1. Anytime you give someone freedom to create (anything), you will end up with a penis drawing. Just scrolling through quickly I see that Frame #13122 delivers on this law of the universe. After watching the movie preview, I only watched the first 45-50 seconds and counted about 4-5 drawings of the bodypart and 6-8 additional frames that just contain the word "penis". I wouldn't be surprised if 2-4% of the total frames submitted contain this specific content.
2. It says that all frames have been drawn, but in fact they are far from complete. Many people have submitted blank frames or frames with one line scribble. There really should be a minimum "ink" or "coverage" amount before determining that a frame has been given a proper amount of effort in the drawing.
3. People have wildly different artistic capabilities. Which sounds like part of the fun, but in practice many of these frames are so bad, that watching them back to back just looks like a static mess.
4. Not a problem, but there are also some AMAZING submissions in here that are awesome to see. I wish those people could be allowed to submit additional frames. Maybe enough "upvotes" on their existing frames and they get to create another frame.
5. We need to crowdsource a review process. It would be good to allow people to either A) draw a frame, which is a smaller portion of the population or B) review an existing frame for content and quality. This allows everyone to contribute to the movie in a way that they are capable. Reviewers could be shown a frame with a few buttons such as: blank, low effort drawing, inaccurate drawing, inappropriate drawing (see #1). If a frame gets a high ratio of similar negative reviews then we know to put it back into the rotation to be redrawn.
5. Just because all frames have been drawn, there should be the option to resubmit an alternative for low-effort or blank frames. These are easy to find, so I should be able to submit a second drawing that gets queued behind the original in case the original gets rejected through the review system (which a blank frame easily would).
Overall the concept is really cool. These tips above would solve most of the core problems and make it a better experience for everyone.
> 1. Anytime you give someone freedom to create (anything), you will end up with a penis drawing. Just scrolling through quickly I see that Frame #13122 delivers on this law of the universe. After watching the movie preview, I only watched the first 45-50 seconds and counted about 4-5 drawings of the bodypart and 6-8 additional frames that just contain the word "penis". I wouldn't be surprised if 2-4% of the total frames submitted contain this specific content.
Are there any YC startups specializing in detecting penises? They can probably help.
When I worked in games in the late 2000s the rumour* about why Minecraft was able to come in and do what everyone knew that Lego should have been doing (a multi-player online block-building game), was that they spent so long trying to create a Lego penis detector that they missed their opportunity.
* - I cannot verify this, so take it with a pinch of small white cubes
> “It was all automated, but the human moderators were, if I remember correctly, the single biggest cost center for Lego Universe’s operational costs,” said Fox.
I know that Discord has a poor implementation of this technology. I once spent 10 minutes trying to upload a photograph before I realized that a pig’s snout was tripping its indecency detector. I had to put a black bar across the offending area to bypass it. It must be a feature channel operators can turn on?
Seriously. People spend thousands to travel to Pompeii and walk through tittering about how naughty the Romans were. It's not as if those Romans were any different from the guy drawing dicks on a blank webpage. And if 2 measly millennia is all it takes to confer archaeological significance on phallic graffiti, why not just get ahead of the herd, take the long view (so to speak), and appreciate your own culture in all its messy future significance in the here and now?
There's nothing wrong with it morally, at least in my opinion.
There's just the practical issue of how to deal with all the penis drawings.
Also, it is just annoying behavior. People think they are being funny, but it is the equivalent of a child writing P O O P everywhere. It is mildly fun for them, but tiresome for everyone else. It isn't in the spirit of the group effort, and just takes the fun out of it for people who actually want to make something.
by allowing penis drawings it pulls any artwork generated to be penis focused. Crowdsourced art suffers if it can only ever be about the penis is mightier than the sword.
Bad drawings likewise limit the aesthetic of what is possible.
By claiming those are not problems, I can present 60,000-ish frames of random scribbles and call it a reproduction of Bee Movie.
There should be some effort made to actually achieve the stated goal.
And while the occasional one-off joke frame could be funny, everyone wants to be that guy. So the thing becomes nothing but a string of joke frames, most of which are not even remotely funny.
Seriously, it's not like they are trying to win an Oscar. If someone puts a random penis in the middle - great, it makes the work all that more interesting. That is what crowdsourced art is all about.
Yeah I mean the whole thing could be done with an ffmpeg one-liner if that was the goal, but emergent web phenomena like this are rare and few between. Reminds me of the million dollar homepage.
> There really should be a minimum "ink" or "coverage" amount before determining that a frame has been given a proper amount of effort in the drawing.
I know what you mean and I agree, but your example of measuring ink usage reminds me of measuring a programmer's productivity by counting the number of lines of code they've written. What would be the equivalent of deleting lines, though?
While lines of code is not a good way to measure productivity, it is not useless. I’ve used it to uncover situations where people were struggling with work. It’s a heuristic which can be used to draw your attention to areas which could be problematic.
Yep! You need a kind of review process and some incentives. Not that difficult to implement.
