Welcome to Hollywood AI, the weekly newsletter covering the latest AI developments in the entertainment industry.

• 💬 Apple Vision Pro + Hollywood

• 🎮 A 12-Minute AI Short Film

• 🍿 AI Kernels

Apple Vision Pro + Hollywood = Magic

Last week, Apple announced the Vision Pro, their new mixed reality headset. The headset looks beautiful and the tech world is going batshit.

While many of the use cases revolve around the headset being used for work, entertainment will also be a huge feature — so much so that Disney CEO Bob Iger appeared onstage during the keynote presentation. Iger called the Vision Pro “real life magic” and announced that Disney+ would be available on the Vision Pro the day in launches.

The presentation included a reel showing a user immersed in an NBA game, inside an episode of Marvel’s What If…?, and hosting a Disney parade in their home. Also included was Apple TV+ shows Ted Lasso and Foundation.

On top of a device to revolutionize work, it feels like Apple is building a “personal movie theater” with features including 4K, HDR, spacial audio and stereoscopic 3D; if you’ve ever wanted to immerse yourself in the Avatar movies, your dream may be coming true.

About this time, you might be thinking this is Hollywood AI, not Hollywood AR, right? Well my answer for you is:

While the Vision Pro is new, it looks like select companies were given prior notice. RewindAI, a software that uses AI to let you turn everything you do into a searchable database, got pre-access — meaning with Rewind, you may be able to turn everything you see into a searchable database 😮

You can imagine other uses of AI on the Vision Pro as well:

• A ChatGPT assistant you can keep on-screen at all times

• A RunwayML app that lets you use AI to turn your Rewind videos into different styles of videos

• A Midjourney app to edit photos captured right in front of you

If this doesn’t get you pumped, I don’t know what will!

A 12-Minute Short Film 100% by AI

Last week, the MIT Technology Review premiered an AI-generated short film called The Frost. Welcome to the world of AI-generated movies.

To make The Frost, the studio Waymark took a script written by Josh Rubin and fed it to DALL-E 2. After a lot of trial and error, they used DALL-E 2 to generate every single shot. Then they used D-ID, an AI tool that can add movement to still images, to animate the shots.

The artwork is beautiful, but some of the mouth and body movements definitely feel unnatural. But Waymark didn’t mind.

“We kind of hit a point where we just stopped fighting the desire for photographic accuracy and started leaning into the weirdness that is DALL-E,” says Stephen Parker. “The best generative video models can still produce only a few seconds of video,” wrote Will Douglas Heaven at the MIT Technology Review. We’re still a long ways away from a normal looking AI-gen movie.

“The Frost has a vibe, for sure. But it is also janky,” writes Heaven. Well, that’s for sure. I encourage you to watch it for yourself and see what you think.

AI Kernels

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

Find a movie based on your emotions. Ok I’ve been waiting for this my whole life. Hopefully Netflix integrates it! → MoveMe.Tv

Runway Gen-2 text-to-video is now available. Previously only on beta access, Runway Gen-2 is now available to the world. → Runway

Transform long videos into short videos 10x faster. You can now use the magic of OpenAI to get ready-to-publish TikToks, Reels, and YouTube shorts in 1 click. → Klap

AI-Themed Content of the Week

Every week, we’ll hit you with a piece of content centered around AI. It might be a book, movie, whatever.

This week, we got something funny. Somebody on Reddit generated a bunch of images of historical figures as fashion models.