Studying at the film school where Oscar-nominated "Sinners" director Ryan Coogler honed his craft, SiJia Zheng dreams of winning an Academy Award.
Now with the recent developments in artificial intelligence, he can see a shortcut to achieving his ambition.3
"That's a chance for beginners like me who can use AI to just make a film and to announce to the world that I have the ability to be a director," he told AFP.
Zheng, 29, who hails from China, is one of a burgeoning class of students at USC's School of Cinematic Arts, studying animation in a place that has long been a training ground for future Pixar and DreamWorks talent.
He has used his time at the Los Angeles university to learn about the emerging field of AI animation.
That has included producing his seven-minute short film "Torment" about a masked killer terrorizing a high school.
The film, which was recognized at the LA Shorts festival, was generated entirely by AI -- in just one week.
Zheng recorded himself in front of a green screen and then asked the software to modify his face to make him into all the different characters in the movie.
The technology also allowed him to set his story in an Asian school and have scenes in a swimming pool -- two things that would have cost a fortune if he had filmed them traditionally.
"As a student, it's impossible to have that much money" to produce a film, he said.
- 'Tool' -
Not everyone in Hollywood feels so positively about AI.
The technology was one of the key sticking points in the writers' and actors' strikes that paralyzed Hollywood in 2023.
Guillermo del Toro, the director of "Frankenstein," which will compete for the best picture Oscar on Sunday, is notoriously anti-AI, insisting he would "rather die" than use it.
Zheng said he had been impressed by the Mexican director's "amazing" film, particularly the opening scene where the monster attacks a 19th-century three-masted ship, which del Toro's prop department constructed specially for the movie.
But "when I watched the film...I was just thinking: 'Oh, using AI to do that would be much cheaper and...make something pretty similar.'"
He insists, however, that it doesn't replace the filmmaking spark.
"AI is just a tool, and people can use it to become even better."
The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the body that will hand out the Oscars in Hollywood on March 15, seems to agree -- last year the body updated its rules to say it was neutral on the technology.
"Generative Artificial Intelligence and other digital tools...neither help nor harm the chances of achieving a nomination," it said last April.
- 'Ethical' use -
At the University of Southern California (USC), teachers like Debra Isaac are trying to navigate the ethics around the emerging technology of AI.
The animation professor said she was shocked by an AI video that rocketed around the internet in recent weeks.
The short sequence, created by Seedance -- the AI generation model developed by TikTok's parent company, Bytedance -- shows an ersatz fight between Brad Pitt and Tom Cruise. Neither star was compensated.
But, used properly, AI does not need to be exploitative, and is not a lazy way to make films, Isaac said.
"It's not just about, 'Hey, I have a prompt, and I'm just gonna type a few words and I'll get my image, and I'll get my animation, and I'm done,'" she said.
"Some of these tools are not ethically dubious at all. They're trained by people that are using their own work," she added.
That's precisely what Xindi Zhang, a recent graduate of the program and winner of a Student Academy Award for her short film "The Song of Drifters," did.
For the mini-documentary about the difficulty of feeling at home anywhere, the 29-year-old artist fed the AI dozens of her drawings.
The database then served as graphic inspiration, allowing the computer to stylize the shots of the cities where the film takes place, accelerating production that would otherwise have taken years.
Even with the help of AI, she spent nearly a month perfecting certain shots.
It's "a craft that nobody really appreciates right now," she says.
But anyone who looks at the use of AI will soon find it's not a compromise-free shortcut to perfection.
"Good, cheap and fast will never happen, no matter what tool you use," Zhang said.
