Friday, a startup called fable announcement An ambitious, if scratched, plans to recreate the lost 43 minutes of the classic film of Orson Welles “The magnificent Ambersons.”
Why a startup which presents itself as the “Netflix of AI” and which recently collected from the funds of the Alexa Fund of AmazonTalking about redoing a film that was published for the first time in 1942?
Well, the company has built a platform that allows users to create their own cartoons with IA – fable guests begins with its own intellectual property, but it has Ambitions to offer similar capacities with Hollywood IP. In fact, it has already been used to create Unauthorized episodes “South Park”.
Now Fable is launching a new AI model that can generate long and complex stories. Over the next two years, filmmaker Brian Rose – who has already spent five years Work to digitally rebuild Welles’s original vision – plans to use this model to redo the lost images of “The Magnifice Ambersons”.
Remarkably, Fable did not obtain the rights of the film, which makes it a potential technological demo which will probably never be published to the general public.
Why “Ambersons”? If you are not a film buff that loves Welles, I suppose it looks like an obscure choice for digital resurrection.
Even among classic moviegoers, Welles’ second film is overshadowed by his older and more famous brother. While “Citizen Kane” is often called the biggest film ever made, “Ambersons” is Recalled as a lost masterpiece That the studio has come out of the director’s hands, cutting it radically and adding a happy endless end.
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The reputation of the film – the feeling of loss and what could have been – is probably what interests fable and pink. But it should be emphasized that the only reason why we care about “the magnificent ambers” today is because of Welles – because of the way he has derailed his Hollywood career and the way in which even in his reduced form, he always reveals a large part of his cinema genius.
This makes even more surprising than fable has apparently failed to contact Welles’ succession. David Reeder, who manages the daughter of the daughter of Welles Beatrice, described the project towards variety As “attempt to generate advertising on the back of the creative genius of Welles” and said that this will represent nothing more than “purely mechanical exercise without any of the only innovative thoughts [of] A creative force like Welles.
Despite the criticism of Reeder, he seems less upset by the idea of trying to recreate “Ambersons” and more by the fact that the succession was not “even given by the courtesy of a downstream”. After all, he noted: “The field has adopted AI technology to create a vocal model intended to be used for VO work with brands.”
I am not so open -minded. Even if The heirs of Welles were consulted and compensated, I would have no interest in this new “Ambersons”, just as I have no interest in hearing a digital simulacrum of the legendary Welles used to peddle new products.
Now Welles fans know that this is not the first time that other filmmakers have been trying to Fix posthumously Or finish his films. But at least these attempts used images that Welles had shot down. Fable, meanwhile, describes its planned approach as a hybrid of AI and traditional cinema – apparently, certain scenes will be reshaped with contemporary actors whose faces will then be exchanged for digital recreations of the original distribution.
Despite the absurdity of announcing a project like this without the cinematographic rights or the blessing of the daughter of Welles, at least pink seems motivated by a real desire to honor Welles’s vision. For example, in A statement on the reason he wants to recreate the filmRose has cried the destruction of “an uninterrupted mobile camera of four minutes, an uninterrupted camera whose loss is a tragedy”, with only 50 seconds of the remained in the cut film.
I share his feeling of loss – but I also believe that it is a tragedy that AI cannot cancel.
No matter how fable and pink can be sewing their own version of this tracking photo, it will be their Shot, not Welles, filled with Frankenstein replicas of Joseph Cotten and Agnes Moorehead, not the actors themselves. Their final product will not be the Welles version of “The Magnifice Ambersons” that RKO destroyed over 80 years ago. Except one Miraculous rediscovery of lost imagesThis version has disappeared forever.
