The rise of artificial intelligence (AI) has led to many interesting creative projects, notably the work of YouTube channels Royalty Now and Mystery Scoop. There have also been attempts to create whole works of art from the process, songs, albums, theatre, and films.
Bird Woman, Sacajawea is an example of a film created using AI. Filmmaker Lynn Rogoff wrote and directed the first episodes of this new historical series. She has taken computer-driven movies and video games as inspiration and has developed a cast of historically-inspired avatars to tell her story.
In taking the Lewis and Clark expedition and the character of Sacajawea as the main plot, Rogoff has assembled the film as a sequence of talking heads against action or nature scenes. The script focuses on how Sacajawea becomes the bird woman and what her life was like leading to this point.
In a deeply feminist reading of the story, the men are somewhat caricatured, and the experiences endured by the lead character are relayed with disarming frankness.
The voice actors are real, which gives something of an emotional core, but I found the avatars more distracting than life-like, and found the whole premise on which Bird Woman, Sacajawea is based didin’t really work for me.
The film is set in a series of episodes in which the major characters tell us about their story, or rather oddly interact. One needs eye contact between characters or something more substantial than what we are seeing here.
However, Rogoff is quite right to seek out different ways of filming, and in blurring the lines between traditional move-making and video games, perhaps teases out a way of storytelling that will appeal to those who may not engage with the spectacle of real characterisations.
Bird Woman, Sacajawea is now available, produced by Amerikids Productions.