AI has generated a real inflection point for every sector that involves/uses/hires creative thinking and talent. For many creative businesses it can easily feel as though they are facing an unprecedented level of uncertainty or even an existential threat. I’m doing a talk at an upcoming event on AI for creatives and production folk and I’m theming the talk around transformational thinking, because I think AI is going to require just that. As part of the research for it I’ve fallen down lots of rabbit holes looking at examples from the film and production industry where innovators thought differently and reimagined fundamental assumptions when the industry underwent major technological or structural change. One of the biggest of these inflection points was the end of the silent film era and the dawning of ‘talkies’, and stories from that time can tell us a lot about how to think differently about the huge changes that AI is already bringing.
Embracing creative risk
When Warner Bros released The Jazz Singer in 1927 it was the first feature-length movie that synchronised music, sound effects and spoken dialogue with the film’s action, marking the dawn of an entirely new era. At the time many studios were not convinced that audiences actually wanted sound in cinema. It was complex, potentially costly, and unknown.
Warner Bros took a big creative bet on an innovative sound-on-disc technology, but in many ways The Jazz Singer was the perfect film to demonstrate the new capabilities of synchronised sound with filmed action. Cultural sensibilities had shifted towards energetic jazz music, urban sophistication, and an appetite for realism. There was music, and singing, and actor Al Jolson whose unique voice, spontaneous dialogue and improvised banter (lines like ‘Wait a minute, wait a minute, you ain’t heard nothin’ yet!’) created a dynamic realism previously impossible in silent cinema. There was now no need for the exaggerated acting that had been used to convey emotion in the silent era. It was the sound that helped create that emotional realism and connection, and the audiences’ relationship with movies was changed forever.
Lesson 1: It’s the creative risk-takers that move the industry forwards. Technology achieves its greatest impact when it is intimately tied to storytelling, allows for spontaneity and authenticity, and is aligned with broader cultural movements.
Reimagining possibilities
Many of the earliest ‘talkies’ regressed into theatrical staging so that they were essentially like filmed plays. The sound recording equipment was bulky and static, and synchronised sound was often treated by directors as a limitation. Ironically it was a theatre director making his film debut who showed what could be done.
Applause, the story of an aging burlesque queen who makes sacrifices to protect her convent-raised daughter from her own low-down life and abusive lover, was released in 1929. Director Rouben Mamoulian broke free from the restrictions of cumbersome sound technology so that he could shoot on location around Manhattan using mobile microphones, early boom rigs, and innovative sound editing that could allow the camera to move freely. He was able to integrate dialogue but also to layer in ambient city sounds into scenes for realism (anticipating modern sound design). The result combined the visual dynamism of silent cinema with the rich, newly expressive possibilities of sound, creating a truly immersive cinematic experience.
Lesson 2: True progress comes not from replicating old workflows with new tools, but from reimagining what the tools make possible.
Enriching creativity
Also released in 1929, King Vidor’s Hallelujah! was ground breaking in a number of ways, not least because it was the first studio film with an all black cast. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer had given King Vidor permission to make the film under the condition it would be a low-budget ‘experiment’.
Rather than see this as a constraint, the director seized the opportunity to shoot on location in Tennessee and Arkansas and used synchronised sound not just for dialogue, but to immerse audiences in spirituals, gospel, and field calls from the southern black community. Eschewing the traditional studio shoot, he battled technical challenges to capture real-world sound atmospheres which enabled him to create a deeply emotional, culturally rich film that felt alive and modern. Sound was not just used to capture dialogue but to add authenticity, and to construct an immersive audio world.
Similarly, in the musical film The Love Parade from the same year, Ernst Lubitsch used synchronised sound to integrate music and dialogue into a flowing narrative in a way that never been done before. Most early filmed musicals were clumsily done with abrupt transitions between spoken scenes and musical numbers. Ernst Lubitsch saw the arrival of sound as an invitation to fuse music and narrative, choreographing not just the actors but the entire soundtrack including dialogue, ambient sound, and orchestrations to flow rhythmically with the storytelling. He shifted between diegetic (sound that can be heard by the characters) and non-diegetic elements, experimenting with overlapping sound and editing, and pioneering the idea of the ‘invisible orchestra’ where music and action feel unified. He was a pioneer of cinema as a fully orchestrated audiovisual experience, his work laying the foundation for sound editing as a storytelling device.
Lesson 3: New technologies (like AI) are not just about efficiency, but about enriching creative possibilities.
Tying new technology to storytelling, visionary innovators who embrace what’s newly possible, and enriching creativity. It’s easy to forget in the hype surrounding AI that almost every industry has undergone paradigm shifts driven by technology before. We lose the lessons from those shifts at our peril.
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Image 1: Bundesarchiv, Bild 183-N0716-0314 / Mittelstädt, Rainer / via Wikimedia Commons
Image 2: Jack de Nijs for Anefo / Anefo, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons
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