Getting advice from the top professionals in any field is typically a very expensive proposition, but MasterClass is looking to make such guidance accessible to all. For a flat enrollment fee of $90, the site gives you lifetime access to a course from one of a handful of luminaries, and ScreenCrush reports that the site has added a screenwriting tutorial from the one and only Aaron Sorkin to the mix.
Sorkin, of course, is one of the top screenwriters on the planet. He has scripted classics like A Few Good Men (“You can’t handle the truth!”), The West Wing, Moneyball, and The Social Network, for which he won the Oscar for best adapted screenplay. In other words: When he talks, you listen.
You can watch the trailer for the course above. It starts out by establishing that “no one, ever in life, starts a sentence with ‘dammit.’” Among the other nuggets shared, is that “the worst crime you can commit is telling the audience something they already know.”
From what we can tell, this seems like a pull-no-punches, no nonsense crash course, and Aaron Sorkin does not strike us as the sort to waste anyone’s time — least of all his own.
The course is comprised of 25 separate video tutorials, and even includes online office hours, during which Professor Sorkin will discuss select projects in greater detail.
MasterClass is “an immersive online experience that offers access to genius by allowing anyone to take online classes with the world’s best.” The service also includes acting lessons from Kevin Spacey, singing tips from Christina Aguilera, directing pointers from Werner Herzog, and writing advice from James Patterson.
Aaron Sorkin’s course is not yet live, but will be available on the site sometime this summer.
China just gave Hollywood a cautionary tale about AI filmmaking. Sanxingdui: Future Past, billed as the country's first fully AI-generated movie, hit theaters on October 23 and bombed at the box office.
According to Futurism, the film's reported $1.5 million production budget landed on more than 10,000 screens. Yet it pulled in only about $181,000, averaging roughly $20 per screen, making the budget difficult to recover.
Some of the best shots in Grok Imagine’s AI-made Odyssey don’t contain actors. Ancient landscapes stretch into the distance. Close-ups of grimy hands suggest people who have touched something rougher than a keyboard. For a few seconds, the illusion holds.
https://twitter.com/imagine/status/2113712964419063911
YouTube videos could soon look better without eating quite so much data, right? Thankfully, the platform plans to introduce a new video format called AV2 on its web player in early 2027, promising more efficient streaming and potentially fewer playback hiccups on slower internet connections. The big headline is a roughly 30% improvement in compression efficiency over AV1, YouTube's existing video format. That doesn't guarantee every video will use 30% less data, but it could make streaming a little easier on both internet connections and data allowances.
What is AV2, and why should viewers care?