What must a synthetic image achieve to behave like cinema? AI Cinematic Realism (AICR), presented whole for working AI filmmakers: the Ideational Frame, the three strata, a century of craft translated into the latent space, conscious assembly, the maker as moral agent, and the forty-point rubric.
Intentional Seeing: AI Cinematic Realism as a Pedagogy for the Post-Camera Era
AI Cinematic Realism began as a way to evaluate synthetic cinema. But its three strata describe something larger: a pedagogy of intentional seeing that trains the very faculties — attention, coherence, and authorship — that generative AI puts at risk of atrophy.
AI Cinematic Realism (AICR): From Indexical Trace to Ideational Synthesis
AI Cinematic Realism (AICR) proposes a new framework for the post-camera era, shifting cinema's guiding question from "Is this real?" to "Is this true?" Grounded in embodied cognition and a lineage of realist movements, AICR defines synthetic truth through the Ideational Frame, Three-Strata Model, and accountable authorship.
The Ideational Frame as the Foundation of the Three‑Strata Model of AI Cinematic Realism
AI‑generated images feel cinematic not because they imitate cameras, but because they activate the perceptual, environmental, and authorial structures that organize cinematic meaning. The Ideational Frame identifies these inherited logics and reveals how they resolve into the three‑strata model, forming the conceptual foundation of AI Cinematic Realism.