In the week in which an AI actor has got the industry talking, Italian producer Andrea Iervolino has unveiled what he claims is the first film helmed by a virtual director.
The producer behind Ferrari and To The Bone announced The Sweet Idleness, which he said is overseen by FellinAI, an artificial intelligence director conceived to “celebrate the poetic and dreamlike language of great European cinema.”
FellinAI is housed at Andrea Iervolino Company AI, a artificial intelligence arm of The Andrea Iervolino Company, with Iervolino acting as its “human-in-the-loop,” a supervisor and producer who guides and monitors the technology.
The Sweet Idleness imagines a future world in which only 1% of humanity still works, transforming labor into a symbolic ritual, while the rest of the population lives in the freedom and leisure provided by machines. The logline states that the “last workers” become the “final masks of a humanity that resists the insolence of labor.”
The Sweet Idleness‘ cast is provided by Iervolino’s Actor+, an in-house Iervolino agency that works with real actors to create a digital likeness that can be used by FellinAI. Watch a teaser trailer here. No release date was given for the feature.
Iervolino touted his project as a “new chapter in the history of cinema,” but said it was not designed to “replace traditional cinema,” to which he said he remained committed. Iervolino said his aim was to “unite human sensitivity with the creative power of artificial intelligence in order to tell stories that no one has ever imagined before.”
The AI director comes amid a spirited debate about Tilly Norwood, an AI actress being circled for representation by talent agents. Deadline first broke the news about the interest in Norwood, who was created by actor and technologist Eline Van der Velden. The development sparked a backlash from the acting community, with the likes of Emily Blunt and SAG-AFTRA voicing concern.
“SAG-AFTRA believes creativity is, and should remain, human-centered. The union is opposed to the replacement of human performers by synthetics,” the guild said in a statement.
“To be clear, ‘Tilly Norwood’ is not an actor, it’s a character generated by a computer program that was trained on the work of countless professional performers – without permission or compensation. It has no life experience to draw from, no emotion and, from what we’ve seen, audiences aren’t interested in watching computer-generated content untethered from the human experience.”