AI cut ten-day shoot to two days on Hazanavicius film, sales chief says
Ten days of shooting became two. That was the saving claimed for artificial intelligence on a major scene in Michel Hazanavicius's new film The Third Hand, according to Vincent Maraval, chief executive of French sales and production company Goodfellas Variety.
Maraval spoke on 22 September at the fifth Creative Investors' Conference in San Sebastian, an event for film financiers co-organised with CAA Media Finance. CAA's Roeg Sutherland asked him how AI technology is changing his work. Maraval answered with the ten-to-two example from The Third Hand.
Hazanavicius is the Oscar-winning director of The Artist and the director of The Third Hand. The new film follows a young French soldier wounded in World War I who wakes in a mad scientist's laboratory after a German hand is grafted onto his abdomen. The cast includes Bérénice Bejo, Rebecca Marder and François Civil.
It is billed as a "fantastique" silent film in colour, a French term for fantasy with strange or horror elements Yahoo. That is Hazanavicius's second silent feature after an earlier black-and-white film. Goodfellas launched sales at TIFF, meaning it began offering distribution rights to buyers from different countries, after production had just wrapped.
The claim prompted a question about jobs. Fewer shooting days can mean less work for crews. Asked about that loss, Maraval said the use of AI was the director's choice.
What makes this stand out is the maths. Shooting days are expensive. Crew wages, locations and equipment all charge by the day, so cutting eight days from one scene is a direct saving.
