Turns out the viral ‘Air Head’ Sora video wasn’t purely the work of AI we were led to believe
A new interview with the director behind the viral Sora clip Air Head has revealed that AI played a smaller part in its production than was originally claimed.
Revealed by Patrick Cederberg (who did the post-production for the viral video) in an interview with Fxguide, it has now been confirmed that OpenAI‘s text-to-video program was far from the only force involved in its production. The 1-minute and 21-second clip was made with a combination of traditional filmmaking techniques and post-production editing to achieve the look of the final picture.
Air Head was made by ShyKids and tells the short story of a man with a literal balloon for a head. While there’s human voiceover utilized, from the way OpenAI was pushing the clip on social channels such as YouTube, it certainly left the impression that the visuals were was purely powered by AI, but that’s not entirely true.
As revealed in the behind-the-scenes clip, a ton of work was done by ShyKids who took the raw output from Sora and helped to clean it up into the finished product. This included manually rotoscoping the backgrounds, removing the faces that would occasionally appear on the balloons, and color correcting.
Then there’s the fact that Sora takes a ton of time to actually get things right. Cederberg explains that there were “hundreds of generations at 10 to 20 seconds a piece” which were then tightly edited in what the team described as a “300:1” ratio of what was generated versus what was primed for further touch-ups.
Such manual work also included editing out the head which would appear and reappear, and even changing the color of the balloon itself which would appear red instead of yellow. While Sora was used to generate the initial imagery with good results, there was clearly a lot more happening behind the scenes to make the finished product look as good as it does, so we’re still a long way out from instantly-generated movie-quality productions.
Sora remains tightly under wraps save for a handful of carefully curated projects that have been allowed to surface, with Air Head among the most popular. The clip has over 120,000 views at the time of writing, with OpenAI touting as “experimentation” with the program, downplaying the obvious work that went into the final product.
Get the hottest deals available in your inbox plus news, reviews, opinion, analysis and more from the TechRadar team.
Sora is impressive but we’re not convinced
While OpenAI has done a decent job of showcasing what its text-to-video service can do through the large language model, the lack of transparency is worrying.
Air Head is an impressive clip by a talented team, but it was subject to a ton of editing to get the final product to where it is in the short.
It’s not quite the one-click-and you-‘re-done approach that many of the tech’s boosters have represented it as. It turns out that it is merely a tool which could be used to enhance imagery instead of create from scratch, which is something that is already common enough in video production, making Sora seem less revolutionary than it first appeared.
You may also like
A new interview with the director behind the viral Sora clip Air Head has revealed that AI played a smaller part in its production than was originally claimed. Revealed by Patrick Cederberg (who did the post-production for the viral video) in an interview with Fxguide, it has now been confirmed…
Recent Posts
- The five-year journey to make an adventure game out of ink and paper
- Valoi Easy35 Film-Scanning Kit Review: Fast, Affordable, and Easy to Use
- The AI assistants are getting better fast
- This smart home brewer turned me into a beer-making master in just 9 days
- The Google Pixel 9 color options and wallpapers may have just leaked
Archives
- May 2024
- April 2024
- March 2024
- February 2024
- January 2024
- December 2023
- November 2023
- October 2023
- September 2023
- August 2023
- July 2023
- June 2023
- May 2023
- April 2023
- March 2023
- February 2023
- January 2023
- December 2022
- November 2022
- October 2022
- September 2022
- August 2022
- July 2022
- June 2022
- May 2022
- April 2022
- March 2022
- February 2022
- January 2022
- December 2021
- November 2021
- October 2021
- September 2021
- August 2021
- July 2021
- June 2021
- May 2021
- April 2021
- March 2021
- February 2021
- January 2021
- December 2020
- November 2020
- October 2020
- September 2020
- August 2020
- July 2020
- June 2020
- May 2020
- April 2020
- March 2020
- February 2020
- January 2020
- December 2019
- November 2019
- December 2011