old as ours, if not older, and every bit as rich and sophisticated, which never placed intelligence at the core of what makes us human, and so meets the thinking machine from a completely different starting point.
Have you, for instance, ever heard of Zhao Tingyang? Probably not, and yet he may be the most original thinker on AI you’ve never read. He’s one of China’s most prominent philosophers, at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. While Silicon Valley spends billions trying to make AI share our values, he for one argues that doing so “may very well be a suicidal mistake”.
Sounds pretty important to hear him out, don’t you think?
Or take Liu Yongmou, a philosopher of technology at Renmin University in Beijing. His thinking is almost the opposite of ours. Where we fear machines that become more and more like us, he says that “humanity’s biggest problem is the machinization of humans, not the humanization of machines.”
You could even go back to antiquity, when, in many ways, we started asking questions about AI.
Did you know, for instance, that Aristotle, in the Politics, imagined a world where “the shuttle would weave and the plectrum touch the lyre without a hand to guide them”, and wondered about the social order consequences of this (mostly whether slaves would still be needed)?
There are Chinese equivalents to this. For instance, in the Zhuangzi, a foundational Taoist classic, you’ll find a similar thought experiment, with a completely different worry attached. An old gardener is watering his vegetables by hand, hauling water out of a well jar by jar. A visitor shows him a labor-saving device, and the gardener turns it down for the reason that whoever uses machines ends up with 机心 (jīxīn), a “machine-heart” - a mind that schemes, calculates and loses its simplicity. “It is not that I do not know [the machine],” he says, “but I should be ashamed to use it.”
Two labor-saving machines, two very different questions: where Aristotle wondered what automation would do to the social order, the Zhuangzi wondered what it would do to us, on the inside. Which, you’ll notice, is exactly Liu Yongmou’s worry, more than two thousand years earlier.
In fact, as we’ll see, 心 (xīn), the heart, is a motif that runs deep through the Chinese AI debate. It appears both in the fear, from Zhuangzi to Liu Yongmou, that machines could give us a “machine-heart” and its mirror image: the ambition to give machines a heart of their own. Zhu Songchun, who heads the Beijing Institute for General Artificial Intelligence, wants “to set a heart for machines” (为机器立心, wèi jīqì lì xīn).
“Heart” in the Chinese sense, that is, which differs totally from the Valentine's Day fluff we’ve reduced it to. 心 (xīn) means heart and mind at once: it’s where we feel but also where we think, tell right from wrong and care for others.
And, crucially, it’s in the heart that the quality Confucianism sees as the very definition of a human being takes root: 仁 (rén). We need two words to translate it, “benevolence” and “humaneness”, but in Chinese they’re one and the same: to be benevolent is to be human. It’s not about intelligence.
This is the entire point of my new article: to step out of our well for a moment and peer over the edge of China's.
What you’ll find there will, I think, surprise you, with questions you’d never thought to ask: from Zhao Tingyang warning that AI’s bad consequences can at least be fought, but that “humanity may die of all the good things AI creates”, to whether the fear that AI will make us “useless” rests on the false premise that a person is worth what they’re useful for.
A premise that a 2,300-year-old Taoist tree, which survived precisely because it was useless, demolished long ago. Could our predicted uselessness turn out, much like that tree’s, to be our saving grace?
Chinese thinkers’ answers to these questions are, I think, among the most interesting anyone has given to the defining question of our time. Whether or not you agree with them, they’re the intellectual backdrop of a country shaping much of AI, and with it our future: you might as well know what they think.
Enjoy the read here: arnaudbertrand.substack.com/…
Pascal Montjovent retweeted
If you're envious, jealous, or just angry that @jennykrakovsky got a BBC interview, I suggest you watch the whole thing.
If the argument is that she's getting unwarranted attention, or that you or someone else deserves more credit for being an AI innovator, you might want to notice that she had an actual plan to get publicity. Seems like whenever an AI creator complains about the X algorithm or the "wrong" people being promoted, I can't spot their plan to do something about it. If someone in the past deserved more attention, what was their plan to get it, and what went wrong?
Her plan was risky, as she mentions in the interview, particularly for her professionally. But the largest risk was just the amount of work involved, and trying to do it under a self-imposed deadline. But she did the work. And, as planned, she got some publicity for her project.
But going from 0 to 3.5K followers on X in a few months when you're producing a ton of interesting niche content on a topic a lot of people are interested in doesn't require a conspiracy. That seems like a modestly successful result from a clever plan.
