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Engadget
18-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Engadget
Engadget Podcast: Ancestra director Eliza McNitt defends AI as a creative tool
Eliza McNitt is no stranger to new media. Her 2017 project, Fistful of Stars , was a fascinating look at stellar birth in virtual reality, while her follow-up Spheres explored black holes and the death of stars. Now with her short film Ancestra , McNitt has tapped into Google's AI tools to tell a deeply personal story. Working with Google Deepmind and director Darren Aronofsky's studio Primordial Soup, McNitt used a combination of live-action footage and AI-generated media to tell the story of her own traumatic birth. The result is an uncanny dramatic short where the genuine emotion of the live-action performance wrestles agains the artificiality of AI imagery. The film begins when the lead's (Audrey Corsa, playing McNitt's mother) routine natal care appointment turns into an emergency delivery. From that point on we hear her opine on how her child and all living things in the universe are connected — evoking the poetic nature of Terrence Malick's films. We jump between Corsa's performance, AI footage and macro- and micro-photography. In the end, Corsa holds a baby that was inserted by Google's AI, using prompts that make it look like McNitt as an infant. To view this content, you'll need to update your privacy settings. Please click here and view the "Content and social-media partners" setting to do so. There's no escaping the looming shadow of Google's AI ambitions. This isn't just an art film — it's an attempt at legitimizing the use of AI tools through McNitt's voice. That remains a problem when Google's models, including Veo and other technology from DeepMind, have been trained on pre-existing content and copyrighted works. A prestigious short coming from Darren Aronofsky's production studio isn't enough to erase that original sin. "I was challenged to create an idea that could incorporate AI," McNitt said in an interview on the Engadget Podcast. "And so for me, I wanted to tell a really deeply personal story in a way that I had not been able to before... AI really offered this opportunity to access these worlds where a camera cannot go, from the cosmos to the inner world of being within the mother's womb." This embedded content is not available in your region. When it comes to justifying the use of AI tools, which at the moment can credibly be described as plagiaristic technology, McNitt says that's a decision every artist will have to make for themselves. In the case of Ancestra , she wanted to use AI to accomplish difficult work, like creating a computer generated infant that looked like her, based on photos taken by her father. She found that to be more ethical than bringing in a real newborn, and the results more convincing than a doll or something animated by a CG artist. "I felt the use of AI was really important for this story, and I think it's up to every artist to decide how they wanna use these tools and define that," she said. "That was something else for me in this project where I had to define a really strong boundary where I did not want actors to be AI actors, [they] had to be humans with a soul. I do not feel that an performance can be recreated by a machine. I do deeply and strongly believe that humanity can only be captured through human beings. And so I do think it's really important to have humans at the center of the stories." To that end, McNitt also worked with dozens of artists create the sound, imagery and AI media in Ancestra . There's a worry that AI video tools will let anyone plug in a few prompts and build projects out of low-effort footage, but McNitt says she closely collaborated with a team of DeepMind engineers who crafted prompts and sifted through the results to find the footage she was looking for. (We ran out of time before I could ask her about the environmental concerns from using generative AI, but at this point we know it requires a significant amount of electricity and water. That includes demands for training models as well as running them in cloud.) To view this content, you'll need to update your privacy settings. Please click here and view the "Content and social-media partners" setting to do so. "I do think, as [generative AI] evolves, it's the responsibility of companies to not be taking copyrighted materials and to respect artists and to set those boundaries, so that artists don't get taken advantage of," McNitt said, when asked about her thoughts on future AI models that compensate artists and aren't built on stolen copyrighted works. "I think that that's a really important part of our role as humans going forward. Because ultimately, These are human stories for other human beings. And so it's, you know, important that we are at the center of that." If you buy something through a link in this article, we may earn commission.
