on monday, Region 9 again Gran Turismo director Neill Blomkamp has unveiled his latest project: a 13-minute sci-fi short titled Sleeping at night that is loosely based on Peter Watts’ 2014 novel Echopraxia. The short comes from Blomkamp’s new original/production company, Barley Studios, and features actors whose voices and faces are played by human actors. But one by one Sleeping at nightThe shots were created with ByteDance’s Seedance 2.0 text-to-video generator.
In X’s post about the brief, Blomkamp described it as an “experimental start” intended to show what production AI can do, and said he wants to “host a full feature in this format” at some point in the future. Blomkamp seems to think so Sleeping at night it’s a solid proof of concept that might get people interested in seeing what he inspires next. But as polished as a “film” might be compared to many of the AI-generated videos floating around the internet today, it still has many of the hallmarks we associate with slop. And even if a group of real people is involved in the production of the project, Sleeping at night such a bad watch that one would hardly call it the future of filmmaking.
Set against the backdrop of the military conflict between the US and Syria, Sleeping at night tells the story of an American pilot who suffers life-threatening injuries when his helicopter is shot down. Although most of the pilot is badly injured, he is still alive and his head is intact. Those things make him an ideal candidate for Project Nightborne – a government program that turns dead soldiers into remote-controlled, armed zombies. And because soldiers have endless corpses, the pilot is one of many ghosts who have been secretly trained for war.
Like all other AI-generated films that came before it, Sleeping at night it’s really a collection of short video clips edited together to tell a simple story. Sleeping at night it’s often cut from footage of its main character to documentary-style interviews with people involved in Project Nightborne. This cut gives the film – which was edited by Austyn Daines – a way to hide the fact that Seedance 2.0 is only capable of producing a few seconds of video footage at a time. And the way the film’s dialogue is mixed probably (but not really) it makes it seem like you’re listening to real people talking.
Blomkamp’s creative voice feels absent
When you look really good Sleeping at nightvisuals and listen closely to its sound, it’s easy to understand how much gen AI is in the mix. Background cues are often written in complete gibberish, and the characters deliver their lines with unusual accents that make them come across as people who don’t really know what they’re talking about. According to Blomkamp, ”real concept artists” contributed work to the project, and 32 human actors agreed to have their likenesses used on screen. But that human input doesn’t seem like it’s close enough to save Sleeping at night from feeling like mechanical content rather than a piece of art.
Apart from that, the same director who dreamed came up I live in Johannesburg – a thought-provoking exercise in using VFX to explore ideas about apartheid-era racism – nothing surprising about it Sleeping at night. Blomkamp’s creative voice feels absent as the story of the short progresses, and if Seedance 2.0 wasn’t part of the equation, people probably wouldn’t be talking about it.
Although Seedance 2.0 can produce emotional videos, Sleeping at night it highlights that the model still lacks the kind of real understanding of small details that make human performance feel natural and real. Whatever dramatic nuance you may glimpse is simply a reflection of the videos Seedance 2.0 is trained on, and it’s nothing to brag about.
Except for zombies, Sleeping at night it does not have everything in common with its source material. But it is very similar to Jia Zhangke Dance by Jia Zhangke short and Ruairí Robinson’s viral AI video featuring Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt fighting – both created with Seedance 2.0. Each of these projects has shown that traditional filmmakers tend to be able to tolerate the technical limitations of gen AI, but their skills can do a lot to make up for the inherent weaknesses of the technology.
While text-to-video models may be more sophisticated, they are not yet advanced enough to produce finished works that audiences enjoy seeing. Sleeping at nightThe announcement was almost met with a wave of backlash from people who saw the film as a sign that Blomkamp was being washed away. And while Blomkamp may have thought that Sleeping at night can get a good buzz for itself, it seems that he has wandered into a negative situation similar to the one created by Darren Aronofsky with his bad AI series about the Revolution.
The most interesting thing about it Sleeping at night it is how its story can be interpreted as a commentary on the technology used to create it. Project Nightborne is about people in positions of power and buying the bodies of dead people without their consent to produce workers for cheap. Generative AI isn’t as (quickly or obviously) destructive as deadly zombie soldiers, but those who want to use the technology are driven by a similar desire that drives it. Sleeping at nightthey are bad.
