Next Stop Paris: The first full-length movie created by AI is about to premiere

On April 13, electronics company TCL announced a one-minute trailer of Next Stop Paris, a long-running romantic comedy produced by the company with most of its content using AI, scheduled to premiere in the summer.

Chris Regina, Chief Content Officer of TCL, said that this is the first time a feature-length film has incorporated one of the most advanced technologies.

The content of Next Stop Paris tells the story of two young people who meet on a train to Paris and fall in love. The frames show that the two had extremely happy times during a visit to the amusement park, taking a boat ride, walking or dancing in the clock tower.

Runway ML, a popular text-to-video tool, participated in the production and trailer creation of the film. The famous AI Midjourney is also used by filmmakers in the filmmaking process. To create logical and consistent segments, the TCL team tried to reconcile two styles of AI.

According to TCL's Content Director, the application of artificial intelligence makes a difference for the film.

However, Tom's Hardware believes that the frames in the trailer are "technological traces of AI that creates videos from early text". In each scene, the dialogue is only a few seconds, the characters do not have much movement, and have unnatural expressions. Between scenes, the appearances of the main characters are different as if "dozens of similar actors are standing in" for these two characters.

9to5google believes that the female character is similar to the characters that AI usually creates, always a young, thin, white woman. In addition, the female protagonist's face shape, hair and eye color are all different to a certain extent in each scene. Image quality compared to another recent video creation AI, OpenAI's Sora, is also far behind.

In addition to images, parts such as editing, music, and voice acting are all performed by real people.

Next Stop Paris is expected to air online and for free on TCLtv+, a platform pre-installed on TCL TVs.

Samuel Daniel

Update 15 April 2024