The eight finalists of the Culver Cup AI Shorts Contest were judged at the top of LA Tech Week. [+] Culver City.
Joey Dowd
TechWeek in LA raised the profile of AI, starting with a sold-out AI Competition at Culver Studios.
Last night, Toonstar, an AI animation company specializing in social media, Loyola Marymount University, and Variety VIP+ hosted an LA Tech Week event at Toonstar’s Arts District studio. Toonstar created a demo of the AI-assisted animation production process while a panel exhibition was taking place in a separate room. With simple character designs and voices, Toonstar’s system can generate animation and dubbing. You can clone audio and animation lip sync to make your character speak in any language.
A fireside chat with Susanne Daniels, former head of entertainment at The CW, LIFETIME, MTV and YouTube Originals, followed by UTA CTO Eric Iverson and Eleven Labs VP of Revenue Carles Reyna. , a panel discussion was held with CEO John Attanasio. I’m Lisa Sterbakov, co-founder of Toonstar and partner at Orchard Farm Productions (Mila Kunis Studio).
Where the Robots Grow is the first feature-length film about AI. And it’s currently free on YouTube. Produced by Tom Payton’s AiMation Studios, the 87-minute film costs just $8,000 per minute, an unprecedented amount for a professionally animated feature.
AWS and FBRC AI kicked off LA Tech Week with The Culver Cup, a generative AI film competition. The filmmakers were tasked with creating an innovative short film using cutting-edge AI tools such as Luma AI’s Dream Machine and Playbook3D. Out of 50 entries, the top eight finalists, including Joey Dowd and Crystal Trix, competed in a bracket-style showdown. The competition focused on how AI is transforming storytelling and enabling filmmakers to create high-quality, production-ready films faster than ever before.
Synthsaga is the retro-futuristic YouTube channel of the Acosta brothers (Raul and Eduardo), who have a studio in Gijón, Spain, and have been building XR experiences since 2014. “We are lovers of vintage sci-fi,” Raul said. “Almost a year ago, we started a retro cyberpunk channel that evolved into its current form of synth saga, an ongoing game between the utopian and dystopian parallel worlds of the past. ” Imaginary nostalgia is the perfect subject for generative AI. but. What’s really important here is the storytelling, direction, music, and attitude of the filmmakers, enough to make you forget for a moment that this isn’t AI. It’s a very good story that makes you want to know more about the world and the characters. Acosta uses mid-journey for still images. Luma and Minimax for video. Udio for music, Eleven Lab and Custom Recording for sound.
Pixie Dust was created by Davide Bianca, an Emmy Award-winning executive creative director, strategist, and technologist based in LA. He has been at the forefront of innovation for nearly two decades, telling stories across multiple media while helping Hollywood studios, television networks, streaming platforms, and gaming companies bring their properties to audiences around the world and shape pop culture. We have been supporting the. “I have been producing GenAI films since 2019, but my work in the AI field goes back to the early 2000s,” says Bianca. “My background is in computer science, and for the past 20 years I have been studying technology innovation and storytelling with the strong belief that when technology serves a story, it transcends us and becomes an invisible hand indistinguishable from the story. “Bianca’s company has a very impressive showreel. Tools used to create “Pixie Dust” are Midjourney 6.1, Kling 1.5, Magnific, Photoshop Beta with Adobe Firefly, Celebrity, and CapCut.
