Hollywood & AI: What Doesn't Kill You Makes You Stronger
Thursday, August 9, 2018 at 9:21 AM by Nick DeMartino “Hollywood and Silicon Valley are in the same business: producing algorithms,” writes AI pioneer Yves Bergquist, one of a new breed of data scientists focused upon the entertainment and media business.
These scientists believe that to survive and thrive, the media and entertainment industry needs to embrace cognitive science, if they hope to compete with tech companies and address its failing business models.
They use a cluster of technologies generally called artificial intelligence (AI) or machine learning – such fields as big data analytics, deep machine learning, semantics and natural language processing, visual and auditory recognition, prediction and personalization, conversational agents among others.
They are creating software that can be taught to learn and program itself – to automate repetitive tasks and to provide insights that were never before possible.
Tech-assisted content development
One active area is content development. A studio-funded think tank, USC Entertainment Technology Center, where Bergquist leads an AI and neuroscience group is mapping box office returns against elements of the film narrative. Bergquist is working on data breakdowns of movies, as shown in this demo, the work of two Bergquist AI startups Corto and Novamente.
Greenlight Essentials, a member of IDEABOOST Network Connect, has broken down decades of film screenplays into 40,000+ unique plot elements and has analyzed over 200 million audience profiles to help filmmakers improve scripts, target audiences, and improve marketing. The product’s Analytic Terminal allows users with neither programming nor mathematics background to explore and discover repeatable patterns from decades of film data.
Scriptonomics is an ML application that breaks down movie scripts by scene, character, location, and other components. Writers and producers can leverage insights and comparisons that the tool extracts from its massive database of past successful movies to improve subsequent drafts and to aid in pitches and audience targeting. Here is an example of Scriptonomics breakdown for Titanic.
Founder Tammuz Dubnov says that Scriptonomics generates a geometric model of a screenplay – its DNA if you will -- in order to compare and improve elements as compared with financially successful films of the past. Dubnov believes that this data-driven, quantitative filmmaking process will give rise to a new generation of data-assistant content studio that will help create more hits and fewer flops.
RivetAI offers Agile Producer, a pre-production platform that automates script breakdown, storyboard, shot lists, scheduling and budgeting. Before RivetAI Toronto native Debajyoti Ray built two earlier AI startups. Video AMP, an AI-powered video advertising solution helped him to understand how much commercials owe to storytelling. So he decided to build an AI engine based upon thousands of movie scripts, both produced and unproduced that became RivetAI.