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- Seedance, Spider-Noir, Muppets and More!
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Seedance, Spider-Noir, Muppets and More!
I hope everyone had a relaxing Presidents Day weekend. I’m still recovering from the festivities (driving to Texas to bail my Aunt Joan out of jail) so I’ve assembled a few quick hits of news items of interest to ease you back into the week!
Seedance Makes Hollywood Shit Pants!
Biggest news obviously is ByteDance’s release of Seedance 2.0, a high-powered video generation model that produces results like the below:
The studios immediately launched into action, with Disney sending a C&D to ByteDance:
“ByteDance’s virtual smash-and-grab of Disney’s IP is willful, pervasive, and totally unacceptable,” wrote the entertainment giant’s counsel.
Deadpool & Wolverine co-writer Rhett Reese tweeted “it’s likely over for us,” with which I agree if he’s referencing slop like Deadpool & Wolverine, a film which AI absolutely could have written and produced.
Don’t get me wrong, these tools are absolutely impressive! It’s just curious to me that every time one of the videos goes viral it’s heavily reliant on already-existing faces and IP in order to be impactful. Why does original AI-created content never seem to show up in these discussions?
Perhaps an important lesson for Hollywood here will be that relying on mix-and-match franchises, remakes, reboots, and legacy sequels is about to become a dead end!
Twin Peaks: The Return x Spider-Noir
Amazon released a trailer for their new Nicolas Cage-starring show Spider-Noir, with viewers marveling at the noir-styled black and white cinematography:
The show’s cinematographer is Peter Deming, who also shot a number of David Lynch projects, including Twin Peaks: The Return, which featured its own mind-bending black and white sequence in Episode 8:
Courtesy of Gold Derby, below is an in-depth look at the production of the 8th episode:
Labyrinth at 40
The 80s classic Labyrinth turns 40 years old this year, and American Cinematographer has blessed us with a reprint of its interview with Jim Henson about the film’s production and how it created its visual effects. The way some of these things were achieved is like reading a dispatch from an entirely different universe.
The complicated mechanism designed to operate the facial features of the dwarf character, Hoggle, was compact and versatile. "There are about 18 radio-controlled motors inside of his face," Henson marvels. "Originally, I had thought that we'd have one radio-controlled head and a more elaborate cable-controlled head for close-ups, but we found we were able to get the full movement with the radio-controlled one. In the past, things that complicated were virtually always cable-controlled, but we decided to radio-control it, which gave us a lot more freedom with the character, because now he can walk about the set while we're shooting."
…Hoggle created other technical difficulties, mainly stemming from its built in video vision system, a refinement Henson had first employed on his Fraggle Rock television program. The vision system consists of a television monitor inside the costume and a camera which films the character's precise point of view, so that the performer inside is seeing exactly what the character would be. "We found when we first started to shoot with Hoggle that the whole video vision was not good, it didn't work well for her at all. It took us a little while to discover that, but she ended up looking through the mouth of the character instead." Oddly enough, the video system inside the gigantic Ludo costume, which employed two video monitors, one showing the character's point of view and the other featuring the actual shot, worked absolutely perfectly for the performer.
Labyrinth is a great example of the power of practical effects, it makes the fantastical world of the film feel real in a way that CGI or AI would never be able to equally achieve.
Kernels (3 links worth making popcorn for)
Here’s a round-up of cool and interesting links about Hollywood and technology:
How YouTuber Markiplier made an indie movie hit. (link)
Ed Zitron eviscerates “Something Big is Coming.” (link)
The hardest VFX in Avatar were sometimes the smallest. (link)