Lost footage from Orson Welles’ The Magnificent Ambersons will be reconstructed using AI
A couple of years ago, creatives went on strike against the studios for a number of reasons, but one of the biggest issues surrounded the security of using human writers and actors at the dawn of a new age of AI in Hollywood. The technology is growing more and more every day, and the fear has always been that studios would employ AI programs in lieu of hiring people. However, China is fully embracing the tech as it was announced that their film industry will be remastering old films with AI and even constructing an animated film with it.
Despite the threat, debate rages on as there are also some beneficial uses of AI and The Hollywood Reporter is now reporting on a company’s quest to reconstruct 43 minutes of lost footage from an Orson Welles film, The Magnificent Ambersons. Showrunner, which is a firm backed by Amazon, announced that it will take on this task as an experimental demonstration on the capabilities of the technology and open up a scenario of what the fully realized film could have been like. This task will not be made commercially since Showrunner does not own the rights to the Warner Bros. film.
Showrunner CEO Edward Saatchi stated, “Year by year, the technology is getting closer to prompting entire films with AI. Today, AI can’t sustain a story beyond one short episode.” However, his company’s technology is a “step toward a scary, strange future of generative storytelling.” If they “see a marketplace for it and a path for it outside of an academic context, then of course they have ownership of it.” The CEO added, “The goal isn’t to commercialize the 43 minutes, but to see them exist in the world after 80 years of people asking ‘might this have been the best film ever made in its original form?’”
Welles’ film The Magnificent Ambersons was made at the legendary RKO Studios in 1941. His original cut ran for 131 minutes, but Welles had granted the studio rights to the final cut and they ended up taking over — editing out almost a third of the negatives to the movie without Welles’ approval and then they jettisoned the footage to free up some vault space. The missing scenes had never been found since.
The reconstruction will not be totally made from scratch using AI. The company plans to shoot foundation footage with live actors and use face replacement to resurrect the full performance of the past actors. The sets will be recreated with 3D models using extensive set photos for reference and matching the description from the original screenplay.
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