Today, the importance of audiovisual production in the tourism industry is undeniable. Whether it's through products designed specifically to promote a particular territory, such as tourism films, or the recent phenomenon known as “film tourism,” in which tourists travel to places they know from the movies, this reality ends up being valued and celebrated at festivals dedicated specifically to this area, such as the Portuguese festival “Art&Tur - International Tourism Film Festival,” the German festival “The Golden City Gate,” part of “ITB Berlin,” or the “World Tourism Film Awards,” organized by the CIFFT - International Committee of Tourism Film Festivals. With the recent massification of artificial intelligence, which even though it's not a recent technology has become the order of the day due to the recent events involving the company Open AI and, more specifically, its online chatbot Chat GPT, the population in general and the scientific community in particular have begun to take a closer look at AI. In the specific case of audiovisual production, while there were a number of tools that already made use of technology in the past and were mainly used in the post-production process (special effects, sound manipulation, etc.), the truth is that AI currently presents some challenges and, on the other hand, some potential, precisely in the first phase of designing an audiovisual work, more specifically, in pre-production. The aim of this chapter is to focus an analysis on the specific case of audiovisual productions conceived in the context of the tourism industry and, from there, try to understand how AI can be an important tool in the creative phase of script design for these works. In the absence of a specific bibliography on the case under analysis, some possibilities for using artificial intelligence to enhance the reach and effectiveness of an audiovisual product designed, above all, to highlight a particular territory or tourist experience will be raised.
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In an era in which audiovisual communication is playing an increasingly important role and new communication platforms make it possible for these stimuli to be disseminated ever more quickly, with all the associated advantages and disadvantages, the tourism industry has opted for differentiated marketing strategies, but which are fundamental to the promotion of a given territory. According to Sousa and Rocha (2019, p. 189) territorial marketing is a vital instrument for place promotion, and local government authorities must incorporate it into their plans to support and encourage the areas' long-term social and economic growth. Regardless of the medium selected, the relationship generated between the media/advertising and tourism is briefly defined by Urry (2002), when he suggests that over time, through media and advertising, pictures created from various tourist perspectives create a system of self-persuasion of illusions that give visitors a foundation for choosing and assessing possible places to visit (Pan, Tsai, & Lee, 2011, p. 596). At the same time, local tourist actors have become increasingly important, with technological promotion tools accessible to companies and individuals (Marinho, Correia and Morais, 2021, p. 2) and in this process of promoting a tourist destination, the audiovisual component, particularly content that uses moving images, finds a wide and effective means of dissemination in the media
Television is the source of the imagery with which we do our imagining of the future, and the holiday imagery now so omnipresent on the screen – in the soaps as well as the ads and in the travel programmes of all sorts – is one of the best places to find our fantasies of the free and fulfilled life (Inglis 2000: 5).
Although the importance of audiovisual production in promoting tourist destinations and experiences is obvious, it is curious that this is an area that has been relatively rarely studied in the academic context, particularly in the field of tourism. If we search for terms such as “audiovisual production tourism” or “tourist film” on one of the main search engines for scientific articles, Google Scholar, we realize that most of the results, sorted by relevance, concern research centered on the phenomenon of film tourism or film-induced tourism, a term that has gained relevance in recent years and which is recognized as a type of tourism that is prompted by the sight of a moving picture and includes film, television, and digital media (Connell, 2012). This phenomenon, which began to gain the attention of researchers in the early 1990s, can be read from the perspective of film studies, namely the social psychology of the viewing experience and the language of cinema from the perspective of semiotics placed on the landscape in the film (Connell, 2012). However, it is not this concept that we intend to analyze in this text, but rather the very materiality of the production of a tourist film like those that are produced daily as part of tourism marketing campaigns all over the world. In this sense, we understand the Tourist Film as a format and term that brings together a series of audiovisual productions with accentuated specificities (promotional videos, documentaries, vlogs, short films, etc.).
With artificial intelligence on the agenda, largely due to the recent controversies involving the company Open AI, which made ChatGPT available to the public and thus put AI in the hands of the ordinary user in a different way to what had happened before, some very relevant hypotheses have emerged about the relationship between this technology and its usefulness in the tourism industry, based on multiple forms of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT). AI has enhanced ICTs by facilitating the integration of physical and online/virtual elements, providing technology-enhanced tourist experiences and personalizing tourist services have been made possible by all these Technologies (Grundner and Neuhofer, 2021). An example of the use of AI in the tourism industry can be seen in online travel and hotel booking sites or enhancing customer engagement in hotels and restaurants with robotics applications (Doborjeh et al., 2021). Based on this relationship and using bibliography related to film production, we intend to understand how IA can contribute to the production of a tourist film, focusing our research specifically on the first stage of audiovisual production, specifically pre-production, using a hypothetical case study based on the pre-production of a tourist film about a particular territory.