The explosive titles of “Your Friends & Neighbors”

Design

As Motionographer aptly puts it,

Director John Likens and FX Supervisor Tomas Slancik dissect existential collapse in Your Friends & Neighbors’ haunting opener, blending Jon Hamm’s live-action gravitas with a symphony of digital decay. […]

Shot across two days and polished by world-class VFX artists, the title sequence mirrors Hamm’s crumbling protagonist, juxtaposing his stoic performance against hyper-detailed destruction.

GPT-4o image creation is coming to Designer!

AI/ML, GPT-4o, Illustration

Having created 200+ images in just the last month via this still-new image model (see new blog category that gathers some of them), I’m delighted to say that my team is working to bring it to Microsoft Designer, Copilot, and beyond. From the boss himself:

Fun recent GPT-4o explorations

AI/ML, GPT-4o

Just sharing a few things I’ve been trying.
For Easter, my cousin’s sweet pup as sweet treats:

Bespoke felt ornaments FTW:


Creating cozy slippers from an A-10 Warthog:

StarVector: Text/Image->SVG Code

AI/ML, Illustration

Back at Adobe we introduced Firefly text-to-vector creation, but behind the scenes it was really text-to-image-to-tracing. That could be fine, actually, provided that the conversion process did some smart things around segmenting the image, moving objects onto their own layers, filling holes, and then harmoniously vectorizing the results. I’m not sure whether Adobe actually got around to shipping that support.

In any event, StarVector promises actual, direct creation of SVG. The results look simple enough that it hasn’t yet piqued my interest enough to spend my time with it, but I’m glad that folks are trying.

Rive introduces Vector feathering

Design, Illustration

I really hope that the makers of traditional vector-editing apps are paying attention to rich, modern, GPU-friendly techniques like this one. (If not—and I somewhat cynically expect that it’s not—it won’t be for my lack of trying to put it onto their radar. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯)

Vibe-animating with Magic Animator?

Illustration

I know only what you see below, but Magic Animator (how was that domain name available?) promises to “Animate your designs in seconds with AI,” which sounds right up my alley, and I’ve signed up for their waitlist.

That Happy Meal feel

AI/ML, GPT-4o

Sure, the environmental impact of this silliness isn’t great, but it’s probably still healthier than actually eating McDonald’s. :-p

Tangentially, I continue to have way too much fun applying different genres to amigos:

Google, Dolphins, and Ai-i-i-i-i!

AI/ML

Three years ago (seems like an eternity), I remarked regarding generative imaging.,

The disruption always makes me think of The Onion’s classic “Dolphins Evolve Opposable Thumbs“: “Holy f*ck, that’s it for us monkeys.” My new friend August replied with the armed dolphin below.

I’m reminded of this seeing Google’s latest AI-powered translation (?!) work. Just don’t tell them about abacuses!

[Via Rick McCawley]

Friday’s Microsoft Copilot event in 9 minutes

AI/ML

The team showed of good new stuff, including—OMG—showing how to use Photoshop! (On an extremely personal level, “This is what it’s like when worlds colliiiide!!”)

As it marks its 50th anniversary, Microsoft is updating Copilot with a host of new features that bring it in line with other AI systems like ChatGPT or Claude. We got a look at them during the tech giant’s 50th anniversary event today, including new search capabilities, Copilot Vision which will be able to analyze real-time video from a mobile camera. Copilot will also now be able to use the web on your behalf. Here’s everything you missed.

  • 00:00 Intro and Copilot Agents
  • 2:07 Copilot for planning
  • 2:30 Copilot AI podcast generating
  • 3:18 Copilot Shopping
  • 3:39 Copilot Vision
  • 4:07 Copilot feature use cases demo
  • 6:16 Researcher, Copilot Studio, custom agents
  • 6:53 Copilot Memory
  • 7:23 Custom Copilot appearances
  • 8:48 Outro

Lego Interstellar is stunning

Design

Wow—I marvel at the insane, loving attention to detail in this shot-for-shot re-creation of a scene from Interstellar:

The creator writes,

I started working on this project in mid-2023, and it has been an incredible challenge, from modeling and animation to rendering and post-production. Every detail, from the explosive detachment of the Ranger to the rotation of the Endurance, the space suits of the minifigures, the insides of the Lander, and even the planet in the background, was carefully recreated in 3D.

Interstellar is one of the films that has moved me the most. Its story, visuals, and soundtrack left a lasting impact on me, and this video is my personal love letter to the movie—and to cinema in general. I wanted to capture the intensity and emotion of this scene in LEGO form, as a tribute to the power of storytelling through film.

Side by side:

Rustlin’ up some Russells

AI/ML, GPT-4o

2025 marks an unheard-of 40th year in Adobe creative director Russell Brown’s remarkable tenure at the company. I remember first encountering him via the Out Of Office message marking his 15-year (!) sabbatical (off to Burning Man with Rick Smolan, if I recall correctly). If it weren’t for Russell’s last-minute intervention back in 2002, when I was living out my last hours before being laid off from Adobe (interviewing at Microsoft, lol), I’d never have had the career I did, and you wouldn’t be reading this now.

