No amount of clever editing can make this Seedance-generated mess interesting.
On Monday, District 9 and Gran Turismo director Neill Blomkamp unveiled his latest project: a 13-minute sci-fi short titled Nightborne that’s loosely based on Peter Watts’ 2014 novel Echopraxia. The short comes from Blomkamp’s new AI startup / production company, Barley Studios, and features characters whose voices and faces are modeled after human actors. But every single one of Nightborne’s shots was made with ByteDance’s Seedance 2.0 text-to-video generator.
In an X post about the short, Blomkamp described it as a “test start” meant to demonstrate what generative AI is capable of, and he said that he wants “to tackle a full feature in this format” at some point in the future. Blomkamp seems to think that Nightborne is a strong proof of concept that might get people intrigued to see what he prompts next. But as polished as the “film” might be compared to most of the AI-generated videos floating around the internet today, it still bears many of the hallmarks we associate with slop. And even though a team of real people was involved in the project’s production, Nightborne is such a terrible watch that one would be hard-pressed to call it the future of moviemaking.
Set against the backdrop of a military conflict between the US and Syria, Nightborne tells the story of an American pilot who sustains life-threatening injuries when her helicopter is shot down. Though most of the pilot’s body is badly injured, she’s still technically alive and her head is intact. Those things make her the ideal candidate for Project Nightborne — a governmental program that turns brain-dead soldiers into remote controlled, weaponized zombies. And because the military has an endless supply of bodies at its disposal, the pilot is one of many uniformed ghouls being trained for war in secret.
Like basically every other AI-generated film that has come before it, Nightborne is really a collection of very short video clips that have been edited together to tell a simple story. Nightborne frequently cuts from shots of its zombified main character to documentary-style interviews with people involved in Project Nightborne. These cuts give the film — which was edited by Austyn Daines — a way to obfuscate the fact that Seedance 2.0 is only capable of generating a few seconds of video footage at a time. And the way the film’s dialogue is mixed almost (but not quite) makes it seem like you’re listening to real people speaking.