It is only a few months ago that neural network based style transfer was the latest thing. Now we have a short and serious movie which contains sections that were generated by style transfer. The director is actress Kristen Stewart who also co-authors the paper.
It is highly probable that most of the heavy lifting was done by Adobe software engineer Bhautik Joshi, but the credits to Stewart and producer David Shapiro were probably justified on creative grounds and simply being able to understand and use a cutting edge technique enough to realize their artistic intent. The film, Come Swim was written and directed by Stewart and makes use of a painting by her to establish the style.
You can see a tiny clip from the film in the video, although there are no style-transferred portions:
Style transfer is achieved by training a neural network to recognize the style of a particular painter and then extracting the features that characterize the style. These can then be applied to a new image to transform it into the same style.
In this case the processing pipeline used lots of GPUs provided by Amazon EC2.
