HOW THESE ARE MADE

AI Is a Tool.
The Work Is Mine.

Yes, I use artificial intelligence to make these films.
No, I don’t type “make me a music video” into a box and post whatever comes out.

I write the songs. I decide what they are about. I develop the story, choose the photographs and reference material, establish the characters and visual language, write the direction, and build the film—usually six to eight seconds at a time. I decide what stays, what gets thrown away, what gets regenerated, what gets cut, and ultimately what the audience sees and hears.

AI does something enormously useful for me: it gives one filmmaker in Chimayó access to production capabilities that once would have required a crew, actors, sets, locations, animation houses, visual-effects artists and a considerably larger checkbook.

That changes the means of production.
It does not eliminate the need for a point of view.

There is plenty of AI slop in the world already: imagery generated because it can be generated, songs without anything to say, pictures without a reason to exist, endless technically impressive content with nobody apparently responsible for what it means.

That isn’t what interests me.

These films generally begin somewhere AI cannot begin: with something I saw, remembered, photographed, experienced, cared about, laughed at, got pissed off about, or thought was worth telling somebody else.

Then I use every tool available to turn that into a film.

And AI doesn’t relieve me of the responsibility to make the damn thing mean something.

CHARLES PAUL JONES
Birrell Jones Productions
Chimayó, New Mexico