You give several people the same frame to draw, then you just have everyone pick their favourite. The one with the least votes can be temporarily shadow banned from their next drawing appearing as an option. Alternatively, you can reward the one with the most votes.
But honestly, maybe just allowing people to choose the frame they like might be enough and you don't even need to do much more.
A great solution would be one where maybe after drawing a frame one could choose between two frames of the movie that which one better represents the original / is better or funnier in their mind.
How about just have multiple people draw a single frame, average it out, if it still is significantly different from the 2 prior and 2 subsequent frames, throw it out and have it drawn again?
The original episode explores how animation is made by having the characters remake the first episode, so it's doubly meta that the fans have reanimated it.
People giving out tips on how to "improve" this probably didn't read the FAQ.
> The Free Movie is not about quality– in fact, that interpretation, that rawness, is the specific terroir want in the final film. To paraphrase MSCHF: shitty things are good.
Yes, there are better ways to rotoscope a movie than unmoderated crowdsourcing. So what? Not everything has to be over-engineered and optimized for 150% user experience. Considering how it was made, I think this is actually surprisingly watchable.
Every other frame is "penis" text, a drawing of a penis, or something similar. I believe it's a work of art nonetheless, definitely cool. If they did it "right" the result would just end up looking like someone took the original movie, converted it to 16-color space, then randomly moved around groups of pixels. I agree the way this is was executed was much more interesting than the "right" way. It's a cool experiment!
People aren't looking to improve the quality of the honest attempts at reproductions of frames, they are looking to have each frame be an honest attempt at reproducing a frame.
There are so many frames where there was no attempt made.
And the FAQ says nothing about that. It does not say that trolling other users is the point. The point is to troll Dreamworks/Paramount by stealing their movie in the weirdest way possible.
This is brilliant. Often, people will come up with clever-sounding ideas for how to "fix" some part of the internet. "Just let people do X and it'll all work out!" The movie generated by this project is a perfect illustration of what happens: you'll get some excellent results from a small subset, the bulk of people will contribute in some small but productive way, and you'll get a small-to-moderate sized group whose members metaphorically relieve themselves all over your project.
It would be cool to do some followup projects. "Ok, that was try 1, now we'll add some basic moderation." It would be great to see visually how well that would work. "Ok, how about meta-moderation?" For a fairly niche project, my guess is that that would be enough to get to a presentable product without any fullscreen "Poop!"s. Then you do "ok, that was cool but the quality was kind of poor, let's incentivize with small amounts of actual cash."
It would be fascinating. Call it "How the Web Melts, Illustrated".
It can work well for restricted inputs, like Twitch Plays Pokemon. The FREE Movie is too open-ended. They should do a simple distance check to throw out frames that don't overlap much with the original frame. They could also have a frame-voting mode where you basically just get a stream of frames and swipe right if it looks good, left if it looks bad, then use the crowdsourced data so that the movie plays with the current highest voted frames.
You don't wanna replicate the movie. I imagine if you add colours, for example, you could make your own interpretation of the colour palette and so something really amazing but as a distance matrix... you'd be way off.
I think just adding some kind of moderation, for example allowing people to select the best frames out of a set of frames and so on, might be enough to get a much higher quality product.
Poor execution, but great idea. Give users random frames. Obtain multiple drawings for each frame. average and reject frames that are too different from the average. voila!
Give users a choice - do they want to draw a frame (will take a couple of minutes, many people don't have time/patience) - or do they want to vote on a few frames?
For each frame, get at least 4 different drawings.
For voters, show them 2-4 frames and have them pick the best one.
If there are more than 4 versions of a frame, do a bracket-based competition to determine the best frame.
This could be an ongoing process. Generate a version of the movie using the best available frames, but continue allowing people to redraw frames. The movie would continue getting better and better over time.
Then, when you watch the movie, maybe you could have a slider to control which "generation" of the movie you're watching. Slide all the way to the left and it will be really primitive, slide all the way to the right and it will be the best version.
I can't even begin to guess how you would numerically average or compare hairline drawings.
If they were fully shaded frames it would work, but hairlines I have no idea.
Also I observed that some frames left a dark background white, and others filled in a dark background as black. So you'd have to set up a lot of drawing "rules" to ensure it was even conceptually meaningful to generate an average in the first place.
Flag images which have less than a certain % covered. Probably garbage.
Pass the reference frame and each candidate drawing through a CNN. Measure the cosine similarity between the candidate embedding and the reference embedding. Flag drawings that fall below a threshold.
Pass candidates through CLIP. Flag images with obvious garbage descriptions.
The problem isn't just approximate positioning of lines, but radically different artistic styles and amounts of shading and detail. Is someone's hair made of one line, five lines, or 100 lines? Does a face have 3 simple lines or 50 little lines that give a sense of skin texture?
Distance fields would work great for font outlines, but not for translating movie frames.
Oh, I don't know. How well does it have to work? If anything I'm suddenly very curious what kind of results you'd get from converting line art to distance fields, averaging/interpolating, and converting back. Maybe I'll write some code...
