We’re soon going to see Wesley Snipes like we’ve never seen him before: in virtual reality. The action star is set to star in The Recall VR Abduction, an upcoming short film, Variety reports. As the title suggests, it’s a VR project, and the allusion to Snipes’ upcoming sci-fi horror flick, The Recall, is not coincidental.
Directed by Mauro Borelli, The Recall VR Abduction will center on an alien encounter that takes place in the same universe as the events of The Recall. The 10-minute film will offer an immersive look, letting viewers see scenes from the perspective of R.J. Mitte’s character.
Along with Snipes and Mitte, the films will star Jedidiah Goodacre, Niko Pepaj, Laura Maria Bilgeri, and Hannah Rose May.
For Snipes, shooting in VR was a new challenge, but interestingly, he found filming for the high-tech medium similar to an older art.
“Shooting in VR is similar to shooting a play, or performing a play,” he said, according to Variety. “You don’t have the luxury of cuts, and short takes, and do-overs. You have to be on your game, and since everything is in the shot, everyone else needs to be on their game at the same time.”
A release date hasn’t been announced for either film yet, but we do know that the release of The Recall VR Abduction will precede The Recall. At least some of the short’s footage will be available for Facebook 360 viewing, and we’ll find out which VR platforms we can use to watch the full video as the premiere gets closer.
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?