Using stock footage and artificial intelligence-created imagery, filmmaker J.R. Sawyers has created footage to accompany Orson Welles’ War of the Worlds radio broadcast of October 30, 1938.
WAR OF THE WORLDS: The Original Orson Welles Broadcast with AI Footage (1938) runs slightly more than 55 minutes. It omits the closing when Welles tells panicked listeners “the War of The Worlds has no further significance than as the holiday offering it was intended to be. The Mercury Theatre’s own radio version of dressing up in a sheet and jumping out of a bush and saying ‘Boo!'”
Sawyers, who directed and wrote the films Nerve and A Trip Elsewhere, uploaded his Welles-inspired creation to YouTube a few months ago. Earlier this week, he uploaded a 4o-second trailer, First Attack.
“I thought it’d be fun to revisit that pivotal cultural moment using today’s new AI technology,” Sawyers said in an online statement. “So over the last several months, I’ve edited the original audio of Orson Welles’ 1938 War of the Worlds radio play broadcast with a combination of 90 percent AI-generated imagery and a few carefully selected stock footage.”
The Welles-directed radio show was a milestone in broadcasting. Its impact has been explored in such book as A. Brad Schwartz’s Broadcast Hysteria: Orson Welles’s War of the Worlds and the Art of Fake News and Dead Air: The Night Orson Welles Terrified America by William Elliott Hazelgrove.
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