Director: Patrick Cormack
Running time: 3mins
Never has the term ‘director’ meant less than in Once Upon a Time (in England). Entirely the product of the AI slop-machine, Patrick Cormack’s entire input into this process will have been to type prompts into an agile, innovative, data-driven Nutri bullet, filled exclusively with dubiously obtained intellectual property, and presented the output as a ‘music video’.
Whatever you might think of the ethics behind that, unfortunately the only thing Cormack’s imagination could muster was to repeatedly mash “derivative Arthurian crap” into the text box. As a result, we have exactly the kind of array of over-saturated, characterless bilge that we have come to expect from any AI production. The grotesquely sterile visuals fall apart even on a superficial basis, the moment we are given pause to revisit them (a sleeping dragon with two tails; a witch whose staff seems to be growing a hat from its base), or whenever movement is introduced to the equation (a nightmarish, idealised folk-singer which forgets to blink for a full minute; a glowing fairy mother with two left hands, who lovingly decides to drown one of the butterflies fluttering around her enchanted lake).
But I’m not here to evaluate the ‘film’, such as it is. Cormack submitted this film without adhering to Indy Film Library’s guidelines on the use of AI.
Since we received our first such film in 2023, our rules have read as follows:
If the filmmaker has used artificial intelligence (AI) to generate part or all of the film, for animation, soundtrack, effects etc, they are required to confirm… who created the visuals and or sounds that the AI used to build the animation. Did someone from your team create a base set of images and or sounds, before the AI helped to make them move, create a whole soundtrack, etc? Or, did you give the AI a text prompt, before it took those keywords, and created the film’s images and sounds from things it had been fed en masse, before animating and scoring the film?
AI engines working on this basis regularly make non-consensual use of artists’ labour, and Indy Film Library is ethically opposed to such production methods. As such, while we may still write about submissions which were made simply by feeding an AI a suggestion, Indy Film Library will not rate these pieces, placing them in the same bracket of reviews reserved for Swipe Left or Choir Girl – films which are actively harmful to both audiences and society at large.
Once Upon a Time (in England) is confirmation of my earlier fears about the way AI content was going to go. While independent artists have found uses for it to keep their sanity during extremely labour-intensive process (for example, our 2025 Best Experimental film Lunatic used it to smooth stop-motion transitions), in a world where blurting out vacuous content quickly is as a way to grind your way to profit, the rule of thumb was always going to revert to the lowest common denominator.
This is thoughtless, tedious material, stitching together billions of fragments of other people’s work, to produce something that is less than the sum of those parts. Devoid of any passion or insight, it is not derived from any aspect of someone’s lived experience. It’s just a bloodless algorithm’s approximation of an answer which on the balance of probabilities might be deemed ‘passable’.
That kind of ‘creative process’ is already leading studio filmmaking in the direction of ruin – with cinemas closing in swathes, as Hollywood has finally driven everyone away with its identikit Marvel formula. Rather than admit they got it wrong, their response has been to look for ways to deliver the same dreck, but cheaper and quicker with technology – while pivoting from theatres to an open sluice of VOD sewage. Mark my words, for all the swivel-eyed hype around the power of AI that will supercharge that new vision of Hollywood, this will not end well.
Amid this folly, there is a golden opportunity to independent cinema to do different; to show that people still crave new stories, told in original ways. It should not be the business of independent filmmakers to champion the studio system’s race to the bottom. The hacks who do might think they are getting ahead of the curve, but in reality, they are sentencing themselves to anonymity amid a sea of mediocre bilge.
We had another review of Cormack’s work earlier this week. Ancient-looking camcorder footage was spliced together with AI, to paper over the cracks and complete production. As ramshackle as that old video might have been, I’ve watched it, and every crackling, spluttering second of it is still better than the alleged sheen of the technology Cormack now sees as his apparent saviour. Whether or not it reached the lofty heights of a studio fantasy epic, at least it came from somewhere. It meant something to the crew. They made flawed, human choices which said something about them and the way the world had shaped them. I might not enjoy the results of those choices, but I’d still rather watch an hour of that, than another second of Once Upon a Time (in England).