Though OpenAI is yet to make the Sora text-to-video model available to the public, its ability to produce realistic, high-resolution video clips already has movie makers worried for job security. Now the tool has moved into the world of pop music videos.
If you want to create a jaw-dropping fly-through video like the viral one-shot promo from JayBird Films a few years ago, you're probably going to need a skilled drone pilot, a capable cinedrone and a fair bit of post-production savvy. But that was before OpenAI released its Sora text-to-video model earlier this year.
We were initially treated to stunning video clips generated from text prompts, followed a month later by some shorts from talented creatives. One of those recently attracted some controversy after Toronto-based production company shy kids revealed that its exceptional Air Head film actually involved quite a bit of post-production cleanups.
That said, Sora remains an incredible development, which was used last month to provide the trippy moving imagery for the song Worldweight from electronic musician August Kamp. Now LA-based director Paul Trillo has used the AI platform for its first official music video commission.
The footage is said to realize an idea that Trillo had been mulling for 10 years, a kind of improved version of a 3D-animated music video for the song The Great Divide by The Shins from 3 years ago. Now the virtual camera is moving forward through the scenes instead of pulling back, to provide the fast-paced visuals for The Hardest Part from singer/songwriter Ernest Weatherly Greene Jr. – otherwise known as Washed Out.
The four-minute video shapes up as a series of fly-through scenes made up of 55 Sora clips generated from text inputs and stitched together in Adobe Premiere Pro software while undertaking only "very minor touch-ups."
The young AI-generated characters and locations are only onscreen for fleeting moments, and it's not clear whether such things as odd body angles, alien heads, weird jerky movement and apparent camera trickery are part of the intended look or merely rendering errors. Either way, it's a cool video for a cool tune.
Source: Paul Trillo
