When George Lucas himself starts probing you for plot details, that’s when you know you’ve got everyone feverishly anticipating Star Wars: The Force Awakens.
Sorry, George. No soup for you. Director J.J. Abrams remained tight-lipped through a virtual celebrity Q&A hosted by Vanity Fair last week, revealing next to nothing about the film itself.
While there were frivolous questions like Amanda Crew’s “how much money do you have in your bank account?” And serious questions like Yuri Milner’s “Do you think we’re alone in the universe, or not?” The session was mostly celebrities behaving like impatient preteens and trying to get Abrams to spill the beans on The Force Awakens.
Shane Smith Founder and CEO of Vice: “What the hell happens between Luke and Darth Vader!?”
Beats CEO Jimmy Iovine: “Can you show it to me before it comes out?”
George Lucas: “What happened to Darth Vader’s grandchildren?”
Of course, Abrams deflected each of these questions with all the deftness of a jedi blocking a stormtrooper’s laser blasts, but it was really fun to see that even very influential, very important people, who are very busy with their own influential/important lives and projects, are geeking out just like us.
Perhaps the biggest takeaway of all, however, came from the director’s one-word answer to Girls Creator Lena Dunham’s question: “J.J., what does it feel like to be you?” His response: “Awesome.”
As it should. The man is on top of the movie world right now, and has enjoyed a long run of almost universally positive press. That said, he’s got to be getting just a bit nervous as the biggest movie premiere of his career (or maybe anyone’s) creeps closer and closer. Making amazing trailers is one thing, making an amazing movie quite another.
Star Wars: The Force Awakens hits theaters on Dec. 18, 2015.
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?