Warhol copied a portrait. Totally different issue.
"The supreme court [lol @ Anti-American Grauniad] focused on the specific use that allegedly infringed Goldsmith’s copyright – a license of Warhol’s work to Condé Nast – and said it was not transformative because it served the same commercial purpose as Goldsmith’s photo: to depict Prince in a magazine."
> The supreme court [lol @ Anti-American Grauniad]
It is nonsense to claim the Guardian is anti American because their style guide eschews capitalisation. They also refer to the “UK supreme court” and to “the king” without excess capitalisation.
You can see a "preview" of the movie by clicking out of the email box and clicking "PLAY" on the bottom right. It's basically what you would expect from a drawing site hosted on the open internet...
For anyone who hasn't seen it yet, I highly recommend the "Our RoboCop Remake". Incidentally, I've also just learned that vimeo apparently demands thousands from you if you have a hosted video that becomes too popular.
I seem to recall years ago that 4chan's tv board, and possible the reddit equivalent, was working on a redraw of the the infamous "Plane Scene" from The Dark Knight rises. I wonder what ever happened with that.
Pretty cool concept! I feel like it would have made more sense to get multiple samples of each frame, and let all the users upvote/downvote frame versions to arrive at the best ones.
Bottom-up (maybe OP less so) for-fun collaborative (re)animations like this are most commonly called Multi-Animator Projects[1], at least presently in certain parts of the internet. They're found everywhere else you'd expect under different names. Some of the earliest web-originals are still on newgrounds and niconicodouga, but aren't easy to find.
Another name is the pattern of "/a/ draws", "/v/ draws", "r/anime draws", etc, from 4chan. Those would be the most similar ones to OP in terms of mspaint-like quality and quantity of penises[2].
Interesting idea but they should have used multiple drawings per frame and overlayed them to get rid of trash frames.
Anyway, if anyone wants to see a Pink Floyd Dark Side of the Moon movie that functions as a projector for the album, I edited this together and you guys may be into it: https://odysee.com/DSOPiQ
I added an intro and some other stuff to mess with you but it can effect the projection substantially so if you want to skip it, go straight to 7:34 (don't go less than that otherwise you might get something)
I thought the idea was interesting and I was curious how they'd make sure the images would not contain dicks / racism / memes or even attempt to re-create the original image in any way.
A voting system? Maybe with a voter reliability score? AI?
Turns out they just didn't, and the result is exactly what you'd expect.
This is great, similar to the Johnny Cash video! Although that had a bit better execution, users could submit however many they wanted and you could select multiple version of a frame.
Will the voices be dubbed by the community aswell? If not, how does this evade the copyright issue?
Curious what the copyright situation is for redrawing a movie. If it's ok the next step would be training a model with video frames and the drawn version (edge input) to undo the process :D
i put my email address to get notification when the film is edited. to my surprise, it's actually a project by MSCHF. a hypebeast shop? glad i use a throwaway email.
This looks like something that could easily come from StableDiffusion. The fact that every frame can be different is a key enabler to using AI because temporal coherence is still an issue there (albeit there are tools to alleviate this some). As a bonus, the super simple monochrome sketch style will be very fast to generate.
1. Anytime you give someone freedom to create (anything), you will end up with a penis drawing. Just scrolling through quickly I see that Frame #13122 delivers on this law of the universe. After watching the movie preview, I only watched the first 45-50 seconds and counted about 4-5 drawings of the bodypart and 6-8 additional frames that just contain the word "penis". I wouldn't be surprised if 2-4% of the total frames submitted contain this specific content.
2. It says that all frames have been drawn, but in fact they are far from complete. Many people have submitted blank frames or frames with one line scribble. There really should be a minimum "ink" or "coverage" amount before determining that a frame has been given a proper amount of effort in the drawing.
3. People have wildly different artistic capabilities. Which sounds like part of the fun, but in practice many of these frames are so bad, that watching them back to back just looks like a static mess.
4. Not a problem, but there are also some AMAZING submissions in here that are awesome to see. I wish those people could be allowed to submit additional frames. Maybe enough "upvotes" on their existing frames and they get to create another frame.
5. We need to crowdsource a review process. It would be good to allow people to either A) draw a frame, which is a smaller portion of the population or B) review an existing frame for content and quality. This allows everyone to contribute to the movie in a way that they are capable. Reviewers could be shown a frame with a few buttons such as: blank, low effort drawing, inaccurate drawing, inappropriate drawing (see #1). If a frame gets a high ratio of similar negative reviews then we know to put it back into the rotation to be redrawn.
5. Just because all frames have been drawn, there should be the option to resubmit an alternative for low-effort or blank frames. These are easy to find, so I should be able to submit a second drawing that gets queued behind the original in case the original gets rejected through the review system (which a blank frame easily would).
Overall the concept is really cool. These tips above would solve most of the core problems and make it a better experience for everyone.