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In the studio this week, a bevy of new works from Arvid! He’s crafted an entirely new set of characters from the ODDBIRDS world. So far, he has around 50 (!) of these new characters, which he’s rendered in a brand new style developed to showcase more diverse body proportions and more varied movements. This gives the updated cast a more natural, variegated, and quirky presence. A sample below!
This method of creating a whole cast of characters before placing them into stories is brand new for Arvid. In the past, he has written a scene first then created the characters to fit the scenario, finishing one work at a time. Through his AiR program explorations he has developed a new, more efficient “character first” workflow. Once a batch of new characters is complete in blender, he can then drop them into his AI generated backgrounds and animate them more efficiently, recombining different casts of characters into new scenes as he goes. On the whole, this should allow for a much faster output of shorts than his previous approach. Here is a quick demo animation showcasing a selection of his new characters jamming to some AI generated music.
Speaking of music, you may have noticed his complex and soundscapes that he puts together for each short - these are all produced using a new AI tool called Udio. If you don’t know about Udio, be sure to check it out. It’s (almost) scary how easy it is to create some pretty mind bending compositions.
Arvid is now targeting to be finished with a series of shorts from the ODDBIRDS KINGDOM by the last week of May. Once complete, we look forward to hosting him on the Office Hours Twitch stream for a full breakdown of his workflow! We’ve already had Domenec and Noah on, both of which generated a ton of interest, questions, and overall great feedback from attendees. With how unique Arvid’s workflows are, we’re very excited to open him up to a live Q&A for our community.
Noah is deep into the casting phase of pre-production now and has been winnowing down a few top actors from a massive pool of candidates. He had over 2000 (!) actors apply in response to his talent listing on Breakdown Express, clearly marking ZERO as a standout project on the platform. This massive response is not only a confirmation of ZERO’s creative momentum, but also a real world demonstration of the acting industry’s willingness - even enthusiasm - for participating in AI driven films. His post was very clear that each character would have unique LoRAs trained on the underlying actor’s likeness. The response? Excitement! To me this is extremely encouraging and points to the over sensationalization of the anti-AI trend. At the end of the day creators just want to come together to produce new and meaningful work, regardless of the medium or technology.
Sneak peek of an upcoming feature on the Civitai website: Crowdfunding! We are moving forward with launching Noah’s project as the first AI project on our brand new crowdfunding portal. We’ve been working towards establishing a path for the community to support projects that they believe in, and soon we will be launching a crowdfunding platform where users can contribute buzz towards the development of new and ambitious works. On top of this, we may have even found a film studio to match the donations dollar for dollar (or dollar for Kilobuzz)!
That means there will potentially be rewards for any donations towards ZERO. Benefits like: access to ZERO comfy workflow templates, exclusive screenwriting workshops, and even 1-on-1 AI work sessions. Stay tuned for more developments here, and if anyone is chomping at the bit to support Noah’s work, feel free to contact us at air@civitai.com.
Shinji has been hard at work developing the LoRAs that he will use to output his new cartridge box designs. However, because there are very few examples of the styles he is trying to capture, he has had mixed accuracy/usability of these LoRAs. Each style he is attempting to reproduce only has about 20 example images to train on. So, we’ve connected with some highly adept trainers from our Creators Club to help refine these attempts! Looking to push this forward over the next week or so with some more example LoRAs.
For a previous exhibition Shinji created multiple Atari-style video games, all playable by the way! Links are here:
To create these, he collaborated with one of the last remaining experts in the Assembly coding language, from which these games are built. In our discussions, Shinji brought up that his dream would be to have a co-pilot coding LLM that was a proficient in Assembly, as it has become such a niche language that current copilots do not support it. This moves us almost into the realm of techno-ethnography. Training an LLM on the Assembly language would effectively staunch the extinction of an endangered digital language. This would be a fascinating use of AI to breathe new life back into a dying computational language, and I think move us towards a posthuman understanding of field of ethonography.
In preparation for this, Shinji has collected the disassembled codebase for over 200 original Atari games. He is currently looking for a machine learning expert to help him train an LLM on these source materials. We are searching within our community already, but if anyone out there is able and willing to help with this larger project, please reach out to air@civitai.com.
Tyler and I hosted Domenec and his collaborator Gus for an artist talk the week before last. Over 500 people attended the live stream, where we watched stories created from user-submitted prompts. By far and away the most popular story was “Buzz Daddy's Liberation”. We'd like to congratulate and thank Domenec for being the first artist to complete the AiR residency!
This will be the last studio update to feature Domenec as his project Infinite Mesh is now complete. If you missed it, you can watch the full twitch stream now on the Civitai YouTube page.
Thanks!
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