Donovan Marsh on AI and the future of filmmaking

About this episode

Donovan Marsh discusses the impact of AI on filmmaking and its potential to transform the industry.

Award-winning South African film director Donovan Marsh has pivoted to artificial intelligence filmmaking and believes generative AI tools could fundamentally reshape how movies are made – and who gets to make them. Marsh, whose 30-year career includes directing the Hollywood submarine thriller Hunter Killer starring Gerard Butler and Gary Oldman, the Spud films and iNumber Number, is the latest guest on the TechCentral Show. The economics, he tells TechCentral editor Duncan McLeod, are extraordinary: a single complex scene in a traditional production requires crews, equipment, locations and days of scheduling, while AI tools collapse much of that overhead into work that can be done at a desk. But Marsh is clear that the creative work has not disappeared. He still directs shot by shot, much as he would on a conventional set, and uses a patchwork of different AI tools – no single product yet does everything. He has found that simpler prompts produce better results, saying over-prescription tends to degrade output quality. Marsh acknowledges the disruption this implies for camera operators, lighting crews, set designers and extras. But he argues that AI filmmaking could prove…

People in this episode

Host: Duncan McLeod

Guest: Donovan Marsh

Topics covered

• AI in filmmaking
• generative AI tools
• future of movies
• South African cinema
• film production economics
• creative processes

Keywords

• artificial intelligence
• filmmaking
• movie production
• AI tools
• South Africa
• film director
• creative work
• Dragon Studios AI

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Dragon Studios AI

Books & works: Hunter Killer, Spud, iNumber Number

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