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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.
The Verge
18-06-2025
- Entertainment
- The Verge
Ancestra actually says a lot about the current state of AI-generated videos
After watching writer / director Eliza McNitt's new short film Ancestra, I can see why a number of Hollywood studios are interested in generative AI. A number of the shots were made and refined solely with prompts, in collaboration with Google's DeepMind team. It's obvious what Darren Aronofsky's AI-focused Primordial Soup production house and Google stand to gain from the normalization of this kind of creative workflow. But when you sit down to listen to McNitt and Aronofsky talk about how the short came together, it is hard not to think about generative AI's potential to usher in a new era of ' content ' that feels like it was cooked up in a lab — and put scores of filmmakers out of work in the process. Inspired by the story of McNitt's own complicated birth, Ancestra zooms in on the life of an expectant mother (Audrey Corsa) as she prays for her soon-to-be-born baby's heart defect to miraculously heal. Though the short features a number of real actors performing on practical sets, Google's Gemini, Imagen, and Veo models were used to develop Ancestra 's shots of what's racing through the mother's mind and the tiny, dangerous hole inside of the baby's heart. Inside the mother's womb, we're shown Blonde -esque close-ups of the baby, whose heartbeat gradually becomes part of the film's soundtrack. And the woman's ruminations on what it means to be a mother are visualized as a series of very short clips of other women with children, volcanic explosions, and stars being born after the Big Bang — all of which have a very stock-footage-by-way-of-gen-AI feel to them. It's all very sentimental, but the message being conveyed about the power of a mother's love is cliched, particularly when it's juxtaposed with what is essentially a montage of computer-generated nature footage. Visually Ancestra feels like a project that is trying to prove how all of the AI slop videos flooding the internet are actually something to be excited about. The film is so lacking in fascinating narrative substance, though, that it feels like a rather weak argument in favor of Hollywood's rush to get to the slop trough while it's hot. As McNitt smash cuts to quick shots of different kinds of animals nurturing their young and close-ups of holes being filled in by microscopic organisms, you can tell that those visuals account for a large chunk of the film's AI underpinnings. They each feel like another example of text-to-video models' ability to churn out uncanny-looking, decontextualized footage that would be difficult to incorporate into fully produced film. But in the behind-the-scenes making-of video that Google shared in its announcement last week, McNitt speaks at length about how, when faced with the difficult prospect of having to cast a real baby, it made much more sense to her to create a fake one with Google's models. 'There's just nothing like a human performance and the kind of emotion that an actor can evoke,' McNitt explains. 'But when I wrote that there would be a newborn baby, I did not know the solution of how we would [shoot] that because you can't get a baby to act.' Filmmaking with infants poses all kinds of production challenges that simply aren't an issue with CGI babies and doll props. But going the gen AI route also presented McNitt with the opportunity to make her film even more personal by using old photos of herself as a newborn to serve as the basis for the fake baby's face. With a bit of fine-tuning, Ancestra 's production team was able to combine shots of Corsa and the fake baby to create scenes in which they almost, but not quite, appear to be interacting as if both were real actors. If you look closely in wider shots, you can see that the mother's hand seems to be hovering just above her child because the baby isn't really there. But the scene moves by so quickly that it doesn't immediately stand out, and it's far less ' AI-looking ' than the film's more fantastical shots meant to represent the hole in the baby's heart being healed by the mother's will. Though McNitt notes how 'hundreds of people' were involved in the process of creating Ancestra, one of the behind-the-scenes video's biggest takeaways is how relatively small the project's production team was compared to what you might see on a more traditional short film telling the same story. Hiring more artists to conceptualize and then craft Ancestra 's visuals would have undoubtedly made the film more expensive and time-consuming to finish. Especially for indie filmmakers and up-and-coming creatives who don't have unlimited resources at their disposal, those are the sorts of challenges that can be exceedingly difficult to overcome. But Ancestra also feels like a case study in how generative AI stands to eliminate jobs that once would have gone to people. The argument is often that AI is a tool, and that jobs will shift rather than be replaced. Yet it's hard to imagine studio executives genuinely believing in a future where today's VFX specialists, concept artists, and storyboarders have transitioned into jobs as prompt writers who are compensated well enough to sustain their livelihoods. This was a huge part of what drove Hollywood's film / TV actors and writers to strike in 2023. It's also why video game