In the age of Artificial Intelligence, film industry pros say donkey work is what makes an artiste

... that’s what we think. As Whistling Woods International launches an AI lab to teach students how to integrate this tech into filmmaking, film artistes tell us that using AI to remove grunt work at early stages of a career means you miss out on important growing pains that make you an expert Storyboarding, which is an intensely laborious act in the process of filmmaking, is being quickly replaced by AI. PIC/ISTOCK Your browser doesn’t support HTML5 audio AI IS on the tip of everyone's tongues. Every room this writer enters seems to be discussing whether AI use is ethical. Where one side is arguing that AI is democratising art, the others tell us that AI is the reason we are going through a water crisis. Whether it truly democratises art or not is debatable. What this writer finds interesting is how tech enables art. One of the only art forms that is truly tech-enabled is filmmaking. We'd been painting, writing, and singing long before we developed technology to do it. But the birth of filmmaking was a technological advancement in itself. "The Lumière brothers were inventors before they were artistes," says Dipankar Mukherjee, co-founder and CEO of Studio Blo, which is an AI-native film studio. On Wednesday, the city's premiere film school, Whistling Woods International (WWI), launched an AI lab in collaboration with InVideo, a generative AI platform. How exactly does AI help filmmakers, we're curious. Chaitanya Chinchlikar, chief technology officer and vice president at WWI tells us, "If a writer uses AI, AI isn't writing the script. You're writing what's in your head. AI can only help you by making it easier for you to write and remove your grunt work. Screenwriters write because they love writing. What they don't enjoy is cutting a screenplay from 110 pages to 100 pages," he continues, "Once upon a time, rotoscopy was done by humans. Today, thankfully, no human will ever have to do rotoscopy again because it's really low-end, repetitive work." The argument makes sense. Industry sources tell us that AI helps them escape "gadha majdoori". Why should an artiste spend time doing donkey work if it isn't the core of their job? Why should a screenwriter make a pitch deck? Why should a director make a storyboard? Why should editors sit on basic cuts? We speak to film crew members who tell us why grunt work is just as important as the core job. ‘All AI writing has to be reworked again’ Sulagna Chatterjee Screenwriter and director In the age of AI co-pilots, screenwriter Sulagna Chatterjee decided to hire a human co-writer In the age where everyone is using AI as co-pilots, screenwriter-director Sulagna Chatterjee just made a call on Instagram last week to find a co-writer for her latest project. We ask her, why not use AI to co-write? She says, "I remember once I had written a 40-page synopsis and needed a two-page version of it. I asked ChatGPT to do that, but I still had to rework everything afterwards. So it's somebody I would maybe pay Rs 10,000 a month as an intern-level writer and then oversee all of their work. It's definitely not a co-writer. Ethically, I wouldn't want that either." Whistling Woods International's new AI lab. PIC/WHISTLING WOODS INTERNATIONAL Chatterjee also feels that AI is exceptionally bad at dialogue-writing, a skill that is tough to crack even as human beings. Even if you outsource basic tasks to AI, Chatterjee says, "Any writer worth their salt should be able to write a logline. You should know how to turn an idea into a two-page document. The way you form sentences, the way you express yourself - all of that is essential to learn as a writer. Joy and frustration are both equal parts of writing." ‘No work is beneath anyone’ Abhishek Waje, Video editor To be a good editor, you have to be patient," says video editor Abhishek Waje, who has been working across commercials, documentaries, and digital content in the business for four years. Some AI tools Waje has used while editing are, "tools where the AI cuts all the conversations for me. If a person is talking to a camera, it switches between angles and takes care of that tedious work," he says, "It can transcribe whatever you're editing, convert it into a script, and then let you edit the script so the video gets edited automatically." Video editor Abhishek Waje has worked across commercials, documentaries, and digital content for the last four years "A huge part of editing is simply going through takes and figuring out what can be used and what can't. Even cutting an interview teaches you a lot about editing. You learn how reactions work and how drama is created," says Waje, "AI