Sathyaraj in a nonetheless from ‘Weapon’
| Photo Credit: Special Arrangement
What would you, as a filmmaker, do when you’re doing a movie with veteran actor Sathyaraj and there’s a flashback portion showcasing the character’s youthful days? The common route could be to use make-up (like in Kanaa and Kadaikutty Singam’s yesteryear parts) or use one other youthful actor in his place. They might make use of de-ageing strategies which can be utilized in Hollywood and have been engaged lately in Acharyafor Chiranjeevi and deleted scenes in Kamal Haasan’s Vikram. But the makers of the upcoming movie Weapon go a step ahead and use Artificial Intelligence (AI) to ‘create’ a youthful model of Sathyaraj.
Filmmaker Guhan Senniappan, identified for helming Sawaari(2016) and Prime Video’s first Tamil authentic sequenceVella Raja, is directing Weapon, a sci-fi thriller that includes Sathyaraj as a superhuman alongside Vasanth Ravi; the movie has a two-minute AI sequence that was created with software program developed by the group. “Both Sathyaraj sir and Vasanth appear in the AI sequences. We fed photos of them to the software and generated the sequences. We just have to feed the ambience, background and characters and it will give us an array of options from which we can choose what we want,” says Guhan, including that saving time is essentially the most vital advantage of utilizing this expertise. “We usually create a storyboard, convert it to digital, and then work from it, which usually takes months. Here, the time taken is considerably low and we have control over how we want it to be. The space to indulge in trial and error is high here.”
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Sathyaraj and Vasanth Ravi in stills from ‘Weapon’
| Photo Credit:
Special Arrangement
Assurance that AI gained’t take their place as screenwriters sooner or later is likely one of the calls for by the Writers Guild of America’s 11,500 members who are currently on strike. Guhan says that he helps the trigger and his use of expertise outcomes from limitations. “A creator’s job is to create something new and deliver it to the audience. But when a machine does it, the value of the end product is lost. I feel AI is a technology that has to be restricted after a certain point,” says Guhan. “Even Chat GPT is used to generate scripts these days. AI requires us to manually input what we want but as the technology progresses, even the need for that would eventually disappear. It destroys the value of the human touch. We have employed this to wrap up production early but, in the long run, it’s a threat to filmmaking as we know it.”
Guhan says that he’s excited to understand how the viewers will obtain the AI sequences. “This is the first time something like this is being tried in Tamil cinema. The sequence will be animated and since the film itself happens past the realms of reality, it fits in with the theme. Even fire glows with a golden tint, and tonally, we’ve opted for a dark one as we’ve treated it akin to pages from comics,” concludes Guhan. Weapon, additionally starring Rajiv Menon and Tanya Hope, is eyeing a September launch.