By: Michael Feldman

IBM Watson has added another skill to its resume: film editing. The cognitive computing wunderkind has produced the trailer for Morgan, a sci-fi horror movie about an AI lab experiment run amok. The resulting trailer is quite slick.

It’s a clever piece of marketing from Morgan’s distributor, 20^th Century Fox, since it makes the AI premise of the movie than much more believable.  For IBM, it’s yet another example of Watson doing tasks normally associated with higher levels of cognition.

Watson basically modeled the entire movie and broke down each scene based on the mood it exhibited: scary, happy, tender, and so on. Based on that, Watson selected a series of “salient moments” as candidates for the trailer. Tech publication The Next Web summarized the process as follows:

"To prepare the machine for the task at hand, IBM researchers fed Watson over 100 horror movie trailers cut into separate moments and scenes. The computer then performed a series of visual, sound and composition analyses to get an idea of the dynamics of a trailer. When Watson finished processing Morgan, it isolated 10 scenes totaling six minutes of video."

Just to be clear, the final editing and clip selection was performed by a real film editor, including, presumably, the trailer’s audio score. So in that sense, the creative aspect of the trailer was still under human control

Nevertheless, it’s easy to recognize the utility of automating scene selection, given the time-consuming nature of doing this manually. Constructing a movie trailer can take weeks. Watson shortened the whole process down to 24 hours.

Here’s the final trailer, along with a discussion of how the project came about and some commentary from a director Luke Scott.

 

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