The $1M AI film festival
A next generation of filmmakers and the next generation of audiences just showed up in the same week and neither one looks anything like the industry expected.
Hi everyone!
Did you hear? Eddie AI can now implement your team’s comments left in Frame.io. 🤯
Also this week:
Netflix is being sued for $105 million after someone walked out the LA office with unencrypted Nicolas Cage movie. Sony spent $100 million on domes. A cinema that spent two years squatting its own building now legally owns it, thanks to Tarantino. And thirty years after Jamiroquai’s floor started moving, Jay Kay is back in a new virtual insanity.
Render Reel
Adobe’s new Color Mode brings pro grading into the edit sans colorist. The mode was unveiled at this year’s NAB and it keeps grading entirely inside Premiere with a complete visual map of your sequence. Three years of development with input from hundreds of editors, now in public beta. Adobe’s pitch “You are a color person.”
Netflix gets sued for $105 million after unencrypted Nicolas Cage film was stolen from the LA office. A hard drive containing Fortitude, a WWII spy thriller, walked out of the Sunset Bronson offices last month. Netflix says the producers delivered it “without proper industry-standard safeguards”; the producers say Netflix told them to hand over an unencrypted copy, then lost it. Either way, the film is now radioactive and every potential distributor has to be told a stolen master is floating around before release.
The first $1 million AI film festival
For a century, film festivals paid in prestige with money coming later (if it came at all).
But this week Higgsfield just flipped the script.
Its Global Film Festival, with submissions opening August 7, puts $1,000,000 in cash behind short AI films.
$500,000 for first place,
Fourteen total winners
Minimum runtime of three minutes,
Must be made from scratch in 24-days, entirely on Higgsfield..
You can edit with external software but you can’t create new content with it. And when the deadline passes, every submission goes public and is open for anyone on the platform to inspect the files and reuse.
Read that again.
This means every entrant is essentially publishing their rushes.
As an anti-cheating mechanism, your generation history is your proof of work. This might be the largest public reckoning AI filmmaking has ever had.
Every eligible entry also grants Higgsfield a perpetual licence to use the film in its marketing.
Cynical minds might rightly state this is a $1 million marketing scheme. But on the flip side, this is real cash with entries judged on merit, in a corner of the industry where “AI filmmaker” still isn’t a job title.
And at least, radical transparency beats the black box every other platform offers.
Winners are announced in late September.
The squatters won: Paris’s La Clef cinema, occupied illegally since 2019, now owns its building outright.
Evicted in 2022, the collective crowdfunded with help from Tarantino, Wang Bing, and Céline Sciamma. It reopened in January and instead of ads before screenings, they project what the cinema actually needs. A bigger fridge. 35mm splicers. Gardening tools. Yes.
Deaf Crocodile and Antenna! are opening a physical shop and microcinema in Kansas City. Deaf Crocodile is the boutique label behind those excellent Soviet animation restorations. Set it next to the La Clef story above, we’re seeing a small but real trend of physical community film spaces opening rather than closing.
Someone rebuilt Blockbuster as a browsable 3D website and it’s more useful than it sounds. Bingebuster is a fully walkable virtual video store with aisles for genre classics. You can even pull a VHS case off the shelf and read the back. Click the tape and it sends you to whichever streamer actually has it.
Gen Z is propping up the box office and Variety’s data backs up what everyone’s been saying anecdotally. Younger audiences are turning out for theatrical in numbers that would have seemed impossible mid-pandemic, driving this year’s biggest surprises with the likes of Obsession, Backrooms, The Odyssey (obviously less of a surprise) all over-performing with an audience raised on streaming who apparently still want to leave the house for it.
Sofia Coppola’s short film award just closed community reviews and 25 finalists made the cut. Coppola herself will now pick the winner from that top 1%. The prize winner will receive $20,000 to produce the short alongside mentorship, and distribution on DCP+.
The Hollywood Reporter’s critics ranked the 25 best documentaries ever made Man With a Movie Camera, Shoah, Hoop Dreams, Grizzly Man, and Stop Making Sense round out the list.
What do we think?
This week we’re watching:
Thirty years ago, Jonathan Glazer put Jamiroquai frontman Jay Kay in a grey room and made your brain give up in “Virtual Insanity,”. Four VMAs, three decades near the top of every greatest-music-videos list later Beefeater has brought Jay Kay back for the 30th anniversary.
Their new promo for its non-alcoholic 0.0 directed by duo Julien & Quentin takes him out the grey room for the first time.
And we finally learn what that famous outstretched hand was reaching for… a bottle of gin with the gin removed..
Retail Therapy: The phone that wants to be ignored
A phone. Real keyboard. Aluminum body. Fewer notifications. Coming soon.
That’s the whole write-up. Felt wrong to do more.
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