Twilight trilogy movie star, Kristen Stewart, is taking on new roles for her upcoming movie release: Come Swim. The actress' fame for the vampire love story never really went away but it looks like she is reaching onto new horizons to make a name for herself in other movie genres.
Kristen Stewart is taking up the role of an AI researcher for her directorial debut, "Come Swim." The short film is amongst those in this week's program at the Sundance Film Festival. The film is quoted to be a "trippy meditation" which brings together "artistic vision" and blends it with one of the many most advanced computing techniques of today.
The groundwork of the 17-minute long film was established with Stewart publishing a research paper last week. The paper provides details on how and where she got the impressionistic visual effects. The actress made use of neural networks.
Neural networks is an aspect of artificial intelligence where a collection of computers work together and try to emulate the intricate workings and details of the human brain. The specific technique is titled "Neural Style Transfer" and it puts neural networks to use for "artistically redrawing" images.
The redrawing is done in a manner similar to that of an impressionistic painting. The painting was made by Kristen Stewart herself and it is that of "a man rousing from sleep," the paper states. A surreal and dreamlike effect is created after blocks of color as well as texture is added to the transfer. This process is put to use throughout the duration of the film.
Kristen's paper states that, "Neural Style Transfer requires many creative iterations when trying to work towards a specific look for a shot." The paper also adds, "The parameter space is very large -- careful, structured guidance through this in collaboration with the creative leads on the project is needed to steer it towards a repeatable, visually pleasing result."
Titled "Bringing Impressionism to Life with Neural Style Transfer in 'Come Swim'," the paper does not bring to light the number of computers pressed into service for the film. However, it does cite an Oxford University-affiliated neural network.
The citation is made for an evaluation said to "provide the right balance between execution time and the quality of result desired". Additional citations include the Amazon EC2 cloud computing service in order to highlight graphics-processing resources which would "get us to the needed level of quality" required for production.
