The Tribeca Film Festival is gearing up for an AI takeover this year, dedicating an entire section to films created by OpenAI’s Sora.
On Friday, the Tribeca Festival announced that it would play host to Sora Shorts, a series of films created by the AI text-to-video-model. For this endeavor, the festival has tapped five filmmakers to make original films with the AI-based application that was announced way back in February and still has not been released.
So far, only a handful of red teamers and visual artists have been given access, so this group of filmmakers joins a small group of insiders. This latest cohort of filmmakers includes Nanny director Nikyatu Jusu and actress Bonnie Discepolo (Fire Country, Shazam! Fury of the Gods). Other filmmakers featured on the list are Ellie Foumbi (Our Father, the Devil), Reza Sixo Safai (The Mario Valdez Story), and Michaela Ternasky-Holland.
Although generative AI has been used in major films — and not without controversy — this will be the first known use of Sora in films screened at a festival. In a statement to the press, Tribeca Enterprises co-founder and CEO Jane Rosenthal said that “humans need stories” to make sense of the world around us.
“Sometimes these stories come to us as a feature film, an immersive experience, a piece of art, or even an AI-generated short film,” Rosenthal said in her statement. “I can’t wait to see what this group of fiercely creative Tribeca alumni come up with.”
One thing that distinguishes Sora from currently available AI models is the ability to produce videos up to 60 seconds long, surpassing other models that are limited to 6-8 second clips — though Google’s Veo, which is also unreleased, purports to make videos of this length as well. Additionally, videos generated by Sora can contain multiple shots, though they don’t include audio of any kind, including dialogue. Sora reportedly has controls in place so that it cannot depict any act of sex or violence.
If you want a glimpse of what the AI model is capable of at this current moment, check out the music video for “The Hardest Part” by artist Washed Up. It’s very underwhelming, to say the least.
The Tribeca Film Festival runs from June 5-16 in New York City, so it’ll be interesting to see how these filmmakers use Sora for genuine filmmaking endeavors.
