Peacock snails! A literal spider monkey! You’ll find these abominations and more in ILM’s AI short film, Star Wars: Field Guide.
We’ve seen all kinds of weird and wonderful creatures in the Star Wars galaxy over the past 48 years, but few have made us want to hold up a chair to defend ourselves quite like the unholy fauna in a new short film created by ILM.
Called Star Wars: Field Guide, it was made in two weeks according to ILM boss Rob Bredow, who unveiled the short film as part of a recent TED Talk. Created using some form of generative AI, it’s designed to “explore what it would feel like if you sent out a probe droid out to a brand new Star Wars planet,” and is essentially a series of brief, animated shots of non-existent creatures.
There’s a crocodile fused with a terrapin. A monkey with feathers. A lion with blue fir, making it look as though it’s just emerged from a chemical toilet. Looking at the footage, it’s possible to imagine some of the text prompts that were punched in to create these animals:
“Give me a combination of a snail and a peacock.”
“Flamingo lizard.”
“Tiger bear.”
“Sloth mercury bukakke!”
The whole thing has been cut to a swooning orchestral soundtrack designed to give it a bit of John Williams awe and wonder, but the effect is more like the fanfare that greeted Homer Simpson’s attempt at automotive design. In short: it doesn’t really look very Star Wars-y.
The Field Guide is made even more anticlimactic by its placement in the final third of Bredow’s 15-minute TED Talk. In it, the ILM senior vice president took an attentive audience from the earliest days of his company’s existence, with computer-controlled cameras and models, through the digital revolution ILM ushered in with The Abyss and Jurassic Park, and into the present, where the spectre of generative AI has come a-knocking.
Bredow acknowledges the anxiety over AI, and the fears that it will replace jobs and dismantle the entire VFX industry. But he also counters that the AI revolution will bring with it new opportunities for artists, just as the birth of computer animation did when it came in as the 80s tipped over into the 90s.
He makes some logical points, and it’s almost certainly true that AI will soon become a regular part of a VFX artist’s toolkit. AI doesn’t necessarily have to be ethically questionable, either, if it’s trained on data used with an actor or artist’s permission, he points out – citing the de-aged Harrison Ford in the most recent Indiana Jones film as an example.
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As a demonstration of how generative AI can make an artist more creative, however, Star Wars: Field Guide falls decidedly flat. If AI-generated footage really is the future of Star Wars, then we surely need a more convincing demonstration than ILM’s rejects from the island of Doctor Moreau.
You can see Star Wars Field Guide at around the 11 minute mark in the video below. A respectful hat -tip to 404 Media for bringing it to our attention.
