FilmSpark.ai

We figured out a cool technique this week and wanted to share. We used to gen low res to test prompts (480 or 720). But when you re-gen at 1080 or 4K, good chance the shot will be slightly different. Thus is the nature of AI. So here is what we figured out. New workflow: • Generate the shot in Seedance at 480p, using your start frame plus your character and environment refs. • When the take is right, clone the shot. • Drop the 480p clip into the video ref slot. Remove a storyboard panel if you used one for the 480. You don't need it. • Tell @FilmSparkAI Agent: revise the shot to follow Video1 for camera, movement, performance, and timing, and match the lighting of Image1. • The Agent rewrites the prompt. • Set the shot to 1080p or 4K and generate. The 1080p comes back matching the version you already approved. Same camera, same performance, same timing. It's like rendering a low res proxy in After Effects before going to the final res. With this workflow you can have much more confidence your final shot will be accurate! Video below shows the 480p and the 4K side by side.

I'm excited to share something I've been sitting on for a while. Rick Carter, two-time Academy award winning Production Designer behind Jurassic Park, Avatar, Lincoln, Forest Gump and The Force Awakens, has been creating with @FilmSparkAI .ai. Nicole Letaw and John Gaeta were kind enough to introduce us, which I am extremely grateful for. Rick is prolific! He has already completed several 25+minute short films on @FilmSparkAI .ai, exploring worlds and stories he's been developing for years, that never had a path to the screen. Rick is inspiring, amazing and completely open to what AI and @FilmSparkAI .ai can bring to filmmaking. Think about that for a sec. One of the greatest world builders in film history, completely open to and not fighting AI. What strikes me most is how he frames it. Rick told me he's spent his entire career taking prompts from directors and turning them into worlds. Spielberg, Zemeckis, Cameron, Abrams. Now he's the one doing the prompting, and to him the conversation feels familiar. He doesn't see AI as a threat to collaboration. He sees it as another collaborator. "I've spent my career taking prompts from directors and turning them into worlds with others. Now I'm the one doing the prompting, and the conversation feels so familiar. I don't fight these tools, I work with them the way I've worked with every collaborator I've had. And for the first time, worlds I've been sitting on for years have a path to the screen." I spent years at LucasArts working alongside ILM, surrounded by people who built impossible worlds by hand. Watching one of the best of them embrace this new toolset, on his own terms, for his own stories, tells me more about where filmmaking is headed than any industry report. More to come on what Rick is building.

AI can give actors jobs, not replace them. Many years ago, I was lucky to work on the LucasArts game "Full Throttle" by @TimOfLegend. I worked on the opening cinematic (back then called cutscenes!), and it was always one of my favorite games of that era, and the one I felt had the most potential to be a film. It felt like a movie. A few weeks ago, I had an idea for a new @FilmSparkAI demo: a biker bar scene. Then I said, "Hey, let's make it the bar from Full Throttle!" Just for fun. That's when I was pointed to the @ManMadeMoon screenplay for Full Throttle. It was cool to see someone else thought this had film potential too. After reading the screenplay, and seeing how he kept the opening cinematic mainly intact, we decided to make a proof-of-concept AI teaser, recreating the opening cinematic as accurately as we could. We used the original audio for authenticity. Hamilton Camp's Corley felt a little cartoonish on the AI character, which was weird but cool. @MarkHamill's Ripburger worked even better. Our goal is something becoming very common in Hollywood right now: using AI to create a sizzle trailer to get a film funded. Think of it as the new graphic novel. We want to use AI to get a film greenlit with real actors, shot on location, and use AI for VFX as needed. To be clear, we are not advocating for an "AI Full Throttle film."  This is one way Hollywood is using AI, behind the scenes.