Gary Hustwit

Long before generative AI, Brian was making software to create generative music.

He likened it to planting the seeds for a piece of music and then letting that piece of music flower in thousands of different ways over the course of time.

It was like the music was a living thing.

Now, I'd actually approached Brian several years before this about doing a normal documentary, and he turned me down.

And he turned down a lot of filmmakers.

But his reason was really fascinating.

He said he hated biographical documentaries because it was always one person's version of another person's story, and there was never just one story about anyone.

But Brendan and I thought we had a solution to this, and we showed him an early demo of our generative film software, and he was really excited.

I still don't think he wanted to have a movie made about him, but he wanted to be part of this gendered film experiment, and that was the price that he had to pay.

Brian gave us access to hundreds of hours of archival footage on every obsolete videotape format imaginable.

It took us two years just to digitize and catalog all this stuff.

But we needed more than just archival footage to tell this story, so I filmed another 50 hours with Brian, talking about his creative process.

In the end, we had over 500 hours of material for this generative software platform, and I'll show you how that works.

We start off with a data set of edited scenes, raw footage and music, and the system selects pieces from that material and builds them into a film that's probably 85 to 90 minutes long.

Now, the system knows what all the contents of these pieces are, and it knows how to arrange them into a good story flow.

It also creates transitions between the scenes dynamically in real time.

The biggest challenge for us was how to make it so that every version of the film had an engaging story arc, regardless of what individual pieces were in it.

Filmmakers are notoriously control freaks.

But I still have control, but it's on this higher level.

Like, I'm curating all the different little pieces that could go into this system, and I'm also designing the limitless ways that they can interact.