Kristen Stewart is at Sundance to promote Come Swim, a short film she wrote and directed. Just ahead of the premiere, it was revealed that she’d also co-authored an academic paper on the artificial intelligence used during production. According to Quartz:
Stewart’s starting inspiration point for Come Swim was one of her own paintings. The paper describes the filmmaker’s experiments with style transfer, a popular use of machine learning that transforms one image into the artistic technique and color profile of another. Stewart and her producers used the technology to turn scenes of Come Swim into the style of Stewart’s own painting. (You can see the images in the paper here [pdf]). Stewart’s co-authors on the paper are a producer at Starlight Studios (which produced the film) and an Adobe employee, whose involvement in the film is unknown.
The paper’s most interesting aspect is its ambition: The team originally tried to tune the algorithm to transfer the sense of emotion in the painting.
“The painting itself evokes the thoughts an individual has in the first moments of waking (fading in-between dreams and reality),” the authors write. “This directly drove the look of the shot, leading us to map the emotions we wanted to evoke to parameters in the algorithm.”
As you can see, Kristen was thrilled to be at the festival promoting her work. For those of us who’ve had that privilege, to be able to find love and fulfilment at work, the feeling is familiar – and infrequent. That’s why you chase it. That’s why when you catch it, you can’t help but want to live in it, because it doesn’t last. Because the goal, always, is that the work is in front of you, never beside you.
I like seeing this Kristen Stewart. The Kristen Stewart who can’t contain her excitement, who can’t wait to show her work.
