Superstar songstress Adele recently came back from a long hiatus and put the entire music world on notice — but she may have her eye on another form of entertainment as well. According to Deadline, the Hello singer is in talks to appear in Xavier Dolan’s The Death And Life Of John F. Donovan and may soon introduce herself to Hollywood.
Dolan and Adele recently teamed up for the Hello video, and the long-form, cinematic project went so well that they’re now considering a second collaboration.
The Death and Life of John F. Donovan stars Jessica Chastain, Kit Harington, Susan Sarandon and Kathy Bates. IMDB offers the following synopsis: “An American movie star finds his correspondence with an 11-year-old actor exposed, prompting assumptions that begin to destroy his life and career.”
Thus far, recording the title track for the Bond film Skyfall is Adele’s only experience in the movie business, but she does have quite the screen presence in her latest video. While you might expect the singer to lend a track or two to this film’s score as well, it looks like this would be an acting gig only.
Though singing and acting are very different disciplines, there’s plenty of precedent for this sort of thing. Musicians like Lady GaGa and Justin Timberlake, among others, have made the transition successfully and we see no reason why Adele can’t add her name to that list.
In fact, the singer has already won an Academy Award — OK, that’s a bit misleading. She has won herself a statue, but it was awarded for her vocal stylings on the aforementioned Skyfall theme.
The Death and Life of John F. Donovan has yet to set a release date and is currently in pre-production. Adele’s next album, entitled 25, is set to drop on Nov. 20, 2015, while her single Hello is already breaking all kinds of records.
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?