Getting a little over 700 subscribers on YouTube, and a few hundred views on her challenge videos doesn't feel like an MI-6 plot. It was clear from the first videos that she had a lot more going on than just a laptop, one frumpy outfit and an attic. The plan was too good, the presentation simple but clever. That was soon explained when she talked about her film school, producing and marketing background. While I was never fooled into thinking Jenny was Eliza Doolittle, it was also clear she wasn't Vesper.
Get real folks. Ben Affleck getting half a billion dollars for an AI startup is a conspiracy. An international shrimp sex cult getting huge write ups to predict AI will be the end of mankind is a conspiracy. Charlie Curran @charliebcurran getting millions of views for his Titty Killer series is… well, that's not a conspiracy. At least so far.
As far as Jenny's BBC interview, my father was a newspaper reporter back in the 50s and 60s and he said the one story editors never turn down is "small town kid does good." Doesn't matter if it's a small town or a big city. It's news that someone in your community has success. Even small success.
My first thought on seeing that she was podcasting from the UK was, I bet the BBC will eventually pick up this story. She went to a prestigious film school, has been a local ad producer (hires local crews) for major brands, won some awards for live action shorts, and quite likely hangs out at the pub with other people in the British entertainment industry. Why wouldn't they do a story about her? Why wouldn't she know someone to call at the BBC, or have a friend who did?
And it's for a PODCAST. It's not BBC1 prime time. Why wouldn't a BBC podcast (not a particularly notable one) do a podcast about a podcaster? Do you really think they had to send in Danger Man to make that happen?
Now, she's certainly had some lucky breaks. She was locked in a South London cupboard as a small child and grew up with a British accent Americans inexplicably think is super charming. Blame Mary Poppins or the Beatles.
And, early in her challenge, Roger Avary got interested and offered to help her with distribution. This might seem odd, but Avary is already building his own AI company, is working on an AI distribution system with Pulp Time @pulptimetv, (which is promoting a lot of other AI creators) and if you've listened to him on podcasts you'll know he specifically talked about creating a way to market small films during slow midweek periods at multiplexes. What kinds of films did he say work for that? Ones that appeal to women. Like Boss. Also quite possible he read the script or saw a rough cut before he committed, which implies it's pretty good.
Ironically, the only video Jenny put out that was unusually, "conspiratorially," viral only exploded because haters (pro-AI and anti-A) jumped in to attack her and hugely raised its engagement.
Some have commented that it's suspicious it's taking so long for it to come out. Well, as someone with about twenty years in digital feature production, if your plan is theatrical distribution, add at least a year to your plan to make that happen properly. There's a lot more involved than uploading to YouTube.
If you do think she's gotten unfair attention, be prepared because it's going to get a whole lot worse. Because she had a plan. And the hard part of the plan is over. The plan worked. So be prepared for:
If the film does even modestly well in America (whatever that means for a micro budget AI film), there's going to be a lot more press attention from Hollywood. And likely a lot of interest in her other old scripts. Maybe even some Hollywood development deals to jump in on this new British AI auteur fad.
If it's perceived as doing well in America, you can be damn sure that it will get at least some small theatrical distribution in Britain at some point. And yes, more BBC coverage and likely a BBC or other UK streaming deal.
It won't take a James Bond conspiracy if some 40ish British actress looks at the film and wants to star in a live action version, directed by Krakovsky. There aren't a lot of great parts for women in that age range, and this appears to be a great role. Oh, and guess what haters, it's exactly the kind of project an American actress in her 40's with a studio production deal might want to do an American adaption of. Will Felix Leiter get to Jenny first?
As she's says in the interview, there's not a lot going on in Britain's entertainment industry these days. It's a little depressed. One would assume she's already getting offers by UK startups to help build that industry.
So if you're jealous, pay attention and study her plan. Borrow what you can to come up with your own plan to take advantage of your own situation. Or at least understand you do need a plan if you want publicity.
What did I personally learn from her successful plan?
1. There's a lot more interest in AI feature films than I thought.
2. You shouldn't limit yourself to what is perceived to be "popular" genres or four quadrant IP. It might work better to pick niche ones.
3. Don't spend all your time trying to make it look like it's not AI. The whole point is that it's AI.
4. It helps to number posts around a common theme so people can find out where they left off. It helps to create a lot of content for the few fans that really want to dig into it, even if the majority of X won't bother.
5. There's a lot of interest in the process of making AI videos, not just in prompts or instructional videos, but the actual creative choices an individual is using. Particularly if the project has some artistic ambition.
6. Don't pick an insane deadline. Worked once, I don't think it will work again. And it just about killed Jenny the first time.
