Extraterrestrial Message

If you're into that sort of thing you may have noticed a recent explosion in the availability of AI art generators that you can use to make some pretty funky pictures with minimal prompting and absolutely no effort on your part. You can download these apps onto your phone and immediately start creating visual imagery that would blow the socks off anything you could probably do in real life – and it only takes a few seconds to create each one. If your finger's really on the pulse then you can also ride the new wave of art acquisition and register the AI representations of your twisted brain juice as NFT's then sell them over the internets for squillions at a time – probably.

Some of the most popular AI art generators are The Night Machine, Dream by WOMBO and Dall-E, but the one which seems to stand out at the moment, and the one which is on display here in the short film Extraterrestrial Message is MidJourney. Partnering up with AI camera software from Cre8tive AI as well as music genreator Soundraw AI, production company Digitonaut along with director Jean-Baptiste Martinoli have fused these computer creations together to bring us a message from a galaxy far, far away – not that one; it's a different one.

Captain Daria is a future human on the starship something or other which has a weird name that wasn't made clear. She's received an Extraterrestrial Message from an alien whose name sounds an awful lot like Oreo, but probably isn't. He comes from the planet Multiformi, which sounds suspiciously Latin for a world that's so distant from Earth that we could never reach it, and it resides in the blah-de-blah galaxy which again has a name that can't be made clear. He wants to show us some holiday snaps from his homeworld and is eager for us to see the incredible beauty and impressive technology that exists there. It kinda just feels like he's boasting, to be honest.

What follows is a quick fly-through of the best bits of Multiformi as Oreo and his sidekick narrate just what gets their alien juices going. There's some expansive explorer/adventurer music blaring all the time as the images play, and everything is all gushingly beautiful, but in terms of story or anything else, that's your lot I'm afraid.

This short is only three minutes long and because of its absence of any sort of plot, it's not really a film at all but more of a showreel for what the technology can do. It's all very nice and a real eye-opener for anyone who's not come across this sort of AI before, but just showing a series of nice images does not a film make.

In the age of Avatar(2009) it's nice to see that the common man can now also have the opportunity to create their own Poundland virtual worlds, but by all accounts it looks like come Christmas time ole Jim-boy Cameron is going to blow all this stuff back out of the water and we're all going to need to start again.