If you’ve ever wanted to play Dungeons & Dragons with Dan Harmon, Seeso has the next best thing. The comedy streaming service is bringing HarmonQuest to subscribers this month, a series that features Harmon and some of his famous comedian friends — not to mention animated versions of them — as they engage in the fantasy role-playing game. Seeso dropped the first trailer today, and as you’d expect, it looks like a fun romp guided by their creative minds.
The trailer makes it clear that the series isn’t taking itself too seriously; the group of comedians may have performed in front of a large studio audience, but they seem like any old group of friends hanging out, right down to their huge supply of snacks. As the trailer says, they are there to “act out [Harmon’s] role-playing fantasies and flex their comedy muscles.”
The animation makes the trailer even more entertaining. Each comedian has a lookalike character, dressed for D&D, and the visual makes it easier for the audience to follow the story’s progression. We see how the group’s quest doesn’t always go smoothly, for example, like when they are out of sync on just how a scene should play out.
Harmon’s quest-mates are a hilarious group, of course. He is joined by Erin McGathy (Harmontown), Jeff Bryan Davis (Whose Line Is It Anyway?), and Spencer Crittenden, who has worked with Harmon on Community, Rick and Morty, and more. Special guests also participate, including Aubrey Plaza (Parks and Recreation), Chelsea Peretti (Brooklyn Nine-Nine), Thomas Middleditch (Silicon Valley), Steve Agee (The Sarah Silverman Program), Paul F. Tompkins (Best Week Ever), Ron Funches (Undateable), John Hodgman (The Daily Show with Jon Stewart), and Kumail Nanjiani (Silicon Valley).
The series, which is adapted from a segment on the podcast Harmontown, premieres with all 10 episodes on July 14.
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?