performers have been on strike for the better part of the past year, and it feels irresponsible to dismiss these concerns as people simply being afraid of innovation or resistant to change. In the making-of video, Aronofsky points out that cutting-edge technology has always played an integral role in the filmmaking business. You would be hard-pressed today to find a modern film or series that wasn't produced with the use of powerful digital tools that didn't exist a few decades ago. There are things about Ancestra 's use of generative AI that definitely make it seem like a demonstration of how Google's models could, theoretically and with enough high-quality training data, become sophisticated enough to create footage that people would actually want to watch in a theater. But the way Aronofsky goes stony-faced and responds 'not good' when one of Google's DeepMind researchers explains that Veo can only generate eight-second-long clips says a lot about where generative AI is right now and Ancestra as a creative endeavor. It feels like McNitt is telling on herself a bit when she talks about how the generative models' output influenced the way she wrote Ancestra. She says 'both things really informed each other,' but that sounds like a very positive way of spinning the fact that Veo's technical limitations required her to write dialogue that could be matched to a series of clips vaguely tied to the concepts of motherhood and childbirth. This all makes it seem like McNitt's core authorial intent, at times, had to be deprioritized in favor of working with whatever the AI models spat out. Had it been the other way around, Ancestra might have wound up telling a much more interesting there's very little about Ancestra 's narrative or, to be honest, its visuals that is so groundbreaking that it feels like an example of why Hollywood should be rushing to embrace this technology whole cloth. Films produced with more generative AI might be cheaper and faster to make, but the technology as it exists now doesn't really seem capable of producing art that would put butts in movie theaters or push people to sign up for another streaming service. And it's important to bear in mind that, at the end of the day, Ancestra is really just an ad meant to drum up hype for Google, which is something none of us should be rushing to do.
Yahoo
20-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Darren Aronofsky Partners with Google DeepMind on Generative AI Short Film Initiative
Darren Aronofsky has launched a new generative AI storytelling venture in which he will partner with Google DeepMind to produce short films with Gen-AI and some of Google's newly announced tools. The venture is titled Primordial Soup, and its research team, along with three filmmakers, will produce short films integrating new tech and storytelling and has the mission statement of creating frameworks for AI's role in filmmaking and putting artists in the driver's seat of technological innovation. More from IndieWire Google Unveils Gen-AI Video Tool with Camera Controls, Consistent Character Design, and Even Sound The Cannes 2025 Films So Far Most Likely to End Up in the Oscar Race 'Filmmaking has always been driven by technology. After the Lumiere Brothers and Edison's ground-breaking invention, filmmakers unleashed the hidden storytelling power of cameras. Later technological breakthroughs — sound, color, VFX — allowed us to tell stories in ways that couldn't be told before. Today is no different. Now is the moment to explore these new tools and shape them for the future of storytelling,' Aronofsky said in an official statement. The news was announced alongside Google's I/O event, in which the tech giant also unveiled its latest generative video model called Veo 3, as well as an advanced new gen-AI editing tool called Flow. Google DeepMind will provide Primordial Soup's team early access to these tools. The first film produced under the partnership is called 'Ancestra' and is directed by Eliza McNitt. Her film will premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival on June 13, and it will be followed by a panel featuring the filmmakers and moderated by Aronofsky. The film blends live-action filmmaking and performance with generative visuals and is described as a deeply personal narrative inspired by the day McNitt was born. McNitt trained the AI models on her own baby pictures and other photos taken by her late father in order to generate a newborn infant with a story that could be shaped by her own biography. 'With 'Ancestra,' I was able to visualize the unseen, transforming family archives, emotions, and science into a cinematic experience that feels both intimate and expansive,' said McNitt. McNitt is known for a previous VR experience that was executive produced by Aronofsky that featured the voices of Millie Bobby Brown, Jessica Chastain, and Patti Smith as the voices of the cosmos. It was the first VR project to ever be acquired out of Sundance. Two additional films, yet to be announced, will explore other new applications of Veo, Google DeepMind's video generation model. Watch the first teaser for 'Ancestra' above, and learn more about this strategic partnership at the Google DeepMind blog. Best of IndieWire Guillermo del Toro's Favorite Movies: 56 Films the Director Wants You to See 'Song of the South': 14 Things to Know About Disney's Most Controversial Movie The 55 Best LGBTQ Movies and TV Shows Streaming on Netflix Right Now
