Kollywood film team uses AI to create young Sathyaraj

The makers of the upcoming Tamil film Weapon, starring Sathyaraj, Vasanth Ravi and Rajiv Menon, have used AI to generate a crucial animated sequence in their film.
The film’s director Guhan Senniappan, who describes the film as a “superhuman saga”, states, “Sathyaraj sir plays a character with superpowers. We have a portion explaining how this character got his superpowers. It is for this sequence that we have used AI, to generate the look of the character in his younger years and how events unfolded in the past.”
Usually, filmmakers approach traditional animators to design such sequences in their films, but here, the team has used AI for the same. Guhan tells us, “Of late, we’ve been seeing a lot of AI-generated images on social media, and they look terrific. AI can generate whatever we want, but it involves trial and error, for now. Since we had footage of the artistes and the locations, it was easier for us. ”
“We had a team of five working on this AI sequence. We used an open-source software with an AI plugin and created 3D images. While films like Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One have used AI, we believe this is the first such attempt in Indian cinema,” says producer MS Manzoor.
‘FOR NOW, CREATING INDIAN CHARACTERS IS A CHALLENGE’
Guhan feels AI still has some way to go when it comes to creating characters in the Indian context. “Right now, AI hasn’t reached a level where it can instantly create the desired skin tones for Indian characters the same way it does for Europeans or Americans. If you ask it to generate a tribal per son from India, it will come with something that is neutral to the whole of Asia. There’s also a lot of Western outlook in terms of backdrops, skin tones and so on. Bringing nativity is a challenge now,” he says.