In any event, early in the pandemic Russell kept himself busy & entertained by taking a wild series of self portraits. Having done some 3D printing with him (the output of which still forms my Twitter avatar!), I thought, “Hmm, what would those personas look like as plastic action figures? Let’s see what ChatGPT thinks.” And voila, here they are.

Click through the tweet below if you’re curious about the making-of process (e.g. the app starting to render him very faithfully, then freaking out midway through & insisting on delivering a more stylized, less specific rendition). But forget that—how insane is it that any of this is possible??

“The Worlds of Riley Harper”

AI/ML

It’s pretty stunning what a single creator can now create in a matter of days! Check out this sequence & accompanying explanation (click on the post) from Martin Gent:

Tools used:

Severance, through the animated lens of ChatGPT

AI/ML, GPT-4o

People can talk all the smack they want about “AI slop”—and to be sure, there’s tons of soulless slop going around—but good luck convincing me that there’s no creativity in remixing visual idioms, and in reskinning the world in never-before-possible ways. We’re just now dipping a toe into this new ocean.

See the whole thread for a range of fun examples:

OMG AI KFC

AI/ML

It’s insane what a single creator—in this case David Blagojević—can do with AI tools; insane.

It’s worth noting that creative synthesis like this doesn’t “just happen,” much less in some way that replaces or devalues the human perspective & taste at the heart of the process: everything still hinges on having an artistic eye, a wealth of long-cultivated taste, and the willpower to make one’s vision real. It’s just that the distance between that vision & reality is now radically shorter than it’s ever been.

New generative video hotness: Runway + Higgsfield

AI/ML

It’s funny to think of anyone & anything as being an “O.G.” in the generative space—but having been around for the last several years, Runway has as solid a claim as anyone. They’ve just dropped their Gen-4 model. Check out some amazing examples of character consistency & camera control:


Here’s just one of what I imagine will be a million impressive uses of the tech:

Meanwhile Higgsfield (of which I hadn’t heard before now) promises “AI video with swagger.” (Note: reel contains occasionally gory edgelord imagery.)

Virtual product photography in ChatGPT

AI/ML, GPT-4o

Seeing this, I truly hope that Adobe isn’t as missing in action as they seem to be; fingers crossed.

In the meantime, simply uploading a pair of images & a simple prompt is more than enough to get some compelling results. See subsequent posts in the thread for details, including notes on some shortcomings I observed.

See also (one of a million tests being done in parallel, I’m sure):

Ideogram 3.0 is here

AI/ML

In the first three workdays of this week, we saw three new text-to-image models arrive! And now that it’s Thursday, I’m like, “WTF, no new Flux/Runway/etc.?” 🙂

For the last half-year or so, Ideogram has been my go-to model (see some of my more interesting creations), so I’m naturally delighted to see them moving things forward with the new 3.0 model:

I don’t yet quite understand the details of how their style-reference feature will work, but I’m excited to dig in.

Meanwhile, here’s a thread of some really impressive initial creations from the community:

ChatGPT reimagines family photos

AI/ML, GPT-4o, Illustration

“Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim” — David Sedaris
“Turn your fam into Minecraft & GTA” — Bilawal Sidhu

And meanwhile, on the server side:

Google’s “Photoshop Killer”?

AI/ML

Nearly twenty years ago (!), I wrote here about how The Killing’s Gotta Stop—ironically, perhaps, about then-new Microsoft apps competing with Adobe. I rejected false, zero-sum framing then, and I reject it now.

Having said that, my buddy Bilawal’s provocative framing in this video gets at something important: if Adobe doesn’t get on its game, actually delivering the conversational editing capabilities we publicly previewed 2+ years ago, things are gonna get bad. I’m reminded of the axiom that “AI will not replace you, but someone using AI just might.” The same goes for venerable old Photoshop competing against AI-infused & AI-first tools.

In any case, if you’re interested in the current state of the art around conversational editing (due to be different within weeks, of course!), I think you’ll enjoy this deep dive into what is—and isn’t—possible via Gemini:

Specific topic sections, if you want to jump right to ’em:

  • 00:00 Conversational Editing with Google’s Multimodal AI
  • 00:53 Image Generation w/ LLM World Knowledge
  • 02:12 Easy Image Editing & Colorization 
  • 02:46 Advanced Conversational Edits (Chaining Prompts Together)
  • 03:37 Long Text Generation (Google Beats OpenAI To The Punch)
  • 04:25 Making Spicy Memes (Google AI Studio Safety Settings) 
  • 05:48 Advanced Prompting (One Shot ComfyUI Workflows) 
  • 07:19 Re-posing Characters (While Keeping Likeness Intact) 
  • 08:27 Spatial 3D Understanding (NO ControlNet) 
  • 10:42 Semantic Editing & In/Out Painting 
  • 13:46 Sprite Sheets & Animation Keyframes 
  • 14:40 Using Gemini To Build Image Editing Apps
  • 16:37 Making Videos w/ Conversational Editing

Happy birthday, Adobe Firefly

Adobe Firefly, AI/ML

The old (hah! but it seems that way) gal turns two today.

