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Forbes
07-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Forbes
An AI Film Festival And The Multiverse Engine
In the glassy confines of Alice Tully Hall on Thursday, the third annual Runway AI Film Festival celebrated an entirely new art form. The winning film, Total Pixel Space, was not made in the traditional sense. It was conjured by Jacob Adler, a composer and educator from Arizona State University, stitched together from image generators, synthetic voices, and video animation tools — most notably Runway's Gen-3, the company's text-to-video model (Runway Gen-4 was released in March). Video generation technology emerged in public in 2022 with Meta's crude video of a flying Corgi wearing a red cape and sunglasses. Since then, it has fundamentally transformed filmmaking, dramatically lowering barriers to entry and enabling new forms of creative expression. Independent creators and established filmmakers alike now have access to powerful AI tools such as Runway that can generate realistic video scenes, animate storyboards, and even produce entire short films from simple text prompts or reference images. As a result, production costs and timelines are shrinking, making it possible for filmmakers with limited resources to achieve professional-quality results and bring ambitious visions to life. The democratization of content creation is expanding far beyond traditional studio constraints, empowering anyone with patience and a rich imagination. Adler's inspiration came from Jorge Luis Borges' celebrated short story The Library of Babel, which imagines a universe where every conceivable book exists in an endless repository. Adler found a parallel in the capabilities of modern generative machine learning models, which can produce an unfathomable variety of images from noise (random variations in pixel values much like the 'snow' on an old television set) and text prompts. 'How many images can possibly exist,' the dreamy narrator begins as fantastical AI-generated video plays on the screen: a floating, exploding building; a human-sized housecat curled on a woman's lap. 'What lies in the space between order and chaos?' Adler's brilliant script is a fascinating thought experiment that attempts to calculate the total number of possible images, unfurling the endless possibilities of the AI-aided human imagination. 'Pixels are the building blocks of digital images, tiny tiles forming a mosaic,' continues the voice, which was generated using ElevenLabs. 'Each pixel is defined by numbers representing color and position. Therefore, any digital image can be represented as a sequence of numbers,' the narration continues, the voice itself a sequence of numbers that describe air pressure changes over time. 'Therefore, every photograph that could ever be taken exists as coordinates. Every frame of every possible film exists as coordinates.' Winners at the 3rd Annual International AIFF 2025 Runway was founded in 2018 by Cristóbal Valenzuela, Alejandro Matamala, and Anastasis Germanidis, after they met at New York University Tisch School of the Arts. Valenzuela, who serves as CEO, says he fell in love with neural networks in 2015, and couldn't stop thinking about how they might be used by people who create. Today, it's a multi-million-user platform, used by filmmakers, musicians, advertisers, and artists, and has been joined by other platforms, including OpenAI's Sora, and Google's Veo 3. What separates Runway from many of its competitors is that it builds from scratch. Its research team — which comprises most of the company — develops its own models, which can now generate up to about 20 seconds of video. The result, as seen in the works submitted to the AI Film Festival, is what Valenzuela calls 'a new kind of media.' The word film may soon no longer apply. Nor, perhaps, will filmmaker. 'The Tisches of tomorrow will teach something that doesn't yet have a name,' he said during opening remarks at the festival. Indeed, Adler is not a filmmaker by training, but a classically trained composer, a pipe organist, and a theorist of microtonality. 'The process of composing music and editing film,' he told me, 'are both about orchestrating change through time.' He used the image generation platform Midjourney to generate thousands of images, then used Runway to animate them. He used ElevenLabs to synthesize the narrator's voice. The script he wrote himself, drawing from the ideas of Borges, combinatorics, and the sheer mind-bending number of possible images that can exist at a given resolution. He edited it all together in DaVinci Resolve. The result? A ten-minute film that feels as philosophical as it is visual. It's tempting to frame all this as the next step in a long evolution; from the Lumière brothers to CGI, from Technicolor to TikTok. But what we're witnessing isn't a continuation. It's a rupture. 'Artists used to be gatekept by cameras, studios, budgets,' Valenzuela said. 'Now, a kid with a thought can press a button and generate a dream.' At the Runway Film Festival, the lights dimmed, and the films came in waves of animated hallucinations, synthetic voices, and impossible perspectives. Some were rough. Some were polished. All were unlike anything seen before. This isn't about replacing filmmakers. It's about unleashing them. 'When photography first came around — actually, when daguerreotypes were first invented — people just didn't have the word to describe it,' Valenzuela said during his opening remarks at the festival. 'They used this idea of a mirror with a memory because they'd never seen anything like that. … I think that's pretty close to where we are right now.' Valenzuela was invoking Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.'s phrase to convey how photography could capture and preserve images of reality, allowing those images to be revisited and remembered long after the moment had passed. Just as photography once astonished and unsettled, generative media now invites a similar rethinking of what creativity means. When you see it — when you watch Jacob Adler's film unfold — it's hard not to feel that the mirror is starting to show us something deeper. AI video generation is a kind of multiverse engine, enabling creators to explore and visualize an endless spectrum of alternate realities, all within the digital realm. 'Evolution itself becomes not a process of creation, but of discovery,' his film concludes. 'Each possible path of life's development … is but one thread in a colossal tapestry of possibility.'
