Join us October 8 at 7pm for Eno., a custom generated film, unique for the Tallahassee audience. Exclusively at Challenger Learning Center IMAX — it’s the groundbreaking generative documentary about visionary musician and artist Brian Eno. A film that’s different every time it’s shown!
ONE NIGHT ONLY, October 8, 2024 at 7pm
Presented by the Tallahassee Film Festival and Challenger Learning Center
Join us and other cinemas around the country and the world as we screen a unique, Tallahassee’s-eyes-only version of this groundbreaking film about musician and artist Brian Eno.
Visionary musician and artist Brian Eno — known for producing David Bowie, U2, Talking Heads, among many others; pioneering the genre of ambient music; and releasing more than 40 solo and collaboration albums — reveals his creative processes in Eno, directed by acclaimed filmmaker Gary Hustwit (Helvetica, Rams). In the first career-spanning documentary of the legendary and prolific artist and the world’s first generative feature film, Hustwit set out to decode Eno’s creative strategies and examine his lifelong search for the meaning of music.
Each screening of Eno is unique, presenting different scenes, order, music, and meant to be experienced live in the cinema. The generative and infinitely iterative quality of Eno poetically resonates with the artist’s own creative practice, his methods of using technology to compose music, and his endless deep dive into the mercurial essence of creativity.
Rich with access to hundreds of hours of never-before-seen footage and unreleased music, Gary Hustwit’s documentary Eno employs groundbreaking technology to accomplish something that’s never been done before: a feature film that’s never the same twice. Hustwit and creative technologist Brendan Dawes have developed bespoke generative software designed to sequence scenes and create transitions out of Hustwit’s original interviews with Eno, and Eno’s rich archive of hundreds of hours of never-before-seen footage, and unreleased music. Don’t miss this event!
$10 | 7pm | Oct 8 | 200 S Duval St
@Challenger Learning Center IMAX
Approx. 85 mins | English | Not rated | Documentary, Music, Art
Gary Hustwit – Director and Producer | Brendan Dawes – Director of Technology | Jessica Edwards – Producer | Maya Tippett – Editor | Marley McDonald – Editor | Mary Farbrother – Director of Photography | A Film First / Tigerlily Production
About Brian Eno
Brian Eno – musician, producer, visual artist and activist first came to international prominence in the early seventies as a founding member of British band, Roxy Music, followed by a series of solo albums and collaborations. His work as producer includes albums with Talking Heads, Devo, U2, Laurie Anderson, James, Jane Siberry and Coldplay, while his long list of collaborations include recordings with David Bowie, Jon Hassell, Harold Budd, David Byrne, Grace Jones, his brother, Roger, on ‘Mixing Colours’ and recently with Fred Again…. Brian’s latest album, ‘FOREVERANDEVERNOMORE’ was released to international critical acclaim in October 2022.
Eno’s visual experiments with light and video continue to parallel his musical career, with exhibitions and installations all over the globe. He has exhibited extensively, as far afield as St. Petersburg’s Marble Palace, Ritan Park in Beijing, Arcos de Lapa in Rio de Janeiro and the sails of the Sydney Opera House. He is a founding member of the Long Now Foundation, a trustee of Client Earth and patron of Videre est Credere. In April 2021, he launched EarthPercent, which raises money from the music industry for some of the most impactful environmental charities working on the climate emergency. In 2023, Brian was honored with the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement by the Venice Biennale Musica.
About Gary Hustwit
Gary Hustwit is a filmmaker and visual artist based in New York. He has produced over 20 documentaries and film projects, including the award-winning I Am Trying To Break Your Heart about the band Wilco; Oddsac, an experimental feature film by the band Animal Collective; and Mavis!, the HBO documentary about gospel/soul music legend Mavis Staples. Gary worked with punk label SST Records in the late-1980s, releasing the music of bands like Black Flag, Sonic Youth, and Dinosaur Jr. He ran the independent book publishing house Incommunicado Press during the 1990s, and started the DVD label Plexifilm in 2001. With Plexifilm, Gary released over 40 films theatrically and on home video, including work by the Maysles brothers, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Andy Warhol and David Byrne.
