ABOUT

Wooden Boxes is an experiment in AI filmmaking from 1984 London's new, Future Studio, made to find out what visual AI filmmaking can really do by pushing the tools to make a demanding piece of creative work.

We wanted to see where the technology could extend visual capabilities and where human judgement remained essential, stretching the boundaries of visual AI filmmaking to put us in the best position to learn, understand and evaluate the tools and its powers.

So we wrote Wooden Boxes.

The film follows Sanna, a woman moving through an increasingly distorted version of the familiar. Running thematically beneath the surface are the seven deadly sins: desire, consumption, vanity, greed, envy, excess and apathy. Conditions that have become normalised in modern life and which are becoming more and more powerful and unavoidable. Sanna is surrounded by these forces. Simultaneously participating in them and suffocated by them. And at the same time unaware - it’s all under the surface. The film is about disconnection from reality by forces we are all unwittingly conditioned to cooperate with.

Setting the film to the words of Shakespeare's The Tempest - a 400-year-old rumination on power and control - positions AI as the omnipresent tyrant for today, but reminds us that the need to exert power and control is inherently human and centuries old. Its representation in the form of AI, insidiously entering every area of life unnoticed, is the central theme of Wooden Boxes.

AI is a disputed and catch-all term, liberally used but poorly defined. In the context of visual AI film and image making, we’re working to a different definition. The layered messaging in Wooden Boxes positions AI as the dark force at play in all our day-to-day lives, which we are all conditioned not only unconsciously to accept but to participate in.

We made the film using the very technology it explores. AI became both the subject of the experiment and one of its creative instruments. In many ways AI already controls us, but in this project we’ve turned the tables and used AI in the telling of its own story.

By putting it under pressure across the filmmaking process, we’re learning what the tools are capable of, where they don’t hold up, how much creative control we can retain and where human intervention remains indispensable.

That was the real purpose of the exercise - to begin to understand what happens when creatives take control of the technology and push it through a genuinely human creative process.

We’re interested in where technology can remove friction, open up new creative possibilities and help good ideas go further. We’re not interested in replacing the human perspective, thinking, or craft that makes the work meaningful.

Credits
Written & Directed by Christopher Jarrett
Visuals, Edit, Colour & Sound Design: Christopher Jarrett
Voice Over: Archival Shakespeare reading (public domain)