Scraps of Mechanical Souls Film Spotlight

Today’s film spotlight focuses on the short film Scraps of Mechanical Souls directed by Mateusz Miroslaw Lis.

What is the title of your film and what inspired said title?

The film’s title is “Scraps of Mechanical Souls”. Being a short film written by an Artificial Intelligence (GPT-2) and given it’s anthological nature I found the title best in conveying the idea that what we are seeing are the very first attempts (the “scraps”) of an AI in emulating an emotional human entity (the “mechanical souls”).

Tell us a little bit about the story and origins of your film.

The idea to experiment with AI came in early February of 2021, at the time we didn’t know about earlier attempts such as Sunspring (2016) or It’s No Game (2017), all of which were generated by older algorithms and are more somewhat of a stunt than a serious attempt at AI storytelling. I already had some experience with AI so after just a few test runs we had a working AI screenwriter. With the help of my co-producer Stefano Pellizzari we then selected the scenes that we found more interesting (not necessarily the best ones) and after a few weeks of pre-production we were ready to shoot.

Any films or filmmakers that inspired this film?

This is something you should ask GPT-2. For the AI’s fine-tuning process we fed it different movie scripts so that it could better grasp the basic concepts of storytelling. One thing that I can say is that we gave it a lot of Kaufman’s works, in an attempt to really test out the AI’s ability to write something “human”.

What is the goal of the film for you?

I think it should be seen as an experiment and an early draft of a manifesto for AI cinema. I can’t really tell if it’s a good watch or not. What I (and much of the people that have seen it) can say it’s that if you leave your prejudices and listen to what GPT-2 has to say, you can appreciate a radical new perspective of the human condition, seen from the eyes of an algorithm.

What has the journey been like getting the film into production?

As all indie filmmakers know, low-budget productions like this are always a nightmare to pull off, we managed to do it without too many problems. Given the number of actors (the most I have ever worked with) production ran for about a month but in the end it was worth it. We shot the whole short with a BMPCC 6k, a Samyang 35mm T1.5, a tripod and some LED lights. It was more than enough for the static and unusual shots that I had in mind. The really fun part was working with the actors. For the whole duration of production, they were unaware that GPT-2 wrote the script, so I had to come up with some “excuses” to justify the weirder parts of the screenplay. I still remember their faces of astonishment when we watched the final cut together for the first time and the credits rolled.

One thing you learned from this project?

How much even the smaller details matter. Time and time again I was faced with some trivial questions about the characters and the script, but without a human writer to work with, there was no way for me to double check GPT-2’s intentions. Much of my work as a director was interpreting the script in the most unbiased way possible, to avoid any projection of my writing style onto the AI’s script. It was very unusual and somewhat terrifying, not because I couldn’t understand GPT-2 vision, but because it was very clear to me where it wanted to take me. The only thing I had to do was trust it.

How can folks find you and your film online?

You can contact me and the rest of the team on our Instagram, Youtube

or through our Website.

“Scraps of Mechanical Souls” is available for free on Paus.TV

Any last pieces of advice for fellow filmmakers?

Nowadays it is much cheaper and easier to shoot films on your own. No matter how absurd your cinematic vision is, there is nothing stopping you from making it a reality. So go out and shoot your film, no excuses, because maybe, one day, an AI will shoot your film before you.

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