Yahoo
25-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
'It feels alive': The Legend of Ochi director on the power of puppets
The Legend of Ochi feels like a film that shouldn't exist today. It's an original story, not an adaptation of an already popular book or comic. It's filled with complex puppetry and practical effects, something many films avoid because CG is simply easier to deal with. And it evokes some of the scarier children's films of the '80s and '90s, like the nightmare-inducing adaptation of Roald Dahl's The Witches. According to Isaiah Saxon, the film's writer and director, it was a struggle to get The Legend of Ochi made. "The attempt to make the film took longer than the making of the film," he said in an interview on the Engadget Podcast. " I think it's extremely hard to reach kids with your first film because kids are kind of behind this kind of corporatized IP world now. But I really wanted to reach kids with my first film and, and so that's why it took so long." Whenever he received a bit of funding for the film, Saxon says he used it to prototype creatures with London's John Nolan Studios, which has built animatronics for films like Jurassic World Dominion, as well as scouted locations in Romania. "And so, through the three-and-a-half years of this work before I got a green light [to make the film], I had then accrued this visual package that was kind of undeniable," he said. "That's when A24 finally just said, okay we're gonna be bold and risky and this isn't what anyone normally does, but we're gonna believe in you here." The result is a film that feels incredibly personal and distinct. It centers on a young girl, Yuri (Helena Zengel), who is growing up in a tiny village on the island of Carpathia. There the people fear the Ochi, mysterious primates who live in the forests and attack farm animals. Her father Maxim (Willem Dafoe in another unhinged A24 film performance) is a conservative, overly-macho man who leads a band of boys to hunt Ochi. Oh yeah, and he occasionally wears Viking armor. The film begins with the Ochi, who from afar look like menacing monkeys. Yuri was raised to fear them, but after encountering one young Ochi, she begins to reject everything her father taught her. It also helps that the creature looks adorable, with large eyes and protruding ears, it's a bit like The Mandalorian's Grogu (AKA Baby Yoda), but with fur. The infant Ochi is also a complex puppet created by John Nolan Studios, and it looks uncanny at first, since these days we expect it to be computer generated. But it's clearly a physical object, with actual facial movements that Yuri can react to. "Puppetry is such an ancient art form," Saxon said, when I asked why he pushed to make the Ochi a puppet and not a purely CG creature. "We've been making shadows on the cave wall for thousands of years, and our brain as we watch the human hand give life to a character is just fully accepting of it." "And then there's also the charm of the failure space of puppetry. Even when you're not doing it just right, it feels alive. And especially for this baby primate, we found immediately as we were testing the puppet, that the little imperfections that came through rod puppeteering were actually exactly the way that a little baby monkey would be just discovering how to move their own body." Creating a believable puppet is just one problem though, another is orchestrating it effectively on a movie set. "[John Nolan Studios] pushed the limits of what you could do at a really small scale with animatronics," Saxon said. "We were able to prototype for years to build these creatures. And then on set, we have extensively rehearsed every single scene with all these puppeteers. There's five on the body led by Rob Tygner, who's doing the head, and he's kind of calling out the internal monologue of the animal — all its thinking, all its vocalization — so that everyone can sync." Another two people control the puppet's face while staring at monitors, so there's a challenge to making them all work as one entity, Saxon says. The film's sets are also built to hold all of the people who control the Ochi puppet, and who often need to be hidden from view. And then there are the suit performers. "We have small people in ape suits with hand extensions with heavy animatronic heads that they can barely see out of. They're hot and they're out in the Carpathian wilderness in the mountains of Transylvania," Saxon said. After seeing what he accomplished with The Legend of Ochi, it's not hard to see Disney tapping Saxon for something in the Marvel universe, like it has with so many independent filmmakers. But that likely won't happen. "I've already said no," Saxon remarked in regards to making a Marvel film, and he also has no desire to make anything based on an existing IP. Saxon isn't entirely against using digital tools, despite his obvious love for puppetry. The Legend of Ochi still uses CG for distant shots of the Ochi, and for creating virtual sets. "I've also, over the years, learned CG and I've made purely animated 3D films. And I know the software myself and I know that it's a bespoke craft art that is tedious and full of love and attention to detail." "It doesn't get the respect it deserves," he added. "And that's partly because there's been a kind of corporatization and overuse of CG a lot.' Saxon says he was well aware a CG character couldn't carry the film, but he also knew that it was the best way to create a 3D river that didn't exist in Romania. (It's also reminiscent of the music video he directed for Bjork's 'Wanderlust.') "You have to look at each opportunity and come to the technique organically for the task. You can't have philosophies about this."
