Anand Gandhi, the mind behind Tumbbad and Ship of Theseus, has shared a series of AI-driven storyboards he created for his film, Emergence.
Announced in 2019, Emergence is described as a hard sci-fi film based on a pandemic that brings the world to a halt. The film was delayed due to the Covid-19 pandemic. In a two-part post on Instagram, Anand said he'd started working on Emergence in 2015 and came close to materializing it in 2019 when the Covid-19 pandemic struck. He said he regretted not making the film in time.
Incidentally, Emergence was meant to star late actor Sushant Singh Rajput as one of the characters. One image in the storyboard features a likeness of Sushant.
"AI generated storyboard.@zain.memon_ and I started working on Emergence in 2015 and came close to making it in 2019. The event the film speculated became real and might have been the prime reason for the film to not happen. I regret not making the film in time. I think I should have at least published it as a book like Kani asked me to, incessantly. Some day, I will make the time to put my screenplay into prose form, I hope. In the meantime, sharing some images I generated using AI for the story. My exposure to text to image AI happened a decade ago at MIT Media Lab. Ramesh Raskar and Dhairya Dand introduced me to a very early prototype. It was literally a storytelling tent then. One would enter the tent and tell a story, rather slowly, and images would be projected on the tent. Computer vision is going to inform our futures in ways I can only vaguely speculate, limited by the ceiling of my imagination. Here’s a glimpse, for starters. This little playfulness of art and AI is dedicated to one of the most interesting minds I had the joy of knowing. You’d know who I am talking about when you reach the last frame", Anand wrote.
Reacting to the post, Actor Vijay Verma commented, “This looks extraordinary, Anand. I hope and wish you make this ”