from Hacker News

The movie that's different every time you watch it

by mmoustafa on 4/7/25, 8:55 PM with 25 comments

• by Animats on 4/11/25, 3:48 AM

  "new and unique cinematic experience"

  Neither new nor unique. It's been done, many times. The classic is Kinoautomat, 1967.[1]

  Much video game design revolves around how to keep to the plot while giving the user some freedom. If the user is locked to a path, the game is called a "track ride". If the user can do whatever they want, it's an open-world game. Resolving that dichotomy is hard, but has been done successfully many times. GTA V is a good example.

  [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinoautomat

• by Nursie on 4/11/25, 3:59 AM

  Ah, Brian Eno.

  I played with a piece of music software of his many years ago now, mid 90s it was. Can't remember the name of it but it was an early attempt at sort of generative music.

  Simple concept - choose a few basic settings like BPM, then drag some instruments (represented as blobby icons) into a 2D box which represents the 'soundscape'. The horizontal axis of the soundscape represented displacement on the stereo channels, the vertical represented volume.

  Each instrument would play a part in the music. I can't remember if the were samples or used the old midi synth stuff, or how it was decided what notes they would play. The instrument icons were mobile in the box and would move around, bouncing off the walls, shifting from left to right speaker while disappearing and reappearing in the music that was generated.

  The idea was that the music was infinite and unique.

  Simple idea, fun to play with, I wonder if anyone got much more than an "Oh, neat" and five minutes tinkering out of it though...

  I bring it up because even though that was 30 years ago, it seems to be on-theme with this project.

  (Edit - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koan_(program) - turns out not to have been his creation, but he used it to publish music and wrote about it)

• by gibbitz on 4/7/25, 9:18 PM

  This raises a fundamental question about the role of Art in society. If I want to see all the content in this film I will have to watch it the rest of my life. This is great if I'm making money off of the content but terrible if I'm just curious about Brian Eno and want to see a well assembled, curated interview with him. Producing content with an AI that will re-edit the film on each watch makes post production easy for creators but leaves the task of editing on the viewer, like ringing up your groceries at the market. So why then does content exist? Is it to entertain viewers, to attract eyeballs to ads or as an outlet to creatives? I'd argue it should be a balance of the first and last (ads are a necessary evil today, but creative texts were not invented to provide context for advertising). Work that is fan service often doesn't provide the outlet desired by the creative and work that challenges the creative often bores the audience. This seems like it falls in the second category. No disrespect to Brian Eno.

• by p1dda on 4/11/25, 6:46 AM

  After reading about this documentary I became interested in watching, turns out I can't. Thanks for nothing I guess.

• by badlibrarian on 4/11/25, 5:19 AM

  In practice it seemed more lazy than illuminating. 30 hours of interviews of even the most fascinating person yields a fraction of useful material. Which in turn needs research and context to communicate in visual form.

  Likewise I'm glad Eno found a way to fund 500 hours of digitization of ephemera but again it needs to be curated, not put into an ffmpeg script.

• by allears on 4/7/25, 9:10 PM

  That's an interesting concept from the point of view of the artist, but from my point of view as a consumer, I want to see reviews and the reactions of my friends before I see a movie. This means I would never see the same movie they saw.

• by GauntletWizard on 4/11/25, 3:41 AM

  Haruhi already did it, though it's sadly been lost to time: https://www.reddit.com/r/anime/comments/3xmlb2/spoilers_haru...

  I loved the Endless Eight, personally, but I watched them one a day after the event was over. Having read the LNs, I knew what was coming as soon as I got a whiff from the internet of the first episode, so I just held off, waited until it was over, and enjoyed.

• by p0w3n3d on 4/11/25, 7:40 AM

  I wonder why nobody mentioned Bandersnatch

• by curseofcasandra on 4/11/25, 6:15 AM

  “Synecdoche, New York”

  Depending on where I am, I get something different from this film.

• by mdp2021 on 4/11/25, 9:36 AM

  > randomly selects snippets

  This is much less than the faults in intelligence of generative systems. (E.g.: "make the visuals for the movie M as if created by director D" - which can result in a formal exercise without the depth that director D would have brought.)

  The sequence of the editing is of course an artistic process which represents an intelligent intention - a deliberate choice with grounds.

• by staticelf on 4/11/25, 8:34 AM

  I really have a hard time with people in the art world. There is nothing unique about the idea and it's really just a script putting together clips. Instead of actually making interesting art, people in this community often resorts to crappy things no one enjoy and wouldn't be able to survive unless they were given benefits from the state.

• by kyledrake on 4/11/25, 5:06 AM

  The unfortunate consequence of this approach for me is that I've been busy the few days they allowed the movie to be streamed, so I haven't been able to see it yet. Can't really put it on Netflix or YouTube if it has to be nondeterministic.

• by slackfan on 4/11/25, 2:37 PM

  So we've basically reverse-engineered theater.

• by lofaszvanitt on 4/11/25, 9:32 PM

  People watch films for the experience, for the stimulation, and to be able to relive that exact experience at any time if they need to. So all this generative nonsense is just bullshit wrapped up in shiny packaging.

• by m3kw9 on 4/11/25, 2:53 AM

  If it came from a “LLM” prompt that is jail broken and in 5 or so years. Just say generate the movie Terminator 2