Meanwhile, if you're just a hater, go on hating, because the engagement always helps her.
xitter.gq/jennykrakovsky/status/…
Full interview: youtube.com/watch?v=gOYOVgwG…
Pascal Montjovent retweeted
THE ITALIAN JOB (1969)
Before shooting the Indiana Jones trilogy, cinematographer Douglas Slocombe lensed this visually vibrant and geometrically composed, kinetic caper. He delivered a playful tone with precision craftsmanship.
Pascal Montjovent retweeted
When a vfx pro like hector conjures up worlds in houdini using voice notes - it just mogs all other opus builds.
Seasoned creators can zoom out to create at an unprecedented scale without losing track of the details.
Because they go from playing the instruments to conducting the orchestra.
En esta prueba he querido poner Claude al límite con Houdini (modelo Opus 5.5). He montado toda la escena hablándole al iPhone para ver dónde está el límite, y mi conclusión es que no hay límite. Esto que veis es donde he puesto el freno, hay cosas que corregir aún pero quiero seguir experimentando con otros proyectos.
El render ha tardado 50 horas en mi 5090 dado lo compleja que es la escena, volumétricas etc.
El color grading lo he hecho en Davinci trabajando en Aces y también lo hice hablándole al teléfono con el MCP de Davinci.
Me cuesta imaginar un futuro donde no vayamos a trabajar con esto de forma masiva.
Pascal Montjovent retweeted
Toni Schneiders.
In 1949, he was a founding member of the Fotoform group.
“I am a curious person, but I am serious about my work, and if I succeed in making visible only a little of the magic of light and a touch of poetry in my pictures, this is luck enough for me.”
Pascal Montjovent retweeted
It is hard to work out why the ending sequences of Mirror by Tarkovsky is so moving.
It gets me every time.
What is it that's so emotional in that tracking shot of the grandmother and the children as the camera moves back through the forest?
link below 👇
Pascal Montjovent retweeted
Sylvia Serfati sur la révolution de l'IA en mathématiques
"La plupart des résultats d'OpenAI mériteraient la médaille Fields".
"Les preuves sont d'une complexité incroyable et aussi parfois d'une beauté impressionnante. C'est-à-dire que nous n'avons pas le monopole de la beauté."
Passionnante réflexion des mathématiciens @Amaury_Hayat et Sylvia Serfati sur l'avenir de leur profession à l'ère de l'IA : la résolution de problèmes ne sera plus notre rôle, et poser les bonnes questions, sans doute que même l'IA le fera mieux que nous à terme...
Pascal Montjovent retweeted
Martin Lewis who died in obscurity in 1962 was a retired art teacher who found some success in his early career, but was largely forgotten. He spent his last three decades teaching other people how to etch, including Edward Hopper.
History chose Hopper, but Lewis was his mentor.
Pascal Montjovent retweeted
"Ikiru" (1952) is a kind of movie that once seen, it is impossible to forget. It is the sort of movie that has the potential to change someone's life or at the very least their worldview. Akira Kurosawa has directed better movies, but this is probably his most important and unique work. It is a kind of movie most directors would be afraid to touch, especially those concerned more about the commercial side of the industry. It is, in my view, the best performance in Takashi Shimura's long career.
Pascal Montjovent retweeted
The secret of what is true and beautiful in cinema lies within Tarkovsky's Mirror (1975).
It's almost impossible to pin down or to replicate - it just happened, miraculously and under restrictive filming conditions.
Every filmmaker should study this film.
Pascal Montjovent retweeted
It still baffling to me that people still think AI video is rolling a dice. We're so beyond that.
Jonathan Degueldre from South Africa, clearly shows how you can direct using very low poly assets, and by combining high quality assets, you can scope a car commercial for pennies.
Car folks know this is expensive to shoot IRL, so anything you can do pre-viz or even to remove a location shoot all together, is worth exploring.
Pascal Montjovent retweeted
People always ask us WHY we spend tens of thousands of dollars per episode.
The answer is simple.
We're taking baby steps until we make our $200M looking feature film.
You get to copy our entire playbook each week.
Full 3D process and Dreamina prompts below👇🏼🧵
Pascal Montjovent retweeted
I was reflecting on how many random contingencies went into creating the current accelerating AI moment and had Opus 5.5 put together a video, inspired by old science show Connections, to try and point out how a series of initially unrelated ideas led to the moment we are in now.
Pascal Montjovent retweeted
Nick Brandt visited five animal sanctuaries in Africa to portray the people displaced by droughts and the creatures whose very existence is under threat.
“We need to be far better stewards of the earth. We all need to learn to be good ancestors .”
2020.
