Sunspring

The screenplay was written by an artificial intelligence. The goal of the film was to see if a computer could write a screenplay that could win a competition.

The opening titles read:

Just above your smartphone keyboard lives an artificial intelligence. It was trained on lots of texts and emails, And tries to guess what you'll type next.

We were curious what would happen if we trained this kind of software on something else;

Science fiction screenplays.

So we fed a LSTM Recurrent Neural Network with these: [Numerous screenplays are listed as .txt files.] Then gathered a cast & crew for one day.

Then we fed in random seeds from a sci-fi filmmaking contest...

Prompts Title: Sunspring Dialogue: "It may never be forgiven, but that is just too bad." Prop & action: A character pulls a book from a shelf, flips through it and puts it back. Optional science idea: In a future with mass unemployment, young people are forced to sell blood. ...Gave it a cup of really hot tea...

...And turned it on.

This was the screenplay it wrote:

[Screenplay shown on screen]

Along with these song lyrics: [Lyrics shown on screen]

What follows

is our attempt at making it.

Sunspring

Featured in It's No Game (2017)