DPOP Studios’ Man With AI Movie Camera – the first feature-length film series to be generated using Artificial Intelligence – live on SuperRare.
From internationally acclaimed filmmaker Dan Sickles and DPOP Studios, comes Man With AI Movie Camera, a cinematic innovation that employs groundbreaking Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools to re-envision the radical 1929 film Man With a Movie Camera, directed by Dziga Vertov.
Part experiment, part fine art project, full-on innovation, Man With AI Movie Camera is an homage to – and interrogation of – Vertov's cinematic masterpiece. Notably, Man With AI Movie Camera is the first feature-length film series to use a single long-form AI prompt, which will generate 480 unique iterations of Vertov’s film to be revealed on SuperRare throughout 2024.
This project sits at the convergence of creativity and technology, art and industry. It is a seminal collection of works documenting this exponential moment in history when creatives are forced to reckon with Artificial Intelligence’s coming-of-age.
“In 2018, as a thought experiment, I drafted a shot-for-shot description of the film Man with a Movie Camera with the intention of making an adaptation for the modern era.
In 2021, as AI generative tools became more available, I began to experiment with the idea that it might be possible to generate a feature-length film using AI that reflected the original.
In 2023, along with a team of creative-technologists, we’ve discovered how to do just that.”
– Dan Sickles
Long form prompts are a developed language that provide sufficient information to enable Artificial Intelligence models to generate desired outputs – in this instance, 480 unique feature-length films adapted from Vertov’s original. “Man With AI Movie Camera is a feat of engineering. It has required a team of creative technologists [including award-winning filmmaker Bruce Thierry Cheung] to help realize this vision while rising above technical limitations. My initial focus was to make the AI prompt sing in a way that honors the essence of the original film – developing language that could produce dynamic results was a challenge.” says director, Dan Sickles
Each iteration of the film is generated from a prompt created by Sickles that describes Vertov’s original film shot-for-shot with the exact timing to match the frame. The prompt is trained on a data set curated by the Sickles to give each iteration a distinct aesthetic while retaining the length and essence of each shot to mirror the original film.
The sale for the Man With AI Movie Camera collection went live for pre-listed collectors on SuperRare on December 18, 2023 at 12pm EST where it grossed over $25,000 within 24 hours. The sale opened to the public December 19 and is ongoing – each mint will be revealed individually throughout 2024.
“Man With AI Movie Camera is timely and serves as a model for how artists can foster AI as an equitable public good for creative production,” says Sickles. “The project is both reflection and progress, a playful experimentation, then and now, inviting audiences to witness the fusion of classic cinema with future-forward technology. Mirrors of one another, each film is distinct in the collection and speaks within the larger chorus.”
Man With AI Movie Camera is the first artistic initiative of its kind to embrace several new open-source principles. The series is created in collaboration with Stability AI's open-source models (Dreamstudio, ClipDrop and Stable Audio), implementing decentralized storage through the Filecoin network of independent storage providers and IPFS (InterPlanetary File System). It also relies on Giza Technology’s zero-knowledge proof cryptography to authenticate the provenance of AI operations. Together with Mirage Gallery AI, DPOP is designing a viewing platform for the series as it is revealed throughout 2024.