It's shot on film, so it must be real. – No one, ever.
In 2023, a text-to-video model was asked for Will Smith eating spaghetti and gave back his face melting into the noodles, barely a face. It went viral as proof of how bad AI video was, then the benchmark every new model is re-run on. By 2025 the horror comes back photoreal.
The industry's answer to AI is to authenticate the camera. Sony, Leica, and Nikon sign the file in-camera under C2PA. A signature proves where a file came from, not that what stood before the lens was real. Point one at a screen playing the clip and it signs the fake. That is the analog hole. Film is the original content credential and launders it the same way, no manifest, no depth map. A camera was present, but it barely says anything about if the man ever ate any spaghetti.
Format | Camera | Stock |
|---|---|---|
Super 8 | Canon 814 | Kodak Vision3 200T 7213 |
Super 16 | Aaton XTR Prod | Kodak Vision3 200T 7213 |
35mm | Moviecam SL | Kodak Vision3 200T 5213 |
Will Smith Eating Spaghetti, 2023–2025 (Test Card). Super 8, Super 16, and 35mm, stacked top to bottom as one silent loop.
The Benchmark
The 2023 original was made with ModelScope. I gathered every version since then into spaghetti-bench-collection, through Veo 3, and re-shot three of them on film. Re-shooting on film is an attempt to launder its authenticity, and doing it across formats aim to benchmark which stock launders realness best. The slop becomes a test card for each film stock's ability to render life out of compute, and the years read as one graph of the model learning to hold a face together.
The same reel before film, digital and intact:
The Process
Each generation went back onto a screen and was filmed off it, once per stock. Super 8 was a Canon 814 on a rug at home. Super 16 and 35mm ran through an Aaton and a Moviecam in a camera room, framed on a monitor. The camera was operated by Owen Smith-Clark.
Exhibition
The Test Card version was shown at the Epistemologies of Slop, a group exhibition at tiat in San Francisco, July 2026.