would simply cut to whoever is speaking, which makes everything feel flat. People don't pay attention to that, but when you watch something like Koffee With Karan, a lot of the entertainment comes from people's reactions. You cannot skip the first step and expect to be good at the craft." With the advent of AI, the expectation from clients is getting more work done in less pay. "When they hire me as an editor, they also want a VFX artiste, a sound engineer, someone who does subtitling. I would rather that they hire people for these jobs, but when I bring it up, I will be told, ‘Why don't you use AI?'," Waje says. "You wouldn't go to medical school and say: Let's skip anatomy and go straight to surgery," says Waje, "Wanting to avoid gadha majdoori is a privileged take from those who don't want to do hard work. It's like saying, ‘I'm above this.' But no work is beneath anyone." ‘AI is just an add-on, not the entire curriculum’ How can an AI lab help students, we ask Chaitanya Chinchlikar, CTO at WWI. "There is no part of the industry that is not going to be enhanced, improved, or revolutionised by AI. So this was a natural transition for us." Sanket Shah, Founder and CEO of InVideo says, "Unfortunately, a lot of the conversation around AI has been about making things cheaper and quicker. We need to move away from that. Instead, ask: Now that this technology exists, what can you imagine that you couldn't imagine before? Don't think about how you can save three rupees by replacing a human. Think about creativity." Sanket Shah, Chaitanya Chinchlikar and Dipankar Mukherjee Chinchlikar emphasises this point: "Institutional philosophy is very important here. How do you ensure students don't take the easy way out early in their education? You have to make sure students understand that their final output will always be built on their creativity. AI doesn't make movies. You make movies with the help of AI." He also clarifies that there will be no changes in the regular coursework for students. "They will still learn how to do everything from scratch. But we cannot ignore this technology. We want our students to use AI as a tool, and not as a replacement to human skillsets." Founder of AI-native production house Studio Blo, Dipankar Mukherjee says that cinema is a technology dependent medium, and AI is just that - technology. "If you don't understand when to use an 18mm lens versus a Cooke lens, then you have no business working with AI either," he says, "That's why I really appreciate that Whistling Woods is doing this. Students have a platform to ground themselves in traditional filmmaking fundamentals while also learning these new technologies." ‘Imagining a visual is a director's most important skill’ IN conversation with Chaitanya Chinchlikar, CTO and VP at WWI and Sanket Shah, founder and CEO of InVideo, we spoke about Martin Scorsese announcing last week that he is going to use AI to make his storyboards going further. Shivani Joshi "Now if someone says Scorsese doesn't know how to do pre-production or make a storyboard, and hence, he's using AI, they clearly don't know what they're talking about," says Chinchlikar. He's right. Scorsese has been storyboarding for 70 years reportedly. Storyboard is the process of visually mapping out a film's narrative frame-by-frame before actual production begins. It is also a painstakingly laborious process, which can take anywhere from two weeks to several months. Martin Scorsese. PIC/INSTAGRAM@martinscorsese_ "AI doesn't make a film. A film is made by the one square foot of real estate [referring to the brain] atop the shoulders of the writer, director, DoP, production designer, among others. AI is just a great co-pilot," says Chinchlikar. "A storyboard is the first time that imagination takes a tangible form," says illustrator Shivani Joshi, "It's the definitive work that will make the shape of your film." Joshi speculates that around 50 per cent of all storyboards are AI generated now. "Storyboarding, as a job, is the first that I see becoming extinct," Joshi says. Joshi has storyboarded in a pre-AI world as well. That makes it easier to spot what is AI. But when students enter an AI-driven world, there is no foundation of what a human storyboard looks like. "How storyboarding works is that a director first sits down with a storyboarding artiste and briefs them on what works and what doesn't. The director has to visualise written words as an image. That requires knowledge of framing, technical proportions, how colours work, among other things," Joshi says, "Now, here, you take away the questioning. To be able to imagine those things and to have some artistic voice in them is critical to being successful as a filmmaker."