Boston Globe
06-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Boston Globe
‘If you wreck it, they will leave': Why the new baseball movie ‘Eephus' is the reverse ‘Field of Dreams'
'Eephus' is set in the 1990s and takes place during a single game between two amateur men's baseball teams on the last day before their beloved field gets razed for a new school. There's not a plot, per se, just banter and bickering between players and among the onlookers (a mix of the passionate and the bored) and, naturally, the game itself. It's a wry and funny yet elegiac look at the way men connect and express themselves (or don't) and at the inevitable passage of time. Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up 'It's a movie about the collective spirit and about a bunch of people coming to terms with a loss in their lives and feeling powerless because time and change happens,' Lund said during a recent video interview. Advertisement Nate Fisher, left, and Carson Lund attend the "Eephus" screening during the 62nd New York Film Festival at Alice Tully Hall, Lincoln Center on Oct. 2, 2024 in New York FLC Co-writer Nate Fisher sees the film as a 'love letter' to community institutions that are eroding and a 'manifesto' about making an effort with friends and neighbors. 'It's very easy for social fabric to break down if it's not maintained,' he said. The catch is that these grown men can't fully express themselves, says the film's other co-writer, Michael Basta. 'They do so in subtext.' The unusual title comes from a rarely used novelty pitch, one thrown so slowly as to confound the batter, to wreck his timing and perhaps even his understanding of time itself. 'The film is trying to reorient your sense of baseball, of aging, of community, of America and of time,' Lund said. Keith William Richards, left, and Jack DiFonso in "Eephus." Courtesy of Music Box Films The best-known fictional example of the eephus comes Advertisement Before shooting began in October 2022, Lund checked out a hundred ballfields (about half in person), eventually discovering Soldiers Field in Douglas. 'Most places had aluminum bleachers and fences — this was all wood with chipped green paint that had been there for decades,' he said. (The field even once hosted a Lund, Fisher, and Basta wrote the film as a box score, plotting the action and then figuring out where to show players chatting in the dugout or onlookers commenting on (or ignoring) the action. The on-field highlights include a diving catch, a play at the plate, and a home run where the batter's body language will be familiar to anyone from Red Sox Nation. (See But there's also a pop-up that seemingly disappears into the sky; a player who gets so caught up in his joke of being his own third-base coach that he gets picked off; players drinking too much between innings and hunting for lost foul balls in the woods; and a final inning completed in the dim glow of car headlights. It's baseball of and for the people. Cliff Blake, Tim Taylor, Jeff Saint Dic, and Ethan Ward in "Eephus." Courtesy of Music Box Films 'Eephus' features two familiar faces for Boston fans. Joe Castiglione, the longtime radio voice of the Red Sox, plays a food-truck owner. 'I think they did a good job of capturing the players' love of baseball,' said Castiglione. Lund says once they'd decided to name the movie 'Eephus,' he just had to track down the pitch's most famous practitioner. Advertisement 'I love amateur ball players, people who just want to play for the love of the game,' said Bill Lee, who played at Soldiers Field in bygone days. 'I said, 'As long as I get to pitch, I'll come.'' Lee, 78, has never really stopped pitching, joining senior leagues and even hurling a complete game win in an independent minor league at 65. He plays a 'ghost of baseball's past who emerges for an inning and then disappears,' Lund said, a vanishing that recalls 'Field of Dreams.' (Fisher calls this film a 'Reverse 'Field of Dreams' — 'if you wreck it they will leave.') Lund is uncertain that Lee read his pages, and Lee acknowledged that 'I don't stick to scripts. I just have the ability to say what they really want to say in my own words.' While we only see one inning on screen, Lee says he faced 12 batters during filming. 'I cut down those guys — there was only one tough out, and I got him pretty good, too,' he said. 'I had good stuff. I wanted to play more.' But the film returns to the local guys, many played by Lund's friends, with a mix of local actors. 'This is not a film about excellent players . . . I just needed them to look like they've played before,' Lund said, adding that he had to 'reshape the script on the fly at times, based on what certain actors were capable of athletically. But I'm proud of how it feels like a mix of real New Englanders.' Keith Poulson, Ari Brisbon, David Pridemore, and Chris Goodwin in "Eephus." Courtesy of Music Box Films Fisher, who never really pitched before and wasn't that good at baseball, plays a reliever. 'Some of my better pitches made it into the final cut,' he said. Advertisement Like Lee, the actors were also allowed to improvise. 'The movie's 80-percent scripted,' Lund said, 'but everyone was living together in a cabin in the woods [near the field], and playing baseball every day, so by week three they were teammates with such incredible chemistry that I felt we had to let some spontaneity in.' While the dialogue is frequently funny, the film carries a certain poignancy. 'There's an impending melancholy throughout,' said Lund, 'because this is about a bunch of people trying to avoid talking about that thing that's hanging over them.' It's kind of like the eephus pitch, said Basta: 'Things feel like they're going slow, and then — boom! — you're suddenly shocked by how much time has passed.' Stuart Miller can be reached at .
