Be Wary of Sora Overhype

Plus: It’s the Children Who Are Wrong

Author

Steve
April 30, 2024

Aloha Hollywood tech nerds!

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Be Wary of Sora Overhype

Regular readers know of my reverence for tech writer and podcaster Ed Zitron (currently in the midst of a banger series of articles on why Google Search has gotten so bad lately).

On Twitter, Zitron flags a recent article on FXGuide on the making of “Air Head,” one of the three ballyhooed Sora creations unveiled upon its initial launch promotion.

Here’s the Sora “Air Head” video for reference:

As Zitron notes, this is how the film’s production was originally described to MIT Tech Review:

But everything in “Air Head” is raw output from Sora. After editing together many different clips produced with the tool, Shy Kids did a bunch of post-processing to make the film look even better. They used visual effects tools to fix certain shots of the main character’s balloon face, for example.

This makes it sound like most of the work was being done in Sora, but that is belied by the FXGuide article:

…on the shot that pans up from Sonny’s jeans to his balloon head [,] [u]nfortunately, SORA would not render such a move natively, always wanting the main focus of the shot—the balloon head—to be in the shot. So the team rendered the shot in portrait mode and then manually, via cropping, created the pan-up in post…

While all the imagery was generated in SORA, the balloon still required a lot of post-work. In addition to isolating the balloon so it could be re-colored, it would sometimes have a face on Sonny, as if his face was drawn on with a marker, and this would be removed in AfterEffects. Similar other artifacts were often removed.

This is much more complicated and human-intensive than the original breathless Sora coverage would have led you to believe. It’s why claims from tech companies about how well their products work must be met with immediate skepticism. It is in OpenAI’s financial interest to make people think “movie pwease” is how their tools will function, and only credulous hype will guarantee investment in said tools from investors who don’t know better.

Conversely, a “slot machine” with 10-20 minute render times per shot and the need to make intensive post adjustments is not exactly the future that AI hypemen continue to promise!

It’s the Children Who Are Wrong

Via Variety, I found myself descending into the depths of madness reading this GamesRadar+ interview with the Russos, the directors of the last two Avengers movies. Faithful readers know that the topic of “superhero fatigue” is one of my favorite industry bugaboos.

The Russos obviously know a thing or two about making a blockbuster film, but appear clueless as to the moviegoing trends that have emerged over the past few years:

“There's a big generational divide about how you consume media. There's a generation that's used to appointment viewing and going to a theater on a certain date to see something, but it's aging out. Meanwhile the new generation are 'I want it now, I want to process it now’, then moving onto the next thing, which they process whilst doing two other things at the same time. You know, it's a very different moment in time than it's ever been. And so I think everyone, including Marvel, is experiencing the same thing, this transition. And I think that really is probably what's at play more than anything else.”

Joe Russo

How is this even possible to suggest post-Barbie, Oppenheimer, Dune: Part Two and even more modest hits like Civil War? These films all define “appointment viewing,” the same way Marvel did at one time.

Marvel is no longer appointment viewing because the experience no longer merits appointments! Anthony Russo tries to turn the standard Western comparison on its head:

“People used to complain about westerns in the same way but they lasted for decades and decades and decades. They were continually reinvented and brought to new heights as they went on."

Anthony Russo

Well, yes, the Western was reinvented. Reinvention means creating a groundbreaking revisionist piece like Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven or Sam Raimi’s pastiche The Quick and the Dead, not developing a Western Cinematic Universe where you had to watch 2 full TV shows in order to understand the plot of the newest movie.

Judd Apatow could have made the same argument as the Russos, as his R-rated comedies ruled the box office in the early 2000s but have since fallen out of audience favor. However, his take is more circumspect:

“…the people have to take big risks, and then you realize, ‘No, people want to be challenged. They want smart movies. They want original cinematic experiences.‘“

Judd Apatow

Here’s a round-up of cool and interesting links about Hollywood and technology:

DP Rodrigo Prieto on that exploding house in Killers of the Flower Moon. (link)

The oral history of Shaun of the Dead. (link)

The latest online culture war: humans vs. algorithms. (link)