Comment by namaria
1 day ago
You make some very strong claims and presented material. I hope I am not out of line if I give you my sincere opinion. I am not doing this to be mean, to put you down or to be snarky. But the argument you're making warrants this response, in my opinion.
The examples you gave as "magical", "100 years into the future", "literally earth shattering" are very transparently low effort. The writing is pedestrian, the timing is amateurish and the jokes just don't land. The inflating tea cup with magically floating plate and the cardboard teabag are... bad. These are bad man. At best recycled material. I am sorry but as examples of why using automatically generated art they are making the opposite argument from what you think you're making.
I categorically do not want more of this. I want to see crafted content where talent shines through. Not low effort, automatically generated stuff like the videos in these links.
I appreciate your feedback.
If I understand correctly, you're an external observer who isn't from the film or media industry? So I'll reframe the topic a little.
We've been on this ride for four years, since the first diffusion models and "Will Smith eating spaghetti" videos. We've developed workflows such as sampling diffusion generations, putting them into rotational video generation, and creating LoRAs out of synthetic data to scale up points in latent space. We've used hundreds of ControlNet modules and Comfy workflows. We've hooked this up to blender and depth maps and optical flow algorithms. We've trained models, Frankensteined schedulers, frozen layers, lobotomized weights, and read paper after paper. I say all of this because I think it's easy to under appreciate the pace at which this is moving unless you're waist deep in the stuff.
We're currently using and demonstrating workflows that a larger studio like Disney is absolutely using with a larger budget. Their new live action Moana film uses a lot of the techniques we're using, just with a larger army of people at their disposal.
So then if your notion of quality is simply how large the budget or team making the film is, then I think you might need to adjust your lenses. I do agree that superficial artifacts in the output can be fixed with more effort, but we're just trying to move fast in response to new techniques and models and build tools to harness them.
Regardless of your feelings, the tech in this field will soon enable teams of one to ten to punch at the weight of Pixar. And that's a good thing. So many ideas wither on the vine. Most film students never get the nepotism card or get "right time, right place, right preparation" to get to make the films of their dreams. There was never enough room at the top. And that's changing.
You might not like what you see, but please don't advocate to keep the written word as a tool reserved only for the Latin-speaking clergy. We deserve the printing press. There are too many people who can do good things with it.
> So then if your notion of quality is simply how large the budget or team making the film is, then I think you might need to adjust your lenses.
You are not being very honest about the content of the comment you're replying to.
> You might not like what you see, but please don't advocate to keep the written word as a tool reserved only for the Latin-speaking clergy.
Seriously?
I will do the courtesy of responding, but I do not wish to continue this conversation because you're grossly misrepresenting what I am writing.
So here is my retort, and I will not pull punches, because you were very discourteous with the straw man argument you created against me: I have watched stand up comedy at a local bar that was leagues ahead of the videos you linked. It's not about what the pixels on the screen are doing. It's about what the people behind it are creating. The limitation to creating good content has never been the FX budget.
> So then if your notion of quality is simply how large the budget or team making the film is
Where did this come from?