AI and Factual Television 2: Truth & Trust

As the Allies landed in Normandy in June 1944 and fought their way eastwards, their progress was filmed by British and American cameramen under the direction of Sidney Bernstein (later founder of Granada TV) from back in London at the Ministry of Information. When the concentration camps were liberated at Majdanek, Poland (the first major one, in July 1944), Auschwitz (January 1945) and Bergen-Belsen (April 1945) the unknown horrors revealed to these cameramen were sent back in rushes (dailies) to Bernstein. As soon as he saw them he realised that the way these inconceivable scenes should be filmed was important and he issued precise instructions to his teams. The filming was to be as incontrovertible testimony, using slow pans/camera movements and with a view to minimal editing, so that no one could accuse the footage of fakery.

Cut to 80 years later and the age of fake news and deep fakery. What role can footage created through generative AI play in factual filmmaking and documentary? The same issues surface – trust, authenticity and truth. AI-generated footage by definition contains no genuine truth, despite being the product of various source truths. Since documentary is fundamentally about documenting reality AI footage can by definition have no major role to play in it.

Where AI can contribute to documentary is in anything from the pre-film-camera age. For example, a thoroughly researched, historically accurate shot of the Roman forum in the reign of Nero.

It is also useful for resurrecting dead people. In the 2022 feature doc ‘Gerry Anderson: A Life Uncharted‘ director Benjamin Field deployed AI-generated images of the Thunderbirds creator’s talking head synced to archive audio recordings of the great man.

What about B-roll and GVs? Sunset over the jungles of Vietnam? Waves lapping the beaches of Normandy? This must be the wrong side of The Line because they document nothing. They are ultimately fantasy. Fine for scripted. No place in documentary.

When Stephen Lambert went down in 2007 for faking the Queen’s behaviour at a photo session, ‘Crowngate‘ proved an accidental act of public service by putting ‘Viewer Trust’ firmly on the TV agenda where it remains to this day. The issue has spread to other media, most recently in the doctored photo controversy. People want to be clear about what they are actually looking at.   

How can documentarians indicate material in their films that were created by generative AI? Benjamin Field did this by putting the Gerry Anderson talking heads into vintage TV sets to differentiate them from the regular factual footage. One way to do this as a standardised practice would be to create an AI ‘watermark’ to make clear what is not actual documentary.

Another way would be to establish a certificate that indicated ‘nothing in this film was made by AI’. At the moment a scheme of this sort is being discussed by PACT, Equity and BAFTA.

The 1 Habit of Highly Effective Factual Filmmakers is: “Trust is the glue of life. It’s the most essential ingredient in effective communication. It’s the foundational principle that holds all relationships.” (Stephen Covey)

Sidney Bernstein, 1st Baron Bernstein of Leigh by Howard Coster (courtesy of National Portrait Gallery, London)

AI & Factual Television

“The future of Television” created by Microsoft Designer’s AI image generator

Just back from CPH:DOX documentary festival in Copenhagen where, apart from running a workshop on stress-testing nascent documentary ideas, I have been exploring the interface between factual filmmaking and Artificial Intelligence.

I had an interesting conversation with multiplatform specialist Simon Staffans about the current crisis in Television in the UK, Europe and beyond. His observation is that, although there is tons of money knocking about in the world in the wake of the pandemic, quantitive easing, etc., the vast bulk of that is being invested in applications of AI in all aspects of life, and not the very 20th century technology that is TV.

What I am seeing at the interface of TV and AI is a strong focus on what AI can or soon will be able to do to speed up, improve or enhance the processes of video content making – from idea generation to pitching to editing to creating voiceover to cleaning up picture/audio to optimising distribution to upping discoverability.

Most training/CPD and briefing sessions at present seem to be largely catalogues of the latest software presented in broad categories representing production stages – that is, the What and a bit of the How. But the frame of the Why is for the most part absent.

AI can help speed up processes and reduce the human resources required – so quicker and cheaper to produce.

It can help fix dodgy pictures and degraded audio – so higher technical quality.

As the arms race for TV sizzle reels continues apace, it can generate impressive visuals, moving and still, to help get you in a room with a money-person. You can add a cloned celebrity voice-over and some in-the-style-of music for a very polished pitch.

But who are you pitching to? If the business models of TV collapse further, where will the funding come from to enable production companies to make good use of these amazing tools?

To what extent will AI give rise to new low-cost forms of content? For example, where text-to-video apps do away with the main costs of production. What’s the relationship between puppies playing in the snow and 20 Days in Mariupol?

