Artificial intelligence in filmmaking just reached another huge milestone. Swiss-based AI-assisted filmmaking company Largo just announced that its added the latest in a long line of features to its SaaS platform.

This feature will solve one of the biggest and most longstanding problems that movie producers and production companies have faced since the very early days of cinema. The problem – how to find a distributor for my movie?

For more than 100 years, film producers have had to battle to find distribution channels to get their movies seen by audiences. Whether it is in movie theatres, video and DVD releases, or today, video-on-demand platforms like Netflix, Vimeo, or Sofy.tv, movies have always had to overcome the challenge of getting a good distributor to get them seen.

Famously, Hollywood director Quentin Tarrantino spent over a year showing his debut movie Reservoir Dogs at international film festivals before finding a distributor to get the film seen in movie theatres.

Today, thanks to the scourge of the ‘Superhero’ film, which has locked movies from theaters just about everywhere, even top-name directors such as Martin Scorcese are increasingly relying on video-on-demand platforms rather than movie theatres. With such a quickly changing global distribution environment, filmmakers, more than ever, need to ensure that they find the best distributors for their films.

AI Matches Films to the Right Distributors

In an earlier article, we explained the process of how AI tools have been developed by air-assisted moviemaking companies that are actually able to match the most suitable actors for a role from just a movie script.

This powerful tool, which recently caused a viral stir after predicting Henry Cavil as being the most suitable replacement actor for the role of James Bond, is already proving to be a big hit with producers worldwide.

It has dramatically cut down on the amount of time casting professionals have had to spend trying to shortlist the right actors while also offering them a unique perspective on their choices.

Using the same advanced technology that it utilizes to power its actor suggestion feature, Largo.ai has been able to develop a new tool that does the same for distributors.

But does it really work?

Well, to answer this question, it is perhaps best to analyze the way that the system undertakes this task.

To start with, data scientists need to partner with mathematicians to create a cutting-edge algorithm that will be able to learn to identify patterns in large pools of both structured and unstructured data. Next up, computer programmers need to turn this model into a working software program.

Then, expert AI developers must partner with data scientists to teach or train this infant AI system to understand the complexity of the data from which it is trying to extrapolate patterns. Unfortunately for data scientists, the task of training and refining the AI system really never ends. By constant training, AIs are able to become increasingly accurate.

AI-assisted filmmaking machine learning systems are trained on a whole range of data pools. Most importantly, AI specialists use the film scripts themselves, as well as video clips, or the final film cut as a primary data source. All of the leading AI-assisted moviemaking companies’ AIs have analyzes 10,000s of films and TV series to date, a number that is increasing every day.

Through such extensive analysis and training, AIs are able to actually learn to understand the ‘recipe of ingredients of any given film. Largo.ai’s most popular tool is its genre recipe, which allows producers, directors, and other movie industry personnel to see the genre makeup of their films from start to finish. This way they can analyze the results to establish if each moment is meeting their expectations.

By utilizing the above as well as their financial understanding of the movie business, etc., AI systems are able to shortlist a number of actors suitable for any role that they have analyzed. Criteria include past roles the actor has played, their salary, how much their films have made, and of course, their acting ability that is established by the AI via critical reviews, etc.

AI systems have already achieved a very high degree of accuracy when it comes to getting character choices right, something which numerous producers stated that they were very impressed with during a recent trial of AI by European producers

Precisely the same process as outlined above was used to create a brand new tool that matches producers and their films to the best distributors for their films.

Data such as which films a distributor has distributed, their company size, their reach, the success of their films, which kinds of movies they distributed, etc., are all used to train the AI. The AI is then able to analyze the exact ingredients of any given film and match it to the most suitable distributors.

The Power of AI Distribution

The potential benefits of this latest tool are all too obvious. Apart from saving enormous amounts of time and effort to find the right distributor, this AI system also increases the chances that the film will be as big a success as it can be. This is because it maximizes the chance that the distributor in question will have the most passion for the project as well as the best connections, etc.

Given that companies such as Largo.ai are democratizing this technology by making it available to all, this exciting new tool will ultimately give all segments of the global movie industry a huge boost. If you wish to try out this exciting new feature then sign up for a free trial of Largo.ai today.