The best of times, the worst of times

I am coming across a lot of announcements about new companies, tools, and apps. I’ve been drawing out ones that relate to art, design, creativity, video, etc. There are multitudes.

BTW Generative AI startups raised $1.6 billion in Q1 of 2023.

Amazon Storyteller: Storyteller scans a movie script, then identifies the scenes, locations and characters and “casts” them from a library of thousands of characters, props and backgrounds. Filmmakers can then edit, upload their own images, etc., then it produces a full storyboard. They are also doing this as a sharing platform, hoping to build community around these storyboards and productions.

Animagic turns a drawing into an animation in seconds.

Uizard (love the name!) takes a hand-drawn wireframe, translates it into a medium/high fidelity responsive prototype, then allows you to edit.

Lumalabs’s NeRF turns images and videos into realistic 3D environments that you can navigate through and edit. I am sure there are huge differences in quality from the pro studios, but essentially doesn’t this put volumetric capture, live performance capture, motion capture, and object scanning on your phone? They’ve also released it as an API so that developers can build it into other tools. It’s $1 a scene. “VFX for everyone”! There are actually a zillion companies with the same goal, another one is Wonderdynamics.

Tons of people are talking about Kaiber, a text to video tool that also has a prompt-to-prompt function. As I understand it, prompt-to-prompt means that the prompt you use to make a video can be edited and still retain features of the original prompt. So when you make an edit to your generative video, the edit can be carried forward into the frames that follow, meaning that you can edit the video and still retain the style of the image you originally created (rather than having to tweak the original prompt and risk having an entirely different result, when all you want is a small change). Correct me if I’m wrong about what this is!

With Voidsynth you can turn sketches of characters, backgrounds etc into realistic renders.

With FabricGenie you can design fabric with words. Great plan! Having said that, this is what it produced for “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times”. (I want a sofa like this).

BTW I’m finding a lot of great references through Ben’s Bites, I would check it out if you’re interested.

On another note, I’m happy like a child running through strawberry fields to have been referenced in Good Internet.