Over the past few decades, actress and writer Natasha Lyonne (“Poker Face”) has certainly left her mark on Hollywood. Now she will make her feature-length directorial debut with the upcoming “Uncanny Valley.” This movie will be done alongside technology innovator Jaron Lanier and actress/co-writer Brit Marling (“A Murder at the End of the World”).
Lyonne and Marling are also expected to star.
“Uncanny Valley” will take place in the world of immersive video games and look at their dependence on AI. The plot centers around a teenage girl leaving a wildly popular Augmented Reality (AR) video game.
The project is backed by Asteria, an AI-based studio founded by Lyonne and Bryn Mooser (“The Big Picture: News in Virtual Reality”). It “will blend traditional storytelling techniques with cutting-edge AI technologies to create a radical new cinematic experience,” says an Asteria representative.
“Uncanny Valley” & AI
Asteria’s partner Moonvalley will generate all of this AI via the “Marey” model. Thankfully this model is built with material that has been COPYRIGHT-CLEARED. Hopefully providing yet another example of ethical uses of AI.
Not to mention, this could potentially create an entirely new way to make movies. “When artists lead the tech instead of the other way round, trailblazing and unexpected advancements are possible,” says Mooser.
Lyonne believes “Uncanny Valley” has the necessary human touch that most AI-generated “art” lacks. It is like if “Dianne Wiest and Diane Keaton, at their loquacious best, decided to take a journey through The Matrix for sport, only to find themselves holding up an architectural blueprint.” [We’d like to see ChatGPT come up with that idea.]
Before calling Lanier “a bona fide polymath, a philosophically expansive personal hero and a singular, sage-like character for the ages.”
“There is a story here about technology, but it is really about people, and the unpredictable thread of connection that joins us across generations, technologies, and divergent weirdness,” Lanier said about the project.
We’ll keep you posted on updates about “Uncanny Valley” as the project develops.
