Music and digital art have long been familiar with artificial intelligence. And the cinema could not be left behind. The AI ??has taken the industry of the seventh art to the point of organizing festivals that exhibit titles generated with this technology. If the Runway AI Film has been the pioneer in being held with great success this past February in New York, Barcelona will host the second worldwide and first in Europe in an alliance between Pompeu Fabra University and Sónar D that will you can enjoy in mid-June.
The RAIN Film Fest will present on the UPF Poblenou campus a selection of the best works that use AI models in their creative processes from an international call for films that will be open until April 7. Likewise, directors and directors will be invited to present and talk about their films at public screenings. So far, a proposal has already been received from Colombia and another from Australia. The most innovative films will also be seen at the next Sónar D.
The date chosen for the event will be June 14 and will last for two more days, on the 15th and 16th, coinciding with the thirtieth anniversary of the International Festival of Music, Creativity and Technology. During those two days, the AI ??will take place at the Montjuïc fairgrounds
Four sessions will be organized around creativity and emerging technologies on cinema and AI and also on music and its relationship with artificial intelligence with the aim of publicizing emerging talent that creates, investigates and undertakes, in addition to discussing the ethical use of AI and present several projects and spinoffs of recent creation.
The initials of the RAIN Film Fest refer to Research (investigation), AI (artificial intelligence) and Narratives (narratives) and it is a festival “where films are born” and “it is open to surprises”, has assured Jordi Balló, director of the contest, during the presentation of the act, which has vindicated the role of the university as organizer of this initiative and as a territory of high social impact. “The philosophy of the project is also open to error, an important part of what we will carry out, because inoculating the error in the AI ??procedure is a way of recognizing authorship,” he added.
Runway Organizers, the leading AI video editing company hosting the festival in New York, are RAIN partners. “We feel within the same intellectual and creative adventure, which is to approach from the point of view of cinephilia, authorship and independent production what it means at this moment to create from artificial intelligence and do what we have to do those of us in universities and cultural centers”. The structure of the festival, which will take place throughout June 14 “as the portico of Sónar D”, is divided into four sessions spread out from 9:30 a.m. to 10 p.m.
The one in the morning will be dedicated to international research, with the presence of producers, creators and researchers who work in cinema, narrative and AI, such as the experts Joanna Zylinska, Víctor Pérez or Cristóbal Valenzuela, from Runway. The participating films will be exhibited and there will be a part of the fair with meetings between Catalan and international authors and producers. During the night the protagonist will be LIVE, a musical and audiovisual event of a performative nature.
“Like Sónar D, we like this alliance more than well. When we received the news that a film festival with narrative and AI was being cooked at UPF, we were immediately interested. Since 2016 we have been following the adventures of AI and we are interested in how creators adopt this technology. Both 2022 and 2023 are crucial years for the formats that can start and develop in the future”, said Antonia Folguera, curator of Sónar D.
During the festival presentation, the winning proposal of the Runway AI Film was screened. This is Generation, an experimental animated short film directed by Riccardo Fusetti, starring a dancer and quite handmade. Its duration? It doesn’t last two minutes. “Technology and the budget mean that the formats that participate now are short,” they point out from the festival. But it is only the beginning of a great adventure that will change the way of consuming and understanding the cinema of the future.