Is it all over for filmmakers?

Another month and another model update accompanied by a massive amount of marketing, Linkedin spam, spin, and dubious claims.

Two years ago I debunked claims that Sora would destroy filmmaking. It’s still mostly garbage today. Last year I punished myself by testing Google's Veo model every day for a month. I am still recovering from the AI slop induced nausea.

Last week’s new model was a version 2.0 update of Bytedance’s Seedance video generator. As always, one has the feeling that lies are travelling around the world twice before the truth has time to put its shoes on. So here I am for another debunk.

One of the most talked about demos of the Seedance 2.0 model was a fight scene depicting Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt (two fight scenes if we count the costume changes). The claims by the news outlets and on social media were that an Irish filmmaker typed just two lines into Seedance 2.0 (which isn’t even available to the public today) and 30 seconds later a full formed fight scene with multiple angles was generated.

“Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence” - Carl Sagan

The usual villainy on LinkedIn drowned the site with the video along with the claims that “Hollywood was over” (as shown in the past these are code words for ‘Jews must go’ and they never talk about any other country’s film industry like that).

I had to call bogus on this immediately. After a lifetime of shooting in college, in film school, being on sets and running post-production; and after years of deep dives into every new piece of technology and testing all the cloud and local AI models, the claims being made immediately rubbed me up the wrong way. Other demos of the Seedance model had the usual errors we have come to expect from AI video generators.

A man returns home. His apartment number is 219 and it is next to apartment 023. Every door in the hallway has a random design.

He inserts a key into his door that already has (deformed) keys in it.

I was pretty sure what we were looking at was a bog standard video to video workflow with image references of Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt provided for face replacement and consistency. Sure, the Seedance 2.0 model is newer and thus more reliable, but it was highly unlikely that just two prompts and thirty seconds were needed to generate a full multi-angle fight scene.

Being the enthusiastic fact checker I hopped over to Seedance’s website and it only took 10 seconds to find green screen footage of two stuntmen performing the same fight choreography we see in the Cruise vs Pitt scene. Seedance had used the green screen footage for a different demo - this time using a prompt for an anime style fight scene.

I duly let LinkedIn know about my findings and posted a video on YouTube showing the green screen footage next to the AI fight scene.

So the ball is in your court Seedance and Ruairi Robinson. Was the input really just a 2 line prompt or was it actually 2 lines, green screen video footage, and face references too? The evidence appears to show that stuntmen were filmed from several angles, that a clip had to be generated for every angle, and then finally all clips were stitched together for marketing.

We need to remind ourselves why audiences flock to cinemas, buy discs and merchandise, and travel across the country or the world to meet actors and filmmakers at conventions and ceremonies. Physical talent and celebrity matters to fans and followers. That’s why the demo above had to use the faces of two celebrities for wide reach and hype. Without that it would have just been two stuntmen and an AI filter. Nothing to talk about.

Similarly, if physical talent and celebrity didn’t matter spectators wouldn’t spend extraordinary amounts of money and time following their favourite athletes and sports teams. They would be content replacing real sports with video games alone. But that’s not how the world works. Humans, like all animals, are social creatures who need to belong to something bigger than themselves.

The entertainment industry (sports, film, acting, music, literature and art) is largely controlled by agencies for that reason - onboarding and managing the talent that audiences look up to. Film production companies and studios come and go, but the agencies run the show.