Video Generator Updates + That Ship is Not Sinking
Cool new toys
Shortish post today, because I’ve been busy AF!
Firstly, updates in AI video land:
Sora 2 is out - you need an invite, but go Google invite codes on Reddit, they’re floating around in abundance.
Look at this shit!! This is Sora 2 run through Topaz Astra’s 4K generative upscaler. Sora 2 has a bit of a jitter but Topaz straightens it up and Sora is sooo very realistic in motion and feelings (though they still have a watermark). But it has dialogue and sound!! It does retro styles and animation super well.
Kling 2.5 also came out - it doesn’t have front/end frames yet, but is very cinematic! Same frame run through Kling 2.5:
Luma Ray 3 also released, and notable for having color management built in to use in studio pipelines. I have not had a chance to play with this yet, but just re-upped my Luma Dream Machine low level sub to poke at it! Because I love crunchy color grading.
Aaaand speaking of color, if you’re a Midjourney person and not playing with the sref styles explorer they put out a few weeks ago, you should be??
They’re cool out the gate, but when you combine two or three and use --sw 50 (or 30-80 in general, 100 being the highest style weight, 0 the lowest) it gets super cool. That’s where the still for these videos came from—I searched for anime cyberpunk styles in MJ’s style explorer and went from there. (Their style explorer is in the usual explore tab, just hit the styles tab upper right.)
If you build a movie’s visual style based off this kind of stuff, regardless of what image and video generators you ultimately use, you’ll be making visual things people just haven’t ever made before in animation.
Wan 2.5 Animate also released in open source and you’ve probably seen it around—it’s better, I think, than Runway Act 2 for motion capture, and you can run it locally (on a beefy enough PC).
Also, not video, but Claude Sonnet 4.5 came out?? It’s been a busy week.
Stuff happening on my end:
I’ve got the Kickstarter for The King’s Weaver show launching on Tuesday and have been tightening everything up behind the scenes, hammering out a battle plan, putting a new book release on TikTok Shop for book 2 in that series, finishing up an Eleven Labs audiobook to fulfill a pre-order, recovering a seven book wide series—you know, all the things!
Also, just wanted to give a reminder that if you’ve been hitting doom mindsets with waves at the world or feeling discouraged, you can absolutely turn that ship around and brainstorm what you can do to lift yourself and your business and then get that shit done.
Around 3/4 of what I’m doing right now is born out of a massive brainstorming/pivot session a week or so ago, realigning my course, and blasting off again. You can turn that ship around, it’s not sinking, and neither are you. Blast that iceberg with heat vision. You’ve got a mission, and you’re gonna do it. 💪
Anyhow! I’ve been psyching myself up too to deal with the AI haters and…they’ve been surprisingly quiet as yet? Just the usual rabble. That’s just ordinary.
And people have, on the whole, been hugely supportive of this AI show I’m making! Which warms my heart all the way through.
Also also, if you ever want a mental pick me up, go through all your old best FB ads and read the best comments. Ignore the stupid ones, of course. This is a cherry picked treasure hunt. ✨
I’ll be dumping thoughts in the Skool as I can on Kickstarter and movies and all of it (and if you’re in the Skool, I dumped my movie making process at Cassie last week for you to watch!), but also, my brain is running at 200% capacity right now, so it might be the streamiest of stream of consciousness stuff.
-Novae