Launched last week, the “Star Trek: Boldly Go” charity campaign was created to raise funds for nine different charities supported by the film’s featured cast. The campaign will see one lucky fan winning a walk-on role in the film each week, over the course of nine weeks. In the latest video promoting the campaign, Star Trek stars Simon Pegg (who’s also a co-writer on the film) and Anton Yelchin offer an update on “Boldly Go,” announce the first week’s winner, and — in a blink-and-you-miss-it moment — provide a peek at what seems to be a new, alien from the upcoming film.
Covered in spine-y hair and whiskers, the alien head appears around the :36 mark in the video — right before a brief scene featuring a tray of pointy, prosthetic ears being prepped to wear.
Here’s what the alien looks like:
Organized via the Omaze fundraising platform, “Star Trek: Boldly Go” encourages fans to make $10 donations to each week’s charity, with every donation offering the chance to win the coveted walk-on role in the film or various other prizes related to Star Trek Beyond. Larger donations also grant other rewards, including limited-edition t-shirts, posters, a cast-autographed “red shirt,” an advanced private screening of Star Trek Beyond, and even a freaking replica Captain’s chair — imagine that in your home theater room.
In addition to the nine walk-on roles offered in the campaign, six additional fans will be honored as “Star Trek: Boldly Go” crew members, winning the opportunity to visit the set of the film in Vancouver and see some early footage from Star Trek Beyond.
You can get more information about the campaign — including the list of charities and prizes — at Omaze.com.
Star Trek Beyond is scheduled to hit theaters July 8, 2016.
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?