In 2007 he made his directorial debut with Helvetica, the world’s first feature-length documentary about graphic design and typography. He has continued to explore how design affects our daily lives with his subsequent films Objectified (2009), Urbanized (2011), Workplace (2016), and Rams (2018). The films have been broadcast on PBS, BBC, HBO, Netflix and outlets in 20 countries, and have been screened in over 300 cities worldwide. He is currently working on Eno, a documentary about musician and artist Brian Eno, which uses generative technology in its creation and exhibition. Eno will be released in 2024.
Gary’s films have premiered at the Sundance Film Festival, the South by Southwest Film Festival, and the Toronto International Film Festival, among others. He was nominated for an Independent Spirit Award for Helvetica, and has served on the grand juries of the Sundance Film Festival, the IFP Gotham Awards, and the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival. Gary was named one of the 100 Most Creative People in Business by Fast Company. He is a member of the Documentary Branch of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
Director’s Statement
BY GARY HUSTWIT
In 2017, I was making a documentary about legendary German product designer Dieter Rams, who’s known for his minimalist aesthetic. At the time, my fantasy was to have Brian Eno do the soundtrack because I thought his sensibilities matched some of the qualities of Rams’ work. I’d been a fan of Brian’s music for decades, but what I was most fascinated by was Brian‘s approach to creativity, and his constant push to experiment with new technology and approaches to music and visual art. I sent a cold email to Brian’s management, and I was ecstatic when he agreed to score the film.
While I was working with Brian on “Rams”, I started asking him, “Why isn’t there a career-spanning, all-encompassing documentary about you, Brian?” I soon learned that Brian didn’t like to think about the past, he’s always pushing forward to new projects and new ideas. I also learned that he was allergic to standard bio-documentaries filled with people talking about how great the subject is/was. At the same time, I was becoming frustrated with how static a medium cinema is. I kept asking myself, why does my film have to be the same every time it’s shown? My background is in music, and even if you’re in a band and have to play your hit song every single night, it’s different every night. You can change the lyrics, or extend a section, or invite a guest artist to join you onstage. And the audience at that show is the only group of people in the world who are going to experience that. The fixed linear narrative of a feature film is a 130-year-old technical constraint that we’re not bound by anymore. But generations of audiences have just accepted the limitation that a film or a television show will always be the same every time they watch it. Why? With all the advances we’ve made in digital filmmaking and streaming, it’s hard to believe that there has been so little experimentation with using new technology to innovate the actual form of feature films.
So I was dreaming about a way for film to be more performative, and reached out to Brendan Dawes, a brilliant digital artist who I knew from his data visualizations and his love of cinema. I told him I wanted to make a film that was different every time I showed it, and Brendan said, “Yeah, I think we can do that.” In the years since that conversation, we’ve had so much fun collaborating on the idea of what a generative film could be, and developing the technology to make it possible. And very quickly I realized who the perfect subject for the first generative feature film would be. Since the mid-1990’s Brian has been using generative software as part of his music and art-making process, and collaborated to release generative apps like the hugely popular Bloom. So this new form of filmmaking seemed like a perfect way to explore Brian’s work and ideas.
I decided not to do contemporary interviews with other musicians or people he’s influenced, I didn’t want the film to be hagiographic. But I was able to film many conversations with Brian over the past three years. He also gave me access to his archive of hundreds of hours of footage, including video that he’d shot himself in the ’80s, lectures, old interviews, and unreleased projects. In many ways I think of Eno as a film about creativity, with the output of Brian’s 50+ year career as its raw material. I still wanted it to feel like a cinematic documentary, but just one that changes every time! In Eno we’re using actual videos of actual people, it isn’t AI animation. We’re using software to create fluid narrative structures for traditionally shot video footage, which enables us to tell the same story in millions of different ways. Ultimately we’re trying to create a cinematic experience that’s as innovative as Brian’s approach to music and art.
One of the most challenging and rewarding parts of the process was working with our film editors Maya Tippett and Marley McDonald to edit the interviews and archival footage. How do you edit a scene in a film when you don’t know if, or where, that scene will appear? And how do you craft a story that’s still compelling whatever form it ends up taking? Brendan and I also experimented with how much we should show our software at work in the film itself. Ultimately we decided it would be appropriate and visually interesting to foreground the code and the generative operations, so that audiences can experience the process of how the film is being made while they’re watching it.
