Fable Studio just unveiled Showrunner, a platform that lets viewers generate, customize, and edit animated series with simple text prompts. Users can tweak dialogue, camera angles, and character actions, or let the AI write the next episode on its own. The platform launched a free testing waitlist alongside 10 original shows, though it is currently limited to animation.
Star Wars creator George Lucas said artificial intelligence in cinema is bound to happen, comparing AI skepticism to refusing cars to stick with horses. Lucas cited his pioneering digital effects work at Industrial Light & Magic to argue that resisting technical shifts in Hollywood is simply not how the world works.
Hollywood creators from writers’ rooms to VFX departments are quietly embracing generative AI, but almost nobody dares to admit it publicly. Following fan backlashes against AI graphics in films like Late Night With the Devil and Civil War, industry veterans say using AI has become a massive PR issue rather than a technical hurdle. Basically, everyone needs the edge AI provides, but nobody wants to be boycotted.
Google just introduced VideoFX, a new generative video tool powered by DeepMind's flagship Veo model that features a storyboard mode for scene-by-scene editing. The company also upgraded ImageFX with brush-based image editing and an Imagen 3 waitlist, alongside a DJ Mode beat-mixer in MusicFX.
Runway just opened on-demand streaming for the top 10 finalists of its second annual AI Film Festival, and the biggest takeaway is that human craft still trumps raw generative tech. While every film leaned on AI for backdrops and effects, warped physics frequently broke immersion. Instead, genuine emotional weight came down to strong scripts, raw vocal performances, and traditional cinematography.
YouTube just expanded testing for its AI-powered "Jump ahead" button to Premium subscribers on Android. When you double-tap to skip, the app pairs viewer drop-off data with AI to guess the next best point in the video, letting you leap straight over the fluff. It is currently limited to high-view English videos in the U.S.
OpenAI just landed its first major music video project with artist Washed Out's new single "The Hardest Part." Director Paul Trillo spent six weeks cherry-picking 55 clips from roughly 700 Sora-generated prompts to pull off sweeping visuals on a budget, though audience reactions have been sharply mixed.
Shengshu Technology and Tsinghua University just unveiled Vidu, a text-to-video AI capable of generating 16-second clips at 1080p resolution in one click. Built on their U-ViT architecture, it supports multi-camera transitions and simulates real-world lighting. While it doesn't quite match Sora's photorealism yet, its temporal consistency marks a serious step forward for Chinese video models.
Synthesia just rolled out Expressive Avatars, an upgrade that brings real emotions and tighter lip-sync to its corporate video presenters. Instead of stitching together pre-recorded video clips, the avatars are generated entirely on the fly using multimodal deep learning. Why it matters: It takes the robotic edge off training and marketing videos, though getting hands right remains a work in progress.
Adobe researchers just unveiled VideoGigaGAN, a generative AI model that can upscale blurry videos up to eight times their original resolution. It manages to deliver sharp, realistic details like skin texture without the flickering artifacts typical of video GANs. It's currently just a research preview, with no word yet on a Premiere Pro rollout.
TED just partnered with artist Paul Trillo and OpenAI to envision what the conference might look like in 40 years, completely generated using the unreleased text-to-video model Sora. The concept video highlights how experimental creators are pushing the boundaries of AI video ahead of a public rollout.
Adobe just previewed new generative AI tools coming to Premiere Pro later this year, letting editors add or remove objects from shots and extend short clips with AI-generated frames. It also teased integrations with third-party models like OpenAI's Sora and Pika to automatically generate B-roll directly in the timeline. Why it matters: professional editors might soon get text-to-video superpowers baked right into their standard workflow.
Blackmagic Design just launched the public beta of DaVinci Resolve 19, packing a slew of AI-powered creative features. Editors can now trim clips directly by editing transcribed text, track and stabilize footage using the neural-engine IntelliTrack, and isolate audio with Dialogue Separator FX. The standard version remains completely free, while the Studio upgrade sits at $295.
Adobe is paying creators an average of $2.62 to $7.25 per minute for short clips of everyday human actions and emotions to train its upcoming text-to-video generator. The data-buying push is aimed directly at countering OpenAI’s Sora, doubling down on Adobe’s pitch of commercially clean, copyright-safe training data.
Storyblocks just introduced AI-driven search enhancements, leveraging BERT-based models and OpenAI's LLM to deliver fresher and more accurate stock assets. The platform recalculates new content performance every four hours and picks the most engaging video thumbnails, boosting download rates by up to 60%.
Apple just introduced Spatial Personas for Vision Pro running visionOS 1.1. Instead of hovering like ghosts trapped in FaceTime tiles, up to five avatars can now sit in the same virtual room with spatial audio to collaborate, play games, or watch movies together.
OpenAI just showcased the first batch of creative works made with Sora, collaborating with filmmakers, designers, and visual artists. Creatives praised the tool's knack for generating surreal concepts unconstrained by physics, though all featured videos underwent manual post-editing. Why it matters: Sora is evolving from a tech demo into a rapid ideation engine for Hollywood-level creatives.
OpenAI is meeting with Hollywood film studios, media executives, and talent agencies to encourage creators to incorporate its Sora video generator into their workflows. COO Brad Lightcap has already hosted initial demo meetings, and select directors and actors have been granted early access. It is an aggressive outreach effort targeting an industry still on edge over AI disruption.
Stability AI just released Stable Video 3D (SV3D), adapting its video diffusion tech to turn a single object image into consistent multi-view orbital videos and 3D meshes. It comes in two flavors—one for generic orbits and another supporting custom camera paths. Weights are open on Hugging Face for non-commercial use, while commercial deployment requires a membership.
Google researchers just unveiled VLOGGER, a multimodal diffusion model that generates realistic talking videos from a single photo and an audio clip. Unlike past head-animation tools, it synthesizes facial expressions along with head motion and hand gestures without individual training. The videos are still short with static backgrounds, but the jump in quality is unmistakable.