The ride has been… interesting, hasn’t it? I remain eager to see what all the smart folks at Adobe have been cooking up. As a user of Photoshop et al. for the last 30+ years, I selfishly hope it’s great!

In the meantime, I’ll admit that watching the video above—which I wrote & then made with the help of Davis Brown (son of Russell)—makes me kinda blue. Everything it depicts was based on real code we had working at the time. (I insisted that we not show anything that we didn’t think we could have shipping within three months’ time.) How much of that has ever gotten into users’ hands?

Yeah.

But as I say, I’m hoping and rooting for the best. My loyalty has never been to Adobe or to any other made-up entity, but rather to the spirit & practice of human creativity. Always will be, until they drag me off this rock. Rock the F on.

Adobe to offer access to non-Firefly models

Adobe Firefly, AI/ML

Man, I’m old enough to remember writing a doc called “Yes, And…” immediately upon the launch of DALL•E in 2022, arguing that of course Adobe should develop its own generative models and of course it should also offer customers a choice of great third-party models—because of course no single model would be the best for every user in every situation.

And I’m old enough to remember being derided for just not Getting It™ about how selling per-use access to Firefly was going to be a goldmine, so of course we wouldn’t offer users a choice. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Oh well. Here we are, exactly two years after the launch of Firefly, and Adobe is going to offer access to third-party models. So… yay!

Runway reskins rock

AI/ML, Illustration

Another day, another set of amazing reinterpretations of reality. Take it away Nathan…


…and Bilawal:

Mystic structure reference: Dracarys!

3D, AI/ML, Illustration

I love seeing the Magnific team’s continued rapid march in delivering identity-preserving reskinning

This example makes me wish my boys were, just for a moment, 10 years younger and still up for this kind of father/son play. 🙂

Behind the scenes: AI-augmented animation

AI/ML, Illustration

“Rather than removing them from the process, it actually allowed [the artists] to do a lot more—so a small team can dream a lot bigger.”

Paul Trillo’s been killing it for years (see innumerable previous posts), and now he’s given a peek into how his team has been pushing 2D & 3D forward with the help of custom-trained generative AI:”

Charmingly terrible AI-made infographics

AI/ML, Illustration, Infographics

A passing YouTube vid made me wonder about the relative strengths of World War II-era bombers, and ChatGPT quickly obliged by making me a great little summary, including a useful table. I figured, however, that it would totally fail at making me a useful infographic from the data—and that it did!

Just for the lulz, I then ran the prompt (“An infographic comparing the Avro Lancaster, Boeing B-17, and Consolidated B-24 Liberator bombers”) through a variety of apps (Ideogram, Flux, Midjourney, and even ol’ Firefly), creating a rogue’s gallery of gibberish & Franken-planes. Check ’em out.

Surrealism blooms through Pika

AI/ML

Check out this delightful demo:

Individual steps, as I understand them:

  • Generate image (in this example, using Google Imagen).
  • Apply background segmentation.
  • Synthesize a new background, and run what I think is a fine-tuned version of IC-Light (using Stable Diffusion) to relight the entire image, harmonizing foreground/background. Note that identity preservation (face shape, hair color, dress pattern, etc.) is very good but not perfect; see changes in the woman’s hair color, expression, and dress pattern.
  • Put the original & modified images into Pika, then describe the desired transformation (smooth transition, flowers growing, clouds moving, etc.).

NeRFtastic BAFTAs

3D, AI/ML

The British Academy Film Awards have jumped into a whole new dimension to commemorate the winners of this year’s awards:

The capturing work was led by Harry Nelder and Amity Studio. Nelder used his 16-camera rig to capture the recent winners. The reconstruction software was a combination of a cloud-based platform created by Nelder, which is expected to be released later this year, along with Postshot. Nelder further utilized the Radiance Field method known as Gaussian Splatting for the reconstruction. A compilation video of all the captures, recently posted by BAFTA, was edited by Amity Studio

[Via Dan Goldman]

Lego together creative AI blocks in Flora

AI/ML

Looks promising:

Their pitch:

  • Create workflows, not just outputs. Connect Blocks to shape, refine, and scale your creative process.
  • Collaborate in real time. Work like you would in Figma, but for AI-powered media creation.
  • Discover & clone workflows. Learn from top creatives, build on proven systems and share generative workflows inside FLORA’s Community.

Sigma BF: Clean AF

Design, Photography

Refreshingly simple design!

Is it for me? Dunno: lately the only thing that justifies shooting with something other than my phone is a big, fast zoom lens, and I don’t know whether pairing such a thing with this slim beauty would kinda defeat the purpose. Still, I must know more…

Here’s a nice early look at the cam plus a couple of newly announced lenses: