Google Release AI-Generated Film Based Off Vintage Photographs

Matt Growcoot

As creatives continue to grapple with artificial intelligence (AI) technology — how it fits into their workflow or whether it should be used at all — Google has released one example of an AI-generated video using “vintage photography” as the basis.

“The Great Voyage” was published on the Google DeepMind YouTube page yesterday. DeepMind is the company’s experimental AI research arm that has previously produced papers warning people could get too close to AI avatars.

According to the video’s YouTube description, the DeepMind team discovered a batch of 1800s photos at a thrift store and then fed them to a LoRA fine-tuned image generation model, in this case Google Imagen, to create new images in the same style.

The three-minute movie follows the format of a Charlie Chaplin-era silent movie from the 1930s. Title cards appear on the screen with a music score, which is also AI-generated, playing in the background.

A collage of sepia-toned, vintage-style science fiction scenes including astronauts, steampunk machines, airships, a dance in formal attire, and people interacting in fantastical settings.
The images all have a carte de visite quality to them, an analog format popularized in the 1860s that features washed-out sepia tones.

The odd story follows an inventor, Francis, and his wife Edith as they sail to a new world and find “all manner of strange creatures.” It is all a little Metropolis (1927) by Fritz Lang.

The DeepMind team revealed that, in addition to using Veo 2 Image to Video to bring the stills to life, they also used Gemini to come up with prompts and motion ideas.

Lyria 2, an AI music generator, was used to make the soundtrack and the entire film was edited in Final Cut Pro and Logic Pro. The background for the title cards was generated on Imagen.

Despite their efforts, plenty of commenters weren’t impressed by the video. “I really do appreciate the effort that went into generating/producing this, and you (and we) should definitely keep trying — because this is pretty terrible on multiple levels,” writes Cosmic Lettuce. “1925 movies are at least three orders of magnitude better both in terms of content, quality, and production.”

It is still early days for AI video, and while silly short videos are doing okay on platforms like TikTok and YouTube Shorts, AI video is yet to be taken at all seriously in long format.

Recently, Lucasfilm was ridiculed when it showed off a series of AI-generated animals that allegedly belong in the Star Wars universe.

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