Amazon-backed AI company Showrunner has announced an ambitious plan – they want to use their technology to reconstruct the destroyed 43 minutes of Orson Welles’ 1942 feature “The Magnificent Ambersons”.
On Friday, the company unveiled a new AI model capable of generating long, complex narratives. The goal is to create feature film-length, live-action films, positioning the company as the ‘Netflix of AI’.
The platform is also dedicated to AI content that allows users to create their own episodes of TV shows with a prompt of just a couple of words. Over the next two years, the plan is to re-create the footage that was lost after studio executives burned it.
Welles lost control of the editing of the film to RKO. The 87-minute final version released to audiences differed significantly from his 131-minute rough cut of the film, with nearly an hour of footage cut by the studio, and a happier ending substituted.
While the excised footage is gone, Welles left extensive notes for how he wished the film to be cut, which will likely be used in AI prompts. The compromised released version is often regarded as being among the greatest films of all time, and the original cut is considered one of the great ‘lost’ movies.
The plan reportedly involves using not just AI but also traditional film techniques, including mo-cap actors. Extensively archived set photos from the production will serve as the foundation for re-creating the scenes.
A significant contributor is filmmaker Brian Rose, who has spent five years re-creating 30,000 missing frames from the movie, including 3D models that rebuild physical sets to recreate the archive materials as much as possible. All of this will serve as the foundation for the re-creation.
The restoration effort can’t be commercialised because Showrunner hasn’t obtained the rights to the film from Warner Bros. Discovery or Concord.
Source: THR
