What if Star Wars featured Owen Wilson as Darth Vader?

Some movie directors leave an indelible mark on the cinema industry. In the modern age, one of those is undoubtedly Wes Anderson, renowned for his quirky, symmetrical aesthetic, star-studded casts, eye-catching film locations, and a particularly appeal style of whimsical storytelling. His vibe is so unique and recognizable it can be spotted from miles away.

Now, even computers are being trained to recognize and recreate the aesthetic. In this post, we’re highlighting three movie trailers created by Curious Refuge with the help of artificial intelligence “text-to-image” bots in Midjourney. The movie trailers featured here remix The Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, and Avatar through the quirky lens of Wes Anderson.

These videos bounced around the internet through the early part of the summer, and when they finally landed on the desk of our content team at Suite, we were wowed and entertained. The final product features AI-generated images brought to life with small animations, a compelling voice-over, well-themed music, and—wait, is that really Bill Murray? No, it’s not—but it sure looks like it.

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To “create art” with the help of artificial intelligence, creators need to provide extremely specific instructions, or prompts, to the machines—and as far as actual “creating” goes, there is very little that the human must accomplish after that. In the case of the remixed trailers featured here, the creators prompted the bots in Midjourney with extremely descriptive, explicit instructions, the computer program interpreted that information and churned out a series of images in response.

The examples in this post are just a small fraction of what’s possible as artificial intelligence technology improves—blending and melding styles might become easier than ever for video-focused creatives. For now, we’ll stick to the originals. Although, a Wes Anderson-style remake of The Fugitive might be just as entertaining as the original. Go ahead and enjoy the faux movie trailers here and ask yourself: What story would you tell with the help of artificial intelligence?

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