Ridley Scott’s son Luke is about to release his first film—a biotech thriller called Morgan. Perhaps appropriately given the sci-fi nature of the project (and Scott senior’s previous work with IBM), 20th Century Fox got Watson in to help with editing the trailer.
Watson is IBM’s burgeoning artificial intelligence software, and the “cognitive computer” is already being tested out in fields ranging from retail and banking to healthcare and cybersecurity.
For its introduction to cinematic marketing, Watson was tasked with learning what makes for a scary trailer, and finding the scariest bits from Morgan to lure in the viewers. IBM (IBM) boasts the result the world’s first “cognitive movie trailer.”
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IBM’s researchers chopped up the trailers of 100 horror movies into individual “moments,” then used Watson to perform visual analysis on all the people, objects, and scenery in those clips.
Once Watson had tagged each clip as being associated with a certain emotion, it analyzed the sounds in the scenes—including the characters’ tone of voice and the background music—to determine which fitted with those emotions.
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The system also examined the scenes’ locations and framing to figure out what is associated with suspense or horror films. With all this statistical analysis achieved, the researchers then fed Morgan into the system to let it pick out the scenes it thought would be the most suspenseful. Watson delivered six minutes of appropriate clips.
That’s where a human stepped in to edit down and arrange those clips together into a coherent trailer with music. Artificial intelligence has been let loose on the cinematographic arts before, notably in scripting a short film called Sunspring, but the results have been rather incoherent without the human touch.
“It’s important to note that there is no ‘ground truth’ with creative projects like this one,” IBM fellow John R. Smith wrote in a blog post. “Based on our training and testing of the system, we knew that tender and suspenseful scenes would be short-listed, but we didn’t know which ones the system would pick to create a complete trailer.”
According to Smith, the use of Watson reduced the time it took to make such a trailer from weeks down to one day.
So how is the trailer? Have a look for yourself:
It’s sufficiently creepy and possibly a better advertisement for Morgan than the film’s early reviews—sadly, it’s just 39% fresh on Rotten Tomatoes.