What’s exciting to me about the film is that I get to inspire audiences with Brian’s ideas and music in a way that’s organic to his process. What’s also exciting is that the film can continue to change and evolve over the coming months and years… we’ll continue to add new scenes, footage, and updates to the software. I’m hoping that Eno can help start a new conversation about what the future of cinema can be.
How the Film was Made with Generative Technology
BY BRENDAN DAWES & GARY HUSTWIT
Can you define and describe the generative technology you have developed for “Eno”?
Brendan: This is our own proprietary software system. We’ve spent years programming this with our own rules and parameters to work with our own data to do a specific thing: create a movie that’s different every time. It’s not trained on anyone else’s work, this isn’t ChatGPT or Runway, and we’re not using a large language model or a text-to-video generator. So all the fear around AI doesn’t really apply here.
Why did you decide to use this approach for a documentary about Brian Eno?
Brendan: Brian was never keen on making a documentary about his life and work. Yet when Gary demo-ed an early prototype of the system we had made in early 2019, Brian was really excited about the idea. Generative systems have been such a key part of his creative process and music that it made so much sense to use the same approach to make this documentary.
Gary: Yes, because making a conventional by-the-numbers bio-doc about Brian Eno would’ve been a missed opportunity and utterly antithetical to what he’s about. He’s spent the past 50 years innovating with different technologies and creative strategies. So it’s a given that a career-spanning film about him had to break new ground formally.
Critics might say that AI or generative technology takes away the creative elements of storytelling. How would you respond to that?
Brendan: Rather than taking away creativity, generative art adds exciting new creative possibilities to the tradition of storytelling. The way we tell stories should always be evolving, and generative systems, if they’re used in the spirit of creative advancement, are the next evolution in that journey.
Gary: The idea of using generative software as part of the creative process isn’t new. We have an amazing archival video of Brian in 1996 demonstrating an early generative music software program to a group of people in his studio. Even as early as the 1960s, artists like Vera Molnár used generative computing in their work. Our film might be the first time this approach has been utilized in a feature documentary, but using generative systems in creativity has a long history. It’s just that the technology has advanced much further now.
Can you walk us through how the system makes each showing of the film different?
Gary: There’s always a mix of different scenes. A certain scene might appear in a cut of the film and sometimes it won’t. There are literally millions of potential combinations of scenes and footage that can occur. There are traditionally edited scenes, and there are pure generative scenes that are unique to each version.
How will the film feel or look different from a conventional documentary?
Brendan: When you’re watching the film, you’re seeing the process of that version of the film being made. You’re actually seeing the code and the choices our generative engine is making dynamically while you watch. There’s never been anything like this before. But ultimately, this is a documentary about Brian, his creativity, his ideas, and his life. That’s the main story here, and we want the film to engage audiences like any great documentary. We don’t want the technology or our approach to take away from his story, we want to enhance it. We’re still telling a story about a very multi-faceted artist, we’re just telling it in a new way.
How much human involvement was there in the editing process?
Gary: A massive amount! There’s been more editing on this film than in any project I’ve ever been involved with. Software isn’t making the footage… we are filming real people and real things, then letting the software generate new possibilities and sequences from our footage. For our editors, Maya Tippett and Marley McDonald, the challenge has been to reinvent how they would typically edit a scene and how it relates to the larger narrative. Because if you don’t know if or when a scene will occur in the film, it changes your approach to the overall story. We also edit exponentially more footage than would normally be involved in a 90-minute film.
How do you envision this technology being used in the future as it relates to storytelling and filmmaking?
Gary: With this system, it’s possible that every viewer who watches or streams the film can get their own unique version. That’s such a cool idea, right? I mean why does film have to be a static, linear art form? That’s been a technical constraint for over 100 years, but now we have the tools to liberate it. In this age of personalization, this technology opens up huge possibilities. I feel like viewers are bombarded with the same content and form over and over, and they want something different. This is a chance to make the experience of watching a film unique, whether you’re in a cinema with a group of people or streaming it on your own.
Brendan: Eno is the first iteration of our ideas about how generative technology can change cinema. I think we have a unique situation here, because our first love is cinema, not code. We’re coming to this project with backgrounds in filmmaking, digital art, and storytelling first and foremost. Eno and the technology around it will continue to evolve, and we’re really excited to explore other ways we can use this system on other film projects.