After officially announcing a new partnership with Google DeepMind to produce short films with Gen-AI and some of Google’s newly announced tools last month, filmmaker Darren Aronofsky has unveiled the first of three planned shorts created using generative AI.
Directed by Eliza McNitt and produced by Aronofsky, the short is entitled “Ancestra,” and it will premiere at the Tribeca Festival on Friday night. Per an official statement, the 8-minute short “blends live-action filmmaking from a crew of 200+ artists and technologists.”
The short was inspired by McNitt’s “own life-threatening birth, when doctors discovered a hole in her heart” and aims to “shed light on pregnancy challenges rarely seen in storytelling, breaking through technological barriers that once made these narratives impossible to visualize.” The filmmaker “transform[ed] personal family archives into a visually stunning experience, including images of her likeness in the womb.”
As IndieWire’s Brian Welk previously reported, “McNitt trained the AI models on her own baby pictures and other photos taken by her late father in order to generate a newborn infant with a story that could be shaped by her own biography.” The short uses both live-action filmmaking and generative AI-created sequences, including those that go inside a woman’s womb, as inspired by McNitt’s own complicated delivery.
The short is the first to come out of Aronofsky’s new venture with Google DeepMind, called Primordial Soup, which aims to produce new shorts that combine, as IndieWire reported last month, “new tech and storytelling and has the mission statement of creating frameworks for AI’s role in filmmaking and putting artists in the driver’s seat of technological innovation.”
McNitt is known for a previous VR series, the three-part “Spheres,” which was executive produced by Aronofsky and featured the voices of Millie Bobby Brown, Jessica Chastain, and Patti Smith as the voices of the cosmos. It was the first VR project to ever be acquired out of Sundance.
While the next two Primordial Soup shorts and their filmmakers have yet to be formally announced, an official statement noted that both “will explore new applications of Veo, Google DeepMind’s video generation model.”
You can watch “Ancestra” in full below.