Beryllium Pictures Presents: The New Guy
Everybody at Beryllium Pictures prides themselves on being a bit nerdy, especially when it comes to movies or tv shows. Frankly it’s this passion for filmmaking and storytelling that got us into this field. While we love working with our clients and helping them bring their visions to life, there's something special about spending time outside of that work to create something purely for the joy of it.
We recently completed our fifth short film (part of, what we jokingly call, the Beryllium Cinematic Universe) called “The New Guy”. News about AI technology is everywhere these days, and it's hard to avoid the hype. We decided to take a tongue-in-cheek approach to the topic and explore what might happen if we let AI go a little too far at Beryllium Pictures.
We went into this project knowing that we wanted to utilize many of the AI driven tools that exist for video production. In some cases we wanted to see what was capable for making work easier or better, and in other cases we wanted to see what really weird or creepy results we could get. These programs included:
Eleven Labs: For creating dialogue out of voice samples (mostly used for the AI version of Benjamin). We actually use this program a healthy amount in our work to fix any mistakes in speech that would otherwise require re-recording. This program has come a long way since its infancy.
Suno: We used this for creating 2 of the songs featured in the film (in the dance montage and end credits). This program was a lot of fun to use and we got some pretty ridiculous results (including what we used in the film). This is one of those programs that I think DOES pose some risks to creative professionals for the ability to so quickly create “original” music.
D-id: This was used to animate the talking headshots at the end of the film. I don’t think we’re fooling anyone with the results this spit out. It’s pretty ridiculous.
Runway: This created some video clips that were used in the AI ad at the end of the film. While I have seen some more believable results from this program, we were definitely striving for something totally bizarre.
ChatGPT: We used this to create a few photos that were featured in the film.
In addition to these AI-specific programs, our main editing program, DaVinci Resolve, utilizes AI for many tasks like audio and video noise reduction, object detection, color matching, among many others.
From a production standpoint, we decided to approach this project with a different perspective compared to our typical client work. The key difference was in our choice of lenses. To give the film a sci-fi, tech-inspired feel, we opted for anamorphic lenses—a perfect match for the aesthetic we wanted. We rented a Sirui 1.6x four-lens set (35mm, 50mm, 75mm, and 100mm) from LensProToGo and paired them with one of our FX6’s for the majority of the film. A few moments, such as the “CCTV” footage, were shot using spherical lenses. Anamorphic technology has advanced significantly in the past few years, and these particular lenses were not only easy to work with but also provided a great opportunity to experiment with composition in new ways.
Are we worried that AI is going to take over our jobs in video production? No. Yes. I’m not really sure, but I am pretty optimistic that us humans still need to be at the core of telling stories.
