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Your new movie
Incorporeal Man - in a few words, what's it about?
It's about a drunk who can walk through walls. He has just left his
job as a carnival sideshow performer to follow his true calling as a
crime fighter, but he is terrible at it. The movie quickly forgets
that it is a superhero movie and follows him through his binge
drinking and taking advantage of his mentally challenged neighbor at
the flophouse, and his half-assed attempts to look for clues in the
case. In the trailer I called it "a superhero movie that gets drunk
and falls down." What were your sources of inspiration when writing
Incorporeal Man?
I wrote it and storyboarded it before 2008, way before Ai came out.
When I wrote it I was thinking of movies like
Taxi Driver and
Midnight Cowboy, anti-hero movies. I also wanted it to be a movie about
addiction, but from the addict's point of view - I wanted to follow
all the same musical and editing conventions as superhero movies, but
instead of defeating villains, the protaganist's goal is to drink
more, the villains are bartenders and liquor store owners who cut him
off, and the musical cues and editing all make obtaining more alcohol
seem like a triumph over evil. This was also a time when superhero and
franchise movies were taking over, if they hadn't already, and I kept
reading reviews of superhero movies where they said "this is a
superhero movies but goes beyond the genre" but I'd watch it and it
would just be another superhero movie. I wanted to make something that
was a superhero movie on the surface but was really just about a loser
with one superpower who is terrible at it.
Since
Incorporeal Man's lead character Jim is based on photos of yourself,
to what extent could you actually identify with him and his schemes?
Hopefully I'm not too much like the character... but I think everyone,
especially when you work on art or film projects in your free time, has
moments when they imagine that their shitty office job they spend 40 hours
a week at is just a day job and that they have a secret identity that
makes them more important than other people think, especially when they are just starting to work.
Do talk about Incorporeal Man's
look and feel! When I wrote it, I expected to shoot it
on 16mm. I had made a movie on 16mm before, and had no idea what I was
doing, so it came out all scratchy with bad framing and bad sound. I
wanted Incorporeal Man to
look like that. When I started making it, Veo and Minimax, and
Sora to
some extent, were the state-of-the-art AI video apps but they looked
too polished and realistic for
Incorporeal Man, I wanted a glitchier
medium. I mostly used Pika, which gives you enough control to make it
look like the storyboard, but still does weird things like 360-degree
head turns and plastic-man movement. I thought of this as the AI
equivalent of 16mm, or even Super-8, and it's a lot cheaper too. Some
of the initial keyframe images came from original locations I had
wanted to use for the movie since I wrote it almost 20 years ago. I
just went there and took photos then AI-edited them to make them match
a little better, then used those as the background for keyframe
images. I also took photos of gritty, dirty surfaces and used them for
the initial image of things like the flophouse wall. As
Incorporeal Man was
mostly AI-generated, do take us through the whole process of making your
movie, and to what extent have the advantages and also shortcomings shaped
your film's story? The only shortcoming I really hate about it is the lip-syncing is
off. The glitches of the medium added to the story in most other
respects. One thing I wanted to do when I was writing it is have
different characters play Roger. I planned to have on main actor play
Roger for most scenes, and I was also going to record audio of him
reading all Roger's lines. Then I planned to have someone in a
fake-looking Roger mask play Roger for about half the movie and I
planned to use the audio for those scenes. When I decided to make it
with AI, I just used AI's native-inconsistency to generate different
versions of Roger instead. Also, because I did all the voice acting
myself, it was a lot easier to get the line read exactly how I wanted.
I had been rehearsing every line in this movie for many years.
Since you've done both, how does
making an AI-generated film compare to making a live action movie, and
which do you actually prefer?
AI is more fun because you don't have to do all the producer's work,
like raising money, getting all the actors and crew to show up on
Saturday morning, etc. The director's work is about the same, or just
a little less, when making an AI movie vs. live action. The work is
just more compressed, because all you have to do to get to the part
where you're actually directing is to sit down at the computer. With
AI you can wake up at midnight with an idea for a short movie and have
it done in 6 hours because the "actors" and sets are just always
there. I do have a couple ideas which just wouldn't be suitable for
AI, which I would like to shoot as live action some day, it all
depends on whether the medium matches the story.
There's different ways to make an AI movie which overlap a little, but
are quickly diverging as the technology improves. With
Incorporeal Man, I had a script and storyboard and was trying to make the AI
images and video match what I already had. This is the direction
Hollywood is going in. The other way to do it (which is the way
everyone thinks all AI movies are made) is to work with AI's
hallucinations to generate or get ideas for surreal content. I've made
short movies like this, and it's a completely different process and
different output, much more experimental.
The $64-question of course, where can
Incorporeal Man be seen? Free on YouTube -
https://youtu.be/VQWmi6-8is0?si=gUHg81TUMrsQ0BTe
Anything you can tell us about audience and critical reception of
Incorporeal Man?
Most people who have seen it like it so far, but it has had low
viewership. I'm terrible at marketing and don't even try very hard at
it, I figure things will just grow organically if they are meant to.
Any future projects you'd like to share?
Nothing I am far enough along on that I'm sure I'll finish. I still
have 5 episodes left of
The Disposable Soma to make and I will
probably finish that eventuallyn but I haven't been in the mood to work
on that lately. I'm working on a script called Bad Investigations
which I might do in a similar style as
Incorporeal Man, or I might go
with higher end tools like Veo. It will be a series of connected
vignettes of people solving crimes and getting it wrong every time.
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Your/your movie's website, social media, whatever else?
I have Bluesky and YouTube:
https://bsky.app/profile/zebharadon.bsky.social
https://www.youtube.com/@zeb-haradon
Thanks for the interview! Thanks for the interview! |
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