Music is also important when it comes to film-making, because a good soundtrack can nudge people to feel in a certain way. For their interactive movie about funnel-web spiders, James Cook University’s (JCU) Dr Linda Hernández Duran and filmmaker and cinematographer Raffaele Giordano, for instance, have also created an AI soundtrack.
“We’ve used Linda’s research on funnel-web spiders and trained ChatGPT. ChatGPT created the lyrics, and we also used Suno AI to generate the music for us, including synthetic voices singing about spiders.”
The spider movie, which is still a work in progress, is planned as an interactive experience that combines stop-motion photography with AI generated environments.
The scientist-filmmaker team is planning to use the CAVE (Cave Automatic Virtual Environment) at JCU’s Ideas Lab for an immersive spider experience. “When we project the movie, we are going to customize the place in the way that people can interact with the environment of the spider,” Linda says.
Dr Linda Hernández Duran and Raffaele Giordano
Raffaele adds that even though AI is a helpful tool, it does not remove the artist from the equation. “AI needs a lot of input from the user. You will need an understanding of filmmaking and you still need an art director to drive the artistic side of things.”