Very seldom does a week go by without bringing at least one new piece of Star Wars-related news — even when that week falls on Independence Day. Per ScreenCrush, the latest from a galaxy far, far, away, is the first in a series of animated shorts entitled, Star Wars: Forces of Destiny.
This first installment (embedded above) is called Sands of Jakku and gives us a peek at Rey and BB-8 palling around on the perilous planet. The main action comes when the pair are chased by a formidable, subterranean, junk-eating beast known as a nightwatcher worm, and it is hardly spoiling anything to say that both manage to escape the ordeal in one piece. We actually got a fleeting glimpse of the monster’s (antennae?) in Star Wars: Episode VII — The Force Awakens, but when it rears its ugly head (and we do mean ugly), we realize there was something far more frightening waiting just beneath the desert sand.
The 2 minute, 48 second-long film is primarily meant to fill in the gaps between scenes from the most recent installment of the Star Wars franchise and will be followed by a new one each day at 1:00 p.m. (ET) until Sunday, when the collected shorts will air on The Disney Channel. Don’t expect anything revelatory out of this series but — if you’re looking for a fun little diversion to tide you over until Star Wars: Episode VIII — The Last Jedi — this may just do the trick.
That said, you shouldn’t expect Disney to phone these in, either. The studio has Daisy Ridley voicing Rey in this first animated adventure and subsequent entries will feature Rogue One’s Jyn Erso (Felicity Jones), as well as Star Wars Rebels cast members like Tiya Sircar (Sabine Wren) and Vanessa Marshall (Hera Syndulla). To top it off, Lupita Nyong’o narrates the series as Maz Kanata.
That’s not a bad lineup for a side project and it will be fun to see what these shorts have in store for some of the series’ new stars.
You can watch the trailer for the series below and — to all those celebrating the upcoming holiday — may the Fourth (of July) be with you.
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?