Meanwhile today the BPI (British Phonographic Industry) went into legal battle with London-based AI start-up Jammable (formerly Voicify AI), which creates voice clones from BPI-represented and other music artists. The knotty legal/rights and ethical questions AI is throwing up are fascinating and watching them play out over the next couple of years will be as interesting and meaningful as all these other questions about what this major ground-breaking, era-defining, future-shaping technology signifies for our industry.

Protest and Progress and Paramount

Photo: Misan Harriman

Our latest Doc Hearts feature documentary with Oscar nominee Misan Harriman has now started shooting – ‘Protest and Progress’ – for Paramount+.

Directed by Doc Hearts founder Andy Mundy-Castle in the wake of his lauded ‘White Nanny, Black Child’.

It couldn’t be more timely…

First day of the year

 

 

That back to school feeling never really fades. The first day back at work every year is a bit of a challenge however much you like your work. Despite the promise of new beginnings, fresh slates, new directions the contrast with hanging out with family and friends, enjoying entertainments, walks, sleeping in is never easy.

The Christmas holidays are synonymous for BAFTA voting members with the first round of the Film Awards voting. This year – a very good year – IMHO was crowned by the astonishing The Zone of Interest directed by Jonathan Glazer. Loosely based on a novel by Martin Amis, it tells the story of the Holocaust at Auschwitz through a domestic drama set in the commandant’s house just over the wall from the death camp. The acting is flawless, the sound design a revelation and the direction perfectly judged. It has clearly been a long time in the making as I spotted in the credits my lovely old Channel 4/Film 4 colleague Sue Bruce-Smith who very sadly passed away way too young in 2020 in Dublin.

Untimely death and the Holocaust both bring us back to a quotation from Anne Frank which for me gives a clue as to where to start the new year of work…

“How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world.”

Anne Frank in Anne Frank’s Tales from the Secret Annex: A Collection of Her Short Stories, Fables and Lesser-known Writings

Given that, hidden in an Amsterdam attic with the threat of violence and death all around her, she was facing something far more challenging than a new year of work and making a living, her positive perspective is very striking and inspiring.

So the new work year is beginning for me today, by happy coincidence, with a documentary film about witnessing the Holocaust from close quarters through the barbed wire. I have been working on the project for a couple of years with journalist Martin Bright and it feels like this is its year. The release of The Zone of Interest can only help as the stories are very complementary.

For this project and others this year the other words I am going to keep in mind are these from the American author William Faulkner… 

“You cannot swim for new horizons until you have courage to lose sight of the shore.”

William Faulkner

Having the courage to try new things and realising that exciting new work which makes a real difference in the world can begin this second is my suggestion for where to begin…

Sandra Hüller, Jonathan Glazer, Christian Friedel – The Zone of Interest

Other thoughts on the best of cinema in 2023 can be found here

The Pilgrimage of Gilbert & George

My latest commission (which came about from a chat with Tim Lovejoy [host of Channel 4’s Sunday Brunch and The Lovejoy Hour podcast] – big hat tip in his direction) is emerging into the light of day…

Hope

This girl/young woman is amazing and a beacon of hope, not least on the day after Trump made his first post-presidential speech in Florida. As things currently stand, the bottom third of Florida is likely to be under water by the end of this century. Here’s what the Climate Crisis means for The Sunshine State.

Few places on the planet are more at risk from the climate crisis than south Florida, where more than 8 million residents are affected by the convergence of almost every modern environmental challenge – from rising seas to contaminated drinking water, more frequent and powerful hurricanes, coastal erosion, flooding and vanishing wildlife and habitat.

The Guardian 21/4/20

I Am Greta

Nathan Grossman’s excellent and moving feature documentary I Am Greta is available now on BBC iPlayer and Hulu.

What I learnt from Michael Apted

Director Michael Apted on the set of ‘Enough’ (2002) [ (c) Columbia. – courtesy of the Everett Collection]

It was sad to hear of the passing of Michael Apted on Saturday. His ‘Up’ series is one of the great achievements of documentary film and could never be replicated in the industry and the world as it is now. This is what I learnt from him when we crossed paths in Rome two years ago.

Michael Apted on the set of Thunderheart (1992) with Sam Shepard & Val Kilmer

Quotation: Teach us rightly to number our days

On holidays and such circumstances we have a conversation in my family about tattoos. I’ve made 51 tattoo films in my career including In Your Face for Real Stories/Little Dot Studios (100M+ views) and The Male Body Handbook: Tattooed for Channel 4. The conversation springboards from the question: If you were to have a tattoo, what would it be? I always end up saying the only thing I would want to see every day is something that was or meant “Carpe Diem”.

As I sit writing this at my desk there is a marble tablet to my right – a cheap bit of tourist tat from when I visited Rome a couple of years ago to speak at MIA – the Mercato Internazionale Audiovisivo film festival/market. The tablet, quite heavy, says:

CARPE DIEM

QUAM MINIMUM

CREDULA POSTERO

Quinto Orazio Flacco

So the phrase we are familiar with actually has a broader context: Seize the day, put very little trust in tomorrow. It comes from Book 1 of (Roman poet) Horace’s Odes (23 BC). Quinto Orazio Flacco in Latin is Quintus Horatius Flaccus, better known as Horace.

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I don’t really like the look of Carpe Diem. Carpe reminds me of carp, the fish that Eastern Europeans love to consume for some reason. Diem contains “die”. So I was pleased to find another quotation this week (at the funeral of my step-father) which means much the same thing. It is from the Old Testament, Psalm 90 (verse 12):

Teach us rightly to number our days, that we may gain a heart of wisdom.

I read this as an exhortation to value each day and recognise that it is one of a limited number we are each allotted – through that perspective, brought to mind daily, we can become wise at heart (as opposed to at head).

The nearest tattoo I can find is Psalm 90:14, two doors down, nicely done but not at all the same:

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I am big on the word “joy” though – my daily mantra is “I will enJOY my day” – and I’m all up for being “glad all our days”, but it’s not for me.

However Psalm 90:12 is not quite snappy enough – it is great for an arch in a cemetery but not quite right for my arm.

Back to the fantasy tattoo drawing board…

In the meantime In Your Face has just been awarded the Best Documentary accolade in the Lockdown Short Film Showcase run by London Short Film, of which more tomorrow…

Athena Skates

This is my 2nd commission for Red Bull Media House. Athena Skates is an uplifting film spotlighting a new generation of empowered Athenian women.

As Athens tentatively emerges from a decade of chaos, a group of young female roller skaters are fighting for space in their city. This new generation of Greeks grew up with few opportunities – but this taught them a valuable lesson: if you want to follow your passion, you have to do it yourself. While support and infrastructure for young people fell victim to the crisis, the girls are using roller skating to create their own community and express themselves.

Athena Skates is a filmic journey through the hidden skate spots and urban wastelands which punctuate this ancient metropolis. In the process, it shows what it means to be a young woman in Greece today and why finding a way to do what you love – despite the challenges – matters now more than ever.

At a time when so many are stuck indoors, Athena Skates is a liberating, dynamic film revelling in the freedom to move through your city and create your own space within it. The film opens in the spectacular location of the abandoned Hellinikon international airport as the sun sets over the Saronic Gulf. The skaters set off on a high-energy journey across the gritty concrete jungle that is Athens, culminating at the top of Mount Lycabettus, as the sunrise ushers in a new day – and a new generation.

Athena Skates was produced by Hijra Collective, London for Red Bull Media House, London & Salzburg – part of an initiative I have been running focused on excellent storytelling applied to human interest documentaries. Athena Skates is directed by London-based Elliott Gonzo, an outstanding young voice, distinctive and original, working in the realms of commercials, drama and documentary.

World of Zoom

Well, that was a weird week. I spent three whole days in online conference calls. I’d used Zoom once before. I’d never used Microsoft Teams.

However the week finished on a high note – our monthly Finnegans Wake research seminar at Senate House, University of London was shifted online this evening. Led by Prof. Finn Fordham of Royal Holloway, University of London, our motley crew wrestled with the clunkiness of MS Team to enjoy two hours together drilling down through the layers of the Wake and its various manuscripts and versions. Spending 20 minutes arguing the toss over the word “be” was a comforting contrast to the macro chaos beyond our virtual room.

“the massproduct of teamwork” suddenly took on a new dimension given that Teams was the software making this human contact and continuity possible.

The three days leading up to this evening was spent on Zoom (wish I had shares in them – and how did they nick ahead of Skype so effectively?). Zoom is a well designed software but the difference between what the workshop would have been like IRL and how it is in an online video conference is stark. Very intense and relentless in a way that is not the case face to face. I was working as a mentor on Documentary Campus Masterclass  – we were supposed to be in Copenhagen, parallel to CPH:Dox Film Festival (cancelled). I did the same workshop in the same city last year so I have a direct comparison.

The most creative use of the software was by two Czech filmmakers I’m working with – Vit & Tomas. They transported themselves and us, using the software facilities, high into the mountains…

[photo: Esther van Messel]

The gap between the experience of these sorts of softwares and the experience of being in a room with fellow humans is an interesting one which tells us much about how we actually communicate and how we create – which is not a flat experience but a rounded and fluid one. Something to keep observing over the next days and weeks…