Bigfoot and Bytedance
The pace of change is unprecedented
A year ago I decided to take a big risk and commit to becoming an “AI Filmmaker”, even though I didn’t really know what that would entail. I just knew that the tools were evolving rapidly, AI video was definitely a thing, and there was no point in trying to be a web designer anymore. The Bumbershoot Arts festival had just announced their “Big Fake, Deep Foot” AI filmmaking competition and shared my breathless enthusiasm. By July 1st, I took an even bigger risk and paid $100 for a one month subscription to Runway and started making short AI films every day. By the time the deadline arrived on August 1st, I had completed 14 projects, thought was a genius, and was pretty sure I was going to win the $5000 prize + 2 tickets to Bumbershoot because their were only 19 entries total. That’s right, 5 other people and myself were the only ones interested or aware enough to make AI films about Bigfoot. If you’re bored, you can check out my full playlist (spoiler alert: I am not a genius, but you can see how far we’ve come in terms of quality)
I waited in anticipation for the entire month of August, spending the prize money in my head and planning how I was going to flex on social media about my huge success. Sadly, Bumbershoot came and went, without a peep from the festival organizers until one of the other filmmakers harassed them for an explanation. Bumbershoot sent out a vague explanation, explaining that they were sorry, they had cancelled the competition due to lack of interest, and had just been too busy to notify us.
Fast forward to May 20 of this year and Google surprises everyone with their Veo 3 model because it can generate audio and video simultaneously and remove the tedium of generating an audio track and attempting to lip synch. Up to this point, most of the lip synching tools still felt really stiff and robotic. And here we are, barely a month later, and the Bigfoot/Yeti vlogs are an entire genre on social media with hundreds (possibly thousands) of creators. There are even tutorials, about how to start your own viral Bigfoot/Yeti channel. A dentist in LA has capitalized on this trend, making his own Bigfoot videos, posting them to TikTok, and seeing his business grow as a result.
A similar trend, that you’ve probably seen, is the impossible AMSR glass/crystal videos that are racking up millions of views on social media. Fast Company has a good article about this and it includes a link to a $15 AMSR ‘class’ (actually a .pdf) for aspiring creators. Olivia Moore, AI partner at the venture capital firm a16z writes, “Veo 3 with native sound is such a huge unlock here, This is now a one step creation process, versus having to generate and then sync each individual sound with the video.”
And that brings me to the difficult part, especially when I have to explain this to my students. I spent nine months dedicated to honing my craft, and I had a built in advantage as a member of Runway’s Creative Partner Program (unlimited access). Then a new tool comes out, an entire new category is created and I am suddenly feeling further behind then when I started. Just as Mary Meeker pointed out in her latest internet trends report, “the pace of change is unprecedented” this is the new normal. Deep seek crashing the US markets in January, ChatGPT releases it’s image generator in March, and Figma, Microsoft, and Google all having major releases in May.
Which brings us to Bytedance, the Chinese parent company of TikTok, who is suddenly in the number one slot in the AI Video Generator leaderboards, ahead of Veo 3 and all the others. In addition to stunning quality, it offers something called ‘multi shot coherence” which means it generates multiple camera angles from a single prompt. In my tests yesterday I found the results to be truly remarkable, beating Runway 9 to 1. I had a really high success rate, most generations took about a minute, and sixty cents gets you a 10 second clip. If you want to tinker with it, you can purchase $10 worth of credits here and try it your self. You can also see (probably cherry picked) beautiful examples on their promotional website, or you can watch my video (below). Buckle your seatbelts, and get ready for a wild ride.