A bizarre AI video trend has seen scores of AI-generated trailers for movies and TV shows uploaded to YouTube and Instagram in a “Super Panavision 70” style.
Super Panavision 70 camera systems were used to film movies starting in 1959 and reimagined AI trailers for Super Mario, Breaking Bad, Terminator, and The Matrix are touted as being from the mid-20th century.
But as Creative Bloq notes, the characters in the trailer “don’t do much other than stare into the distance and their appearance tends to morph before our eyes.”
The videos are largely coming from the Abandoned Films YouTube channel which describes its output as “movies that could have been”, noting that the content is made from a combination of AI and Photoshop.
It shows the astonishing progression of AI video technology while also underlining how much latent space the industry still has to grow into.
“All those ‘1950’s Super Panavision 70′ videos feel so dreamily comfy,” writes one YouTube commenter. “It feels like I imagined them right before I fell asleep.”
“As a pretty old dude, these are brilliantly like the very early 1960s, late 1950s trailers,” adds another.
What is Super Panavision 70?
Super Panavision 70 is a photographic process employed to shoot high-resolution films. Using 65mm film, the image is captured horizontally on the film strip and is designed to provide a higher resolution and better color reproduction.
The “70” in the name refers to the fact that when the film is projected, it uses a 70mm print, which includes room for soundtracks (hence the extra 5mm).
The Super Panavision 70 system is notable for producing a widescreen aspect ratio of 2.20:1, which is achieved without the use of anamorphic lenses. Instead, it uses spherical lenses, which can capture a wider image while maintaining the quality across the entire frame.
Classic movies shot on Super Panavision 70 include Lawrence of Arabia (1962), 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), Ben-Hur (1959), Cleopatra (1963), and The Sound of Music (1965).
The format has recently had a revival largely thanks to last summer’s blockbuster movie Oppenheimer which used IMAX cameras but also used Panavision Panaflex System 65 Studio cameras.
Image credits: AI-generated images courtesy of the Abandoned Films YouTube channel.