What has already happened to the music industry with the collapse of the major label’s stranglehold on the public’s music taste is already happening to the film industry. The AI tools such as MidJourney and Stable Diffusion plus hundreds more in the works mean I have a mini-Pixar studio in my living room now.
We haven’t seen many of these feature-length films come out yet because they still take months to build, but you better bet they’re in the works. The entire film production pipeline is being reinvented, but give us a year or even less and we will see what the leading-edge filmmakers have in store.
Brace yourself. Culture is about to go off like a Roman candle in a good way. It’s about to speed up and outrun the dinosaurs.
Just as Tame Impala wrote, produced, and recorded an album in their living room that got 200 MILLION streams and record of the year, you no longer will need a floor or three of animators or multi-million dollar production budgets to make a compelling film.
Where are the stories of women who are not child-like damsels in distress? Where are the anti-heroes and protagonists who deconstruct the dominant cultural paradigms? Fortunately, they’re already here and more are coming.
The metamodern masterpiece Everything Everywhere All At Once was made with a comparatively tiny budget. A team of five made this real magic. Finally, we have an incredibly well-done film that is not a regurgitation of the hero’s tale.
The monomyth, btw, is a big fat huge lie, plus Joseph Campbell was a blatant racist and misogynist. If you are a storyteller, for the sake of all that’s good and sacred please deconstruct the covert patriarchy hidden in the monomyth so that you can make actually interesting and hopefully world-changing art.
Ok? Ok. Let us continue.
“If you want your children to be intelligent, read them fairy tales. If you want them to be more intelligent, read them more fairy tales.”
Einstein was not speaking of Disney’s sugar-laced-lies – the kind of fairy tale which slowly rots the being’s heart, mind, and soul. Our fairy tales must contain the truth if they are to prepare the next generation by transmitting the wisdom of the ancestors.
I’ve assembled a playlist with some excellent medicinal-grade fairy tales from all over the world. We start with Baba Yaga and the Hedgehog in the Fog, as well as all the videos linked to in this post.
If you have a favorite fairy tale, please drop it in the comments. I can always use more good ‘uns.
Please come to the AI Art Salon every Friday where we are making archetypal tales full of the beautiful juice and bittersweet potency of real life.
I’m capturing years of wisdom I’ve gathered while guiding psychedelic sessions for the last several years. I have had the honor of witnessing the unwinding of deep ancestral tales lived out in the lives of my clients. The gift of their messages goes into my work.
Building a new culture and worldview is not merely an intellectual thought experiment, it requires a subjective artistic expression that elicits new emotions and feelings. Go Art!