John Williams’ iconic Star Wars score was a great contribution to the world of music, but the latest official piece of music from the Star Wars franchise isn’t quite as inspiring.
To help promote The Force Awakens in the Middle Kingdom, ScreenCrush reports that Lucasfilm has named Chinese pop star LuHan the “official China Ambassador for Star Wars: The Force Awakens” and the singer was also enlisted to create an official, Star Wars-themed music video, which you can check out above.
According to Disney, the video will be “aired on national TV programs, streamed on online video platforms, and screened as a pre-movie ad at cinemas across China.” The hope is that LuHan — who boasts roughly 12 million followers on Weibo (China’s most-used social media site) — will draw attention to a franchise that the Chinese are less familiar with, given that the original trilogy was once banned from Chinese theaters and aired on the country’s big screens for the first time in June of 2015.
That seems like sound reasoning, but unless something is being lost in translation, this thing is pretty darn awful.
Musically, it’s a mishmash of English-language cliches and awkwardly translated Chinese phrases, set to a beat that sounds like a parody of something you might hear at your local EDM festival. Video-wise it’s little more than a montage of unrelated images from The Force Awakens paired with a few shots of LuHuan singing. He does don a Jedi robe while wielding a lightsaber around the 1:48 mark, but it’s not enough to salvage the effort.
Silly as this all seems, it would be a mistake to dismiss the marketing power of LuHuan, who holds the Guinness World Record for most comments on a single social media post, with 13,163,859(!) on a comment about the Manchester United football club.
The Force Awakens hits Chinese theaters on January 9, 2016, so we’ll have to wait until then to see if LuHuan and the rest of Disney’s marketing machine can help it succeed there. It would be rather ironic if one of the most popular films of all-time flops in the most populated country on Earth.
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?