Monthly Archives: November 2024

Celebrating Saul Bass

Illustration, Typography

It’s a real joy to see my 15yo son Henry’s interest in design & photography blossom, and last night he fell asleep perusing the giant book of vintage logos we scored at the Chicago Art Institute. I’m looking forward to acquainting him with the groundbreaking work of Saul Bass & figured we’d start here:

FlipSketch promises text-to-animation

AI/ML, Illustration

We present FlipSketch, a system that brings back the magic of flip-book animation — just draw your idea and describe how you want it to move! …

Unlike constrained vector animations, our raster frames support dynamic sketch transformations, capturing the expressive freedom of traditional animation. The result is an intuitive system that makes sketch animation as simple as doodling and describing, while maintaining the artistic essence of hand-drawn animation.

BlendBox AI promises fast, interactive compositing

AI/ML

I’m finding the app (which is free to try for a couple of moves, but which quickly runs out of credits) to be pretty wacky, as it continuously regenerates elements & thus struggles with identity preservation. The hero vid looks cool, though:

AI fixes (?) The Polar Express

Illustration

Hmm—”fix” is a strong word for reinterpreting the creative choices & outcomes of an earlier generation of artists, but it’s certainly interesting to see the divisive Christmas movie re-rendered via emerging AI tech (Midjourney Retexturing + Hailuo Minimax). Do you think the results escape the original’s deep uncanny valley? See more discussion here.

Incisive points on AI & filmmaking from Ben Affleck

AI/ML

Ignoring the misguided (IMHO) contents of the surrounding tweet, I found these four minutes of commentary to be extremely sharp & well informed:

New Google ReCapture tech enables post-capture camera control

AI/ML

Man, I miss working with these guys & gals…

We present ReCapture, a method for generating new videos with novel camera trajectories from a single user-provided video. Our method allows us to re-generate the source video, with all its existing scene motion, from vastly different angles and with cinematic camera motion.

They note that ReCapture is substantially different from other work. Existing methods can control camera either on images or on generated videos and not arbitrary user-provided videos. Check it out:

A love letter to splats

3D, After Effects, AI/ML, NeRF

Paul Trillo relentlessly redefines what’s possible in VFX—in this case scanning his back yard to tour a magical tiny world:

Here he gives a peek behind the scenes: 

And here’s the After Effects plugin he used: