Earlier this year, TCL released a trailer for Next stop Paris – an ai-animated short film that looks like a Lifetime movie on steroids. The trailer had all the hallmarks of ai: characters that don't move their mouths when they speak, lifeless expressions, and strange animations that make scenes look like they're constantly vibrating.
I thought this might be the extent of TCL's experimentation with ai movies, given the healthy dose of criticism it received online. But boy, was I wrong. TCL premiered five new ai-generated short films that are also destined for its free streaming platform TCLtv Plus, and after the Next stop Paris debacle, I alone had to see what else he cooked.
Although the new movies look a little better than Next stop ParisThey serve as another reminder that ai-generated videos are not yet available, something we've seen with many of the video generation tools emerging, like OpenAI's Sora. But in the case of TCL, it's not just the ai that makes these movies bad.
Here are the five, ranked from tolerable (5) to “I wish I could stop watching this” (1).
5. Day of the sun
This futuristic short film has basically the same concept as The story of Ray Bradbury. “All summer in one day.” It follows a young woman who lives on a planet where the sun only rises every seven years, but only 10 people can see it at a time from the top of a building called the “Citadel.” Well, this girl wins the lottery to have a rooftop view of the sun, but two thugs lock her in a room to prevent her from reaching the Citadel.
The ai-generated sequences become quite difficult to follow as you try to get out of the sewers beneath the school. Somehow he contacts his father (telepathically?), who turns out to be a maintenance worker who knows the underground way. There, she encounters purple rats on her way to some kind of elevator (?) that turns into a rocket and launches her to a rooftop (?) where she can finally see the sun.
The voice acting in this isn't bad, but the lack of facial expression was pretty ridiculous (just watch this scene).
4. Nexus Project
Nexus Project It's more like a five-minute trailer than a short film, and unlike TCL's other ai movies, this one is meant to depict animated characters, rather than trying to make them look as human as possible. It starts like this: a man finds what looks like a radioactive rock and then coordinates the arrest of a group of four teenagers, who then gain some kind of supernatural powers after the rock explodes beneath their prison.
They use these new powers to escape from prison, and that's where it ends with a “to be continued.” I thought maybe the facial expressions would be better because the characters aren't supposed to look completely human, but that's definitely it was not the case here. The story of this film is probably the most compelling of all – the ai-generated animation and questionable voice acting make it difficult to watch.
3. The best day of my life
This is a docu-fiction style short film, in which an actor playing Dr. Warren Brown uses ai to retell the harrowing story of how he lost a leg after being caught in an avalanche on the top of Cerro Castillo mountain. Chile, and it is difficult to say in which parts. of history (if there was one) actually happened.
Although most of the film is an ai flashback, showing clips of Brown and his friend traversing the snowy mountaintop, it intercuts scenes with the real human actor playing Brown narrating the story. It's basically like watching an Investigation Discovery show, but with all the “dramatic reenactments” done with ai.
The story starts to lose me after it shows an ai-generated image of a severed leg, followed by a trippy sequence of Brown's “life flashing before his eyes,” which, for some reason, includes a zebra transforming into a lion. I visibly cringed at the end when Brown called this the “best day” of his life.
2. Audition
First of all, The hearing It didn't seem so bad. But what I thought was a silly parody involving an actor auditioning for a role in front of a demanding casting director turned into some strange and unfunny attempts at comedy. After asking the actor to try out various accents, the casting director's requests become more specific: he should be younger, perhaps look more like Brad Pitt (with Elf ears, for some reason.).
Magically, with the power of ai, the actor becomes everything the casting director wants him to be and even fakes it in different scenes from iconic movies like Indiana Jones and eastern time. Guess what? In the end, the casting director rejects him because she wants something “different.” When he leaves, his clones practice their lines in the waiting room.
1. The slug
It's okay, I In fact I hate this. It is as if Franz Kafka had access to ai and generated The metamorphosis. The gist is this: a woman suffers from a severe case of arthritis and tries to contact her family and doctor by phone, but they don't answer. He can't seem to leave the house because of the pain, which is why he looks so longingly out the window when he places a slug outside.
Things get really weird after this. His hands and feet become covered in slime, until his body gradually transforms into a slug. Viewer discretion is advised, because it's honestly a little disturbing. Once the metamorphosis is complete, he slowly walks out of the house in slug form and someone finally calls him back. How tragic.
