Viral AI-Generated ‘Barbenheimer’ Trailer Took Four Days to Make
It’s the biggest movie weekend of the year with both the Barbie and Oppenheiemer movies released at the same time, now some artificial intelligence (AI) magic has spliced the two together.
“Barbenheimer” has entered the lexicon in recent weeks and one creative used the AI image generator Midjourney to create the outrageous mashup.
Starring Matt Damon, who plays Lieutenant General Leslie Groves in Oppenheimer, and Margot Robbie who plays Barbie. The video does a great job of showing what the latest generative AI tools can do.
Taking to Reddit, where so far the video receives 10,000 upvotes, the video’s creator Curious Refuge says that it took them four days to make.
While the base images for the trailer are apparently generated from Midjourney, Curious Refuge used other tools including Runway Gen 2, a multimodal generative AI program, After Effects, and a whole host of techniques.
The video also has AI-generated voices that are supposed to belong to Matt Damon and Margot Robbie.
“Seriously impressive use of multiple tools all while solidly written,” writes one person. “Getting better every time. Interested to see when one of these more or less pass the Turing test and people think it’s real,” adds another.
What is Barbenheimer?
That two totally different movies are coming out on the same weekend with similar levels of hype is unusual — virtually unprecedented.
Oppenheimer, a film by Christopher Nolan, will follow the life of J. Robert Oppenheimer the theoretical physicist who is often referred to as the father of the atomic age thanks to his role in overseeing the Manhattan Project that led to the first nuclear weapons.
Oppenheimer makes use of IMAX 70mm cameras with the movie being shown in “15 perf” IMAX 70mm at selected IMAX theaters on a film reel weighing 600 pounds and measuring 11 miles long. It features film noir segments and shots that are quite literally designed to blow you away.
Barbie, on the other hand, could be viewed as branded content but the movie, directed by Greta Gerwig, has hinted at something unexpected with its original teaser trailer a direct parody of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Normally when “twin movies” are released at the same time they are often very similar. Such as Antz and A Bug’s Life or Deep Impact and Armageddon.
But conversely, “Barbenheimer” has captivated people’s imaginations with the two movies playing off one another, promoting each other. This was the exact opposite effect that Warner Bros. Pictures (which are releasing Barbie) intended because it appears they released Barbie on the same day as Oppenheimer in a bid to thwart Christopher Nolan because after years of working with Warner Bros. Nolan signed for Universal instead.
