# Expanded Childhood

- Date: 2023-01-22
- Type: film
- Credit: Sam Lawton
- Genre: Documentary, Experimental
- Artists: [Sam Lawton](https://aifilmhistory.org/artist/sam-lawton)
- Made with: DALL-E 2
- Award: Merit — Runway AIFF 2023 — Runway AI Film Festival 2023
- Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Q5qstYoYu0
- URL: https://aifilmhistory.org/entry/expanded-childhood

Sam Lawton ran childhood photos through DALL-E 2's outpainting, which invents what lay beyond the edge of a picture, and showed the results to his father. The extra dogs in the bathtub and the blurred, faceless trick-or-treaters look almost right, and the father's unscripted reactions ("Something's wrong… do I just not remember it?") carry the film. One of the first AI films about memory, it won a Merit award at [Runway's first AI Film Festival](https://aifilmhistory.org/entry/aiff-2023) and was called otherworldly by MIT Technology Review.

Links:
- AIFF 2023 winners: https://aif.runwayml.com/2023
- About the film, on Sam Lawton's site: https://samlawton.space/expanded-childhood-film

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Source: https://aifilmhistory.org/entry/expanded-childhood
Era: 2023 · The Cambrian Explosion
Last updated: 2026-10-19