by Geoff Stanton
As a judge on an AI film festival, George Miller is in many ways a natural fit. Since his childhood days in the local cinema of rural Chinchilla, he’s been fascinated by the imaginarium of visual narrative, and where it could go. His long career now carves a remarkable journey across its expanding horizons, from the road-skirting rigs of 1979’s Mad Max to the animation breakthroughs of Happy Feet and the immersive mythscape of Furiosa. It’s been a hell of a ride.
Yet Miller’s grounded sensibilities have consistently used technical advancements to keep the human in the spotlight. It’s an instinct in step with the designs of the OMNI International AI Film Festival, co-founded by Aryeh Sternberg and Travis Rice, launched to explore a new era of filmmaker creativity, with judging criteria focused on the quality of narrative-based stories, from short-form experiments to AI-generated documentaries.
Like all of us, Miller watches with fascination as the technology continues to reinvent – or maybe dynamite – the norm. But he also sees it as a continuation of the journey. “There’s always been an evolution of technology in cinema, from the get-go, through silents to sound to colour to all the different platforms. And, of course, AI is eclipsing them way more rapidly. But at the same time, artists and creatives and filmmakers are learning how best to use it in their process.
“I couldn’t help but get really, really intrigued by what was happening,” he says.
After hearing about the festival earlier this year, which premiered on a smaller scale in Sydney, Miller was happy to be invited as a judge on the panel. He joins pioneers such as animation veteran Yan Chen, known for work on Happy Feet and Matrix Reloaded, AI producer Caroline Pegram, who led the team that won the very first global AI Song Contest, digital creative guru Jonathan Zawada and Travis Rice.
During the initial test-run in April, the 0.5 version of the festival proved a hit, drawing nearly 1,000 entries and sold-out audiences.
“’I saw the finalists, and I was blown away by what they could do,” says Miller. “Incredibly, those that came in two months before the final entries were not as evolved in their technology as the later ones – which really showed just how rapidly AI is changing. Of course, we’ve had CGI and digital filmmaking. But what would be a year or two in it, in the evolution of those tools, now happens within a month – if not a week. It’s a wild ride.”
He is equally enthused about the creative scope that it hands filmmakers. “One of the things that goes hand in hand with my curiosity about storytelling is the curiosity about the tools available. Particularly for the moving image. Way back in the first Babe, it was almost 10 years from the time I read the original book to when the technology was available to make it into a live action story. We had to wait.
“Then, not quite a decade later, Andrew Lesnie came back from the first Lord of the Rings and showed me the first motion capture of Gollum. We already had the story for Happy Feet, and suddenly there was a way we could make thousands of penguins dance. One of the main things that also kicked off Fury Road was the opportunity to do things that we could never have dreamed of doing when we were working analogue.
“What once drove visual effects back in the ‘90s were fairly rigid pipelines. You started on a visual effects or animation pipeline, it was a big machine and relatively rigid. On the Lord of the Rings, WETA built in a lot more flexibility and were much more innovative. But nevertheless, AI has changed it all. It’s no longer a pipeline. I’ve heard so many filmmakers say, ‘I’ve tried to raise the money, I’ve gone here, I’ve gone there. And now it’s within my reach, I can do it.’”
Where will it all lead, does he think?
“It’s hard to grasp at any given moment where the tools are going. It’s changing, literally, as we speak. And of course, with it comes this huge, I guess, ethical debate about human creativity. What are its negatives? What are its positives? What do we have to be careful of? What do we have to be grateful for? And all that debate goes on any technological advance across time. So, we’re in that stage now, and it’s a wild ride,” he says again!
Ultimately, it returns to the meeting point of story and human experience. “We are hard-wired for story. It’s the way we make meaning and how we understand existence. And it goes way back. We in Australia know that more than anybody else, because we’ve got the oldest culture on the planet, the indigenous Australian culture, which goes back some 65,000 years.
“And the stories are still there. And they’re stories that do exactly what every mythology, every great religion, every great Shakespeare, every great novel, every great movie, every great narrative that we write, every great fairy tale does. What they all have in common is that at the end of the day, we are trying to understand who the hell we are.”
As the moving image journeys forth, into the brave new world of AI, George Miller is confident our stories will keep us in the light.
OMNI 1.0: Iterations – will take place in Sydney in November 2025
