It’s no secret that the movie landscape is overrun with sequels, prequels, remakes, reboots, and re-imaginings. That said, certain studios — like Pixar, for example — have made a concerted effort to continue creating unique, original stories. While the studio is certainly not above milking some of its most popular franchises for all they’re worth (see: Cars 3), it has continued to nurture the vision and creativity that turned it into one of the most respected outfits in the industry.
Case in point: The studio’s internal, experimental storytelling initiative that gave teams of animators and storytellers total creative freedom to spend six months creating short films. Per ScreenCrush, Pixar artist and producer David Lally tweeted out a pair of images on Thursday from the first short film to emerge from that initiative: Smash and Grab. Lally also tweeted out a promotional image for an upcoming talk, which describes the creative experiment and the resultant film thusly:
“In 2016, Pixar launched an internal, experimental storytelling initiative to enable new creative voices and explore alternative storytelling techniques, pipelines, and workflows in production. Within the new program, filmmakers are granted total creative freedom to develop a story, design a world, and produce a short film, within six months, and without any executive supervision. Smash and Grab is a seven-minute short film that explores the use of a comic book development process, virtual production, performance/camera capture, and procedural shading and lighting techniques.”
Here are two new images from Smash and Grab, the 1st short from Pixar’s new experimental story program! More at @siggraph! #pixar #animation pic.twitter.com/OY4kHrFk73
— David Lally (@davidmlally) June 22, 2017
Other than the obvious, it is tough to make heads or tails of the images, which appear to show a cycloptic robot hoarding chunks of glowing rock, and an elevated train, speeding through a desert landscape beneath the moon, stars, and setting sun.
As you might expect, the images are beautiful and we are wondering whether “comic book development process” means the entire story will be told via paneled stills, or if it will just borrow techniques from the genre.
Color us very intrigued, as the studio’s shorts preceding its films tend to be worth the price of admission themselves.
No word yet on when we will see Smash and Grab, but Pixar’s newest feature — Coco — is set for a November 22 release.
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?
YouTube is changing how its Home page works, giving viewers more control over what shows up there and making some of the app’s most-used sections easier to reach. Custom Feeds are now replacing the existing topic chips for eligible users, while YouTube is also testing a redesigned top bar on mobile that moves Subscriptions closer to the Home feed.
YouTube first started experimenting with Custom Feeds earlier this year, letting you type out what you wanted to watch and turning that request into its own stream of recommendations. Now, the feature is starting to look less like a side experiment and more like something YouTube actually wants people to use as part of their everyday Home page.