Hello Hollywood AI Reader!

Welcome to this week’s edition of the Hollywood AI newsletter, where we bring you the latest & greatest in AI technology news for the entertainment industry. Here’s what’s on tap today:

• 🤖 Wonder Dynamics Discuss AI At SXSW Festival

• 📻 DJ AI Just Crashed The Party 

• 🍿 Hollywood AI Kernels

🤖 Wonder Dynamics Discuss AI At SXSW Festival

Last month, the 2023 SXSW Conference & Festivals successfully concluded its ten-day event, which brought together creative innovators and industry experts across the tech, film, and music industries. This year’s conference and festivals featured keynote speakers, award ceremonies, and interactive exhibits. Among the panelists was Wonder Dynamics, the AI film company created in 2016. Co-founders Tye Sheridan and Nikola Todorovic, along with board advisory members Anjoo Kanazawa and Antonio Torralba, sat down to discuss the official launch of their newly created AI tool, Wonder Studio.

Wonder Studio is a cloud based program capable of animating, lighting, and composing a CG character directly into any scene. The advanced technology behind this tool tracks an actor's performance by analyzing and capturing their body motion. It then takes into account the lighting, composition, and camera angles, generating a 3D CG character.

It’s important to note that Wonder Studio is not a generative AI tool. Each CG character should be created by artists working with the filmmakers. Wonder Studio was designed to be an intuitive tool accessible to both established studios and independent filmmakers, streamlining the process of CG and VFX effects. The program provides filmmakers with full control of the final product and even allows for detailed adjustments.

As we’ve discussed here before, the rapid advancement of AI introduces countless possibilities, but also genuine concerns within the industry. How will we control and regulate every new AI development? What about job displacement? During their talk at SXSW, the Wonder Dynamics team discussed these concerns at length. You can catch the full discussion here.

The team emphasized that Wonder Dynamics was “not in the business of replacing actors”. The tool was created to assist CG artists and empower independent filmmakers by providing them with an easy-to-use tool to allow their films to appeal to a larger audience.

Sheridan went on to explain how film has relied on technology since the dawn of the camera, emphasizing that it’s more of a symbiotic relationship which influences each other's growth. The tool was not trained on other artists' designs, to then generate a character based on them. Rather, it is a tool “created by artists, made for artists” designed to solely enhance the work of filmmakers.

Wonder Studio has the potential to save filmmakers hours of work and reduce production costs significantly. Additionally, it could help level the playing field for independent filmmakers who may not have access to the same resources as major studios. The technology may be seen in action sooner than anticipated, as it is being used in the upcoming Russo Brothers film, Electric State, starring Millie Bobby Brown and Chris Pratt. The company is hoping the AI tool becomes an essential part of the CG and VFX process in the years to come.

📻 DJ AI Just Crashed The Party

Super Hi-Fi, a leader in AI-powered radio experiences for digital music services, has teamed up with ElevenLabs, a leading text-to-audio AI software provider, to make fully customized and personalized radio experiences available to a global audience. This collaboration will help broadcasters and streaming music services offer listeners a completely AI-driven listening experience that is interactive, bespoke, and personalized.

As part of this collaboration, Super Hi-Fi has launched a live radio station called “AI Radio” to showcase the potential of this partnership. This 24-hour autonomous station is created and managed exclusively by AI using Super Hi-Fi's MagicStitch™, ElevenLabs' Prime Voice AI, and ChatGPT.

With this partnership, Super Hi-Fi will integrate ElevenLabs' voice creation tools directly into its production platform, allowing global customers to create realistic voices that can be used for a variety of purposes, including DJ voices, personalized news, localized weather bulletins, and advertising. Customers of Super Hi-Fi can now offer radio content that is powered by a combination of narration composed via ChatGPT and audio spoken by ElevenLabs' next-generation AI voices. Super Hi-Fi's patented AI automated production suite will weave these together to create a completely AI-driven listening experience that is interactive and bespoke.

Mati Staniszewski, CEO of ElevenLabs, said, "The combination of Super Hi-Fi and ElevenLabs' breakthrough AI platforms opens up endless possibilities to create new content in the streaming audio space. We're excited to see our technology enabling a more personalized, bespoke, and interactive offering for listeners." The ability to have AI-generated voices perfectly woven into personalized listening experiences is emerging as a new standard for the industry.

Super Hi-Fi and ElevenLabs aren’t the only ones letting robots DJ the party. Spotify recently debuted a similar AI DJ in its app. The AI DJ leverages Spotify’s personalization technology, OpenAI’s generative AI technology, and the dynamic AI voice platform of Sonantic. Spotify acquired Sonantic AI last year in a strategic step towards offering listeners new, AI-driven audio experiences.

Tweet Of The Day 🔥

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For context, Amazon released Bedrock this week, entering the generative AI race. Bedrock is the company’s new API for Amazon Web Services that allows developers to use and customize AI tools that generate text or images. Think of it as a cloud-based generative AI toolkit aimed at businesses and developers.

With Bedrock, AWS customers can leverage AI models from a variety of different providers, including AWS, via an API. Amazon isn’t disclosing the cost of the service, as it’s currently only available as a limited preview.

🍿 AI Kernels

Here’s a round-up of interesting news and stories that caught our attention this week:

The Avengers were given a 90’s-inspired AI make-over. The images were generated by Midjourney and cast stars like Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt as Marvel superheroes. The images are quite impressive → reddit

Storia AI, a generative AI company, wants to use AI for storyboarding. Check out what they’re up to, here → twitter

Hollywood voice actors are divided on whether AI is good news or bad news for the industry. Many of the most prolific actors in the industry are embracing it. → /film

AI-generated songs have been popping up on music streaming services. Universal Music Group has told streaming companies like Apple and Spotify to block AI services from scraping lyrics and melodies. → ars technica

That’s a wrap for today’s newsletter. Thanks for reading Hollywood AI!

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