There are more ways to celebrate Star Wars Day than there are ewoks in Return of the Jedi. All Nippon Airways, however, may have come up with one of the best. The Japanese airline released a video today in celebration of May the Fourth, and it features a creative new arrangement of the Star Wars theme song.
The main title is so iconic that you don’t even have to be a Star Wars fan to know it. Still, you’ve probably never heard it quite like this before. ANA’s arrangement takes the song to new heights — literally. With the help of its staff, the airline has created a version that is unconventional and clever.
The ANA arrangement uses the instruments the airline is best known for: its planes, staff, onboard amenities, and more. Sounds you’d never expect to come together to make music do just that, from the moment when an aircraft is powered up to its wheels screeching as they touch down upon landing. There’s a lot in between as well, including the click of a flight attendant’s high heels, overhead compartments being closed, coffee being poured, and more.
Overall, it’s a pretty solid arrangement. After a strong opening, there is a small lull in the middle before it picks back up again for the end. You likely won’t find yourself wishing you could download it, but it probably wouldn’t make the song’s composer, John Williams, cringe, either.
The video may not have as the star power of Daisy Ridley’s tribute to Star Wars Day, but just the fact that the airline actually honored the fan holiday is pretty cool. Clearly, the Force is strong at All Nippon Airways.
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?