Pixar lesson #452: “Sometimes, you gotta get through your fear to see the beauty on the other side.”
Released yesterday, the latest clip from Pixar’s The Good Dinosaur is entitled Get Through Your Fear and reminds you that if you venture into the tall grass of the unknown, you just might kick up a million fireflies.
Jeffrey Wright (Casino Royale) is soothing and paternal as Poppa and prompts young Arlo (Raymond Ochoa) to venture into the unknown. While some have noted that his film feels a bit like a prehistoric Finding Nemo, that parenting style stands in stark contrast to the overprotective parenting style of Marlin, everyone’s favorite neurotic, unfunny clown fish.
With Inside Out fresh on movie fans’ minds, it’s easy to forget that another Pixar original is on our doorstep, and as we draw closer to this film’s Nov. 25, 2015 release date, the studio has provided us with a steady drip of promotional material as a reminder. In the past few months alone, we’ve seen a teaser, two full-length trailers, a sneak peak at the short that will debut ahead of the film, and this poignant little clip. Here’s a look at the official synopsis:
“The Good Dinosaur asks the question: What if the asteroid that forever changed life on Earth missed the planet completely and giant dinosaurs never became extinct? Pixar Animation Studios takes you on an epic journey into the world of dinosaurs where an Apatosaurus named Arlo makes an unlikely human friend. While traveling through a harsh and mysterious landscape, Arlo learns the power of confronting his fears and discovers what he is truly capable of.”
That initial hypothetical will be familiar to anyone who played with dinosaur toys as a kid, and it looks like the studio has set up another magical world capable of appealing to youngsters and adults alike.
We’ll have to wait and see if Pixar can go two-for-two in 2015, but if history is any indication, we wouldn’t bet against them.
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?