As evidenced by the flood of AI movies hitting Twitter over the past couple of weeks, Google’s Veo 3 recently made another leap with AI video generation, adding sound and better consistency. It still has its issues (as can be seen below), but in the hands of a skilled prompter with some credits to burn it can create some fun meme-level, eight-second clips. We’re starting to see some moves towards serious artists creating longer films with AI beyond the famous Coca-Cola commercial. For example, this short was the first AI movie I’ve seen that I would describe as moving (created with Midjourney and one of the dubbing softwares, I forget which), and a studio in South Korea has announced a whole series of short episodes that will be exclusively AI generated.

While anything involving basic actors and scenes is probably going to remain the domain of live actors for a little bit at least, the real value add is the ability to create fantastical scenes that would be difficult for an amateur without a big budget to do.

For example, Mormonr (full disclosure, I’ve done some work for them, but they do really make some of the best Latter-day Saint related memes) released a “Nephite television” piece.

I recently switched my subscription from GPT to Gemini, so I get three movies a day, and I played around with some Church/scripture scenes. It’s worth noting that with more credits you can refine and develop each scene, but these are just one-shot.

Moses splitting the Red Sea

“Mountain was full of horses and chariots of fire all around Elisha.”

“I kneeled down and began to offer up the desires of my heart to God. I had scarcely done so, when immediately I was seized upon by some power which entirely overcame me, and had such an astonishing influence over me as to bind my tongue so that I could not speak. Thick darkness gathered around me, and it seemed to me for a time as if I were doomed to sudden destruction.”

A scene from Church history I always thought would make a good movie clip was during the Utah war when the troops were allowed to ride through Salt Lake City–and the Mormon militia was sitting with torches ready to burn the city down if they made a wrong move. The movie is obviously inaccurate, in addition to torches magically appearing in their hand the women and children had all been evacuated to Utah Valley at this point, but still.

Moses’ vision in the Pearl of Great Price.

And then finally, probably the most tragicomical one, Joseph Smith being shot while a leg grows out of his back side. (AI actors haven’t exactly reached Daniel Day-Lewis level yet).

Finally, another one with really bad acting, the Battle of Crooked River in eight seconds according to AI.