Kristen Stewart is quickly becoming one of my favorite people. She’s gone from Twilight to indie darling, picking some amazing films that show us she has way more talent than Bella Swan gave her credit for. And now, she’s a scientist.
Stewart is gearing up to debut her directorial debut, a 17-minute short film called Come Swim, which was inspired by a painting Stewart had previously completed. The film integrates the painting using a technique called “style transfer,” which uses convolutional neural networks to have an algorithm change a video in real time. It’s kind of like a movie version of Prisma.
Stewart, along with her film’s producer and an engineer, drafted a three-page research paper, called “Bringing Impressionism to Life with Neural Style Transfer in Come Swim.” It’s mainly a case study in how to apply style transfer to film, but it’s still pretty great to see Stewart’s work applied to AI development. Who knows... we could see a BellaBot Impressionist Uprising in the next few years. They’d be deadly... but at least they’d look cool.
