The script for the Sidorov series was written by the AI TV Script Generator neural network developed by Vladimir Larkin and Vadim Povolotsky, students of Data Scientist PRO directing of the Skillbox education platform. They uploaded the scripts of the popular STS series “Rodkom”, “Voronins”, “Dyldy”, “The Eighties”, “The Oligarch’s Wife” and others to artificial intelligence. Thousands of pages of text made it possible to adjust the algorithms as close as possible to writing a movie script.
“355.892 words, 88 episodes, seven TV programs were loaded into the neural network. To get the best quality of the content produced by the network, 20 experiments were run with parameters and the way the data was fed into the model. Taking a small piece of text as input, the neural network can generate an infinite number of different scenarios within a hundredth of a second,” Larkin said.
Artificial intelligence learned to independently compose the time and place of the action, the names of the characters, copies, descriptions and other elements of the movie script.
The director of the project was Sergei Znamensky, who worked on the comedy hits Ivanov-Ivanov and The Family. He noted that the team tried to minimize edits to the script to preserve the original idea of the neural network:
“We take the neural net-generated situation and try to justify the idea with the help of acting and directing, even if there is no logic. We try to find it, search and add it. If we filmed everything as written by a neural network that is still being trained, it would be a theater of plastic doodles that move left and right and say some text.”
The characters created by artificial intelligence were an ordinary family – husband (Georgy Dronov), wife (Alina Alekseeva), son (Sasha Novikov), grandmother (Tatiana Orlova) and grandfather (Sergei Stepin). They stay out of their homes, hear off-screen laughter and find themselves in awkward anecdotal situations. When the Sidorovs realize they’re characters from a sitcom, they try to get away with it.
“Actually, this is a story about Groundhog Day that happened to our heroes. The family lives in the mansion, everything is the same throughout the 385 episodes. And our main character suddenly understands: why can’t I go anywhere and eat nothing but cabbage soup, and my grandfather goes fishing every day and does not? It becomes the main reason why the hero wants to escape from the landscape, ”Znamensky said.
The director noted that all the actors got their roles according to the results of the casting, which took several months. Applicants for secondary roles, short videos were searched on the VK Clips platform. The winner of the casting was Maxim Sushko, 31-year-old dancer, actor and model from Murmansk, who plays the dumb jock neighbor. Tatyana Orlova, with whom Znamensky worked on The Family, was the fastest approved for the role.
According to Orlova, she did not see any particular difference between the production of standard projects and shooting according to the neural network scenario. The actor stated that because he didn’t know the screenwriter of The Sidorovs, he would present him as “someone who is a bit lewd with the text and characters”.
In response, Dronov announced that there is “a huge difference” between the neural network scenario and the human-written stories. The actor described the artificial intelligence as too young to create a perfect scenario and admitted that he wanted to change a lot in the resulting text.
“We were given a precondition to try to justify as much as possible what the neural network wrote. But I want to change a lot,” said Dronov.
According to the actor, it is difficult to embed an understanding of the creativity and algorithms of the comedy genre into a neural network. She noted that there are many laws that must be followed on the sitcom.
“This is a modern comedy dell’arte that assumes the existence of an unchanging character mask throughout the play,” Dronov said. – Each character is endowed with a certain set of qualities: one is cowardly and kind, the second is stupid but brave, and the third is treacherous. The whole story takes place between these three characters. It seems to me that the AI will run the drama faster than the comedy genre, which again takes comedy to the next level. It is considered one of the most difficult species.”
The actor added that developing a scenario using a neural network was a very daring experiment. Also, Dronov joked that artificial intelligence could deprive him of his job: “What if robots overthrow us, representatives of humanity? After all, it is much more convenient for the producer: he bought the program, launched it and went to work. Robot actors aren’t whimsical, they don’t need to be fed, and their workday can be twelve hours a day. On the other hand, artificial intelligence will definitely not have as high a quality performance and approach as that of gamers.”
The landscape of the Sidorovs’ apartment was built in the same Amedia pavilion, where the Voronins were filmed for ten years. According to Dronov, there is a noticeable deviation in the script of the neural network in the direction of this sitcom. The team of the TV series “Ivanov-Ivanov” and “Family” is working on the project.