Walking Shadows Vol. 3:
Director’s Statement
In a world where we are consuming more screen content than ever, what would stop a TV network from cutting costs dramatically and using new technology to create commercials, entertainment, reality TV and more? Drama and Comedy is protected (for now) by new agreements struck with actors’ and writers’ unions around the world, but cheap reality TV going this way is not much of a stretch.
Large corporations, such as Disney have been using A.I. for a while and are now actively exploring their options with the technology to create content, and Lionsgate have just announced a new partnership with A.I. firm Runway with a view to generating new content, so this is definitely the way things are going in the entertainment sphere.
Add to that the state of global politics, with disinformation, divisive rhetoric and the encouragement of mob mentality – repeated and amplified in the general public’s social media feeds and other published content A.I. learns it’s ethics from – what will we see in a few years as acceptable entertainment?
And so the idea of The Little Sleep – a reality TV show, using death row inmates as contestants who don’t actually know they’re on a reality TV show, where the general public vote on who will get a pardon and who will be left to die – was born to form the storyline for Walking Shadows Vol. 3.
Why are they all speaking Shakespearean language? Taking the idea of insisting that everyone be the same, or else they are “othered” and devalued as citizens (or worse), which is already happening right now around the world, it’s not too big a stretch to see that maybe individual cultures could be lost. Which would be a tragedy. But who would the world turn to for a global culture?
Shakespeare is the most read author ever globally (alongside Agatha Christie), selling 2 billion plus copies of his plays to date, so it is a natural progression to think that maybe, with Shakespeare being seen – rightly or wrongly – as the paragon of intellectual culture, the world might begin to elevate him even further, adopting his speech and also potentially Elizabethan culture and attitudes. To be honest, in some quarters, certain attitudes in certain sections of society today would fit right into the Elizabethan mindset, especially in regards to women and “foreigners”, so again, not much of a stretch.
With a history of high culture being co-opted into extreme regimes to give them legitimacy, plus humanity generally being prone to sentimentality about the past – it’s not too big a leap to think that maybe we would start to pick aspects of Elizabethan culture to adopt in every day life as well.
Using about 10% of A.I. generated elements as an experiment, live actors, and a LOT of human-generated VFX, this final season of Walking Shadows Vol. 3 now exists as a cautionary tale, born out of my own anxiety about unregulated tech and the current state of global unrest.
There was a lot of human effort put into making any of the computer generated/A.I. content look “right” during the edit of the series, as the A.I. during that time was not great and had a lot of glitches that had to be corrected by a human (me), but I was amazed at how fast A.I. is learning and improving when it comes to generating screen elements in general. Especially with the free apps I was playing around with.
It’s a brave new world and, if I’m honest after creating elements of this final season of this series in this way – I will admit that the tech aspects alone in this current climate make me somewhat anxious about what it all means for us as an industry and society as a whole.
I guess time will tell if those fears are founded.
Sally McLean
Creator, Writer & Director
Walking Shadows Vol. 3