Bringing Impressionism to Life with Neural Style Transfer in Come Swim

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates how neural style transfer can be used creatively in film production to emulate impressionist painting styles, providing a framework for iterative artistic control and future research insights.

Contribution

It introduces a practical application of neural style transfer in film, mapping parameters to creative controls and guiding artistic iteration.

Findings

Effective style transfer in film scenes

Parameter mapping for creative control

Insights into future research directions

Abstract

Neural Style Transfer is a striking, recently-developed technique that uses neural networks to artistically redraw an image in the style of a source style image. This paper explores the use of this technique in a production setting, applying Neural Style Transfer to redraw key scenes in 'Come Swim' in the style of the impressionistic painting that inspired the film. We document how the technique can be driven within the framework of an iterative creative process to achieve a desired look, and propose a mapping of the broad parameter space to a key set of creative controls. We hope that this mapping can provide insights into priorities for future research.