[Music] [John Canning] Hello, everyone. I'm John Canning. I work with AMD. Oh, jeez. I have a headshot. Look at that thing.
I look after the Adobe relationship for AMD, which generally means, people ask us, like somebody earlier today, actually walked into the booth and said, "What does AMD do?" And I said, "See that box over there?" And they went, "Yeah". I said, "What you can't see inside the box is the thing we do." And then it's wrapped with some software and some hardware but none of it actually really matters. I know. Don't tell the people I work with...
Until somebody actually does something interesting with it, right? And I think a lot of you are those people, going and doing interesting things, creating things, trying to figure out how to create new things. I know most of you have never had a deadline in your life. I know most of you have never worked under pressure and I know most of you have always delivered on time and under budget.
But for those of you who haven't, I have some colleagues of mine that will share their fun story with you. And I'm proud to know these two gentlemen who are creators and they go make things. Some of it happens to be on our hardware. That's awesome. Apparently uses a lot of Adobe software. That's cool too. But at the end of the day, it's about making interesting stuff. So with that, take it away. [Alex Vo] All right.
You gotta introduce yourself. Okay, I was going to introduce myself after the video but I guess I can do it now. My name is Alex Vo, and I manage the video and photo side of our company, Elevative Media, and we're based out in Morgan Hill in San Francisco, we say the Bay Area in California. [Mark Sebastian] Yeah. My name is Mark Sebastian, and I'm Director of Digital Media at Elevative. So anything that happens on the screen that's something to do with it, more or less. All right, here we go.
I guess I can give a little preview of the video. This is a video that we were a part of. We don't do this often, actually at all, being in front of the camera. We're usually behind the camera. So this is an interesting experience. We'll share a little bit about this later.
[Man] Advanced Intelligence, Take 1. AMD Marker.
Elevative Media is a creative agency run by me and my business partner, Alex. We have weekly calls with each other and normally, we do small talks. And eventually, a lot of that small talk just turned into these long conversations that really evolved around these dreams that we had over the weekend or the night before. And we noticed that we both really considered dreams as something very significant to the both of us.
AI is a lot like dreaming, where you can receive a lot of visuals and ideas, but when you start lucid dreaming, that's when you have full control over what you're doing. Taking those visuals that you would have in a dream that is normally considered as uncontrollable, in the same way, generative AI takes on that same form because you are literally taking control of the visuals that you put in front of you. My first experience with AI, it was actually a big production in San Francisco for one of our biggest clients where they were flying in people from all over the country to be part of this shoot. And we had this 6-Channel Recorder and, my mistake, I updated the firmware right before the shoot. It took all the microphone sources and compressed it down to one audio source and blew out everything. The deliverable was going to be for AMC Theater. So it was going to be in a theater format with surround sound, and we're like, this is the worst situation that could have happened. At the time, Mark, he'd said, there's a software that's out and I think we should give it a shot, and there's AI implemented into this. We ran it through and it was magic. It removed the background audio. It cleaned up the voices. It was beyond my understanding, but I just knew at that time that it saved us. If those AI tools weren't available, we would've had to do a reshoot. We would have to fly the client back in. I think we did 12 interviews that day. We would have to rent a spot, hire crew, reputational cost of saying, "Hey, we wrecked your whole shoot." Because of that experience, I've always been open to it as a tool. So now we are actually utilizing in our pre-production when we're coming up with scripting ideas or storyboards. I could type in the model of camera, what kind of lens I'm using, what type of lighting I want, what type of model, and I could create an image based on those parameters. Normally, it would take us weeks in order to communicate a vision. Now, it just takes hours. Being creative and running a business requires a lot more than what you see on social media. There is no end to tedious work that nobody wants to do. AI lifts that load so we can focus on being creative again.
As a creative, you're always evolving. And I think with these AI tools, this is just another stepping stone in this evolution. And when we started looking at a localized system like the rise in AI PCs, we knew that this was just another step in evolving our work and evolving us as creatives in general.
[Music] Cool. So thank you. Appreciate it. You guys do okay in front of camera too. Yeah. It was actually very nice to go to shoot and to show up to set and not have to bring any equipment or not have any plans whatsoever. I highly suggest that you guys can get that opportunity. That's called talent. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, we don't have much of that. But we do have a lot of great experiences that came after the shoot. And I don't think the directors, even the producers, really plan on us going this far into just dreams in general. And after the shoot, we actually met up for dinner, and I think the entire 2 hours, 2.5 hours, we were just talking about our own experiences of dreaming. And I think Mark and I, we have these discussions back and forth, but we don't really-- This isn't a topic that comes up very often in just normal conversations, even with our friends or spouses have any good dreams lately, and I wanted to actually, do something. Some of the animations we actually created through Stable Diffusion. And I wanted to open this up to the group and actually create a dream sequence of our own based off of our own experience of lucid dreaming, which I learned is actually a lot more common than I originally thought. So does anyone here actually have experiences with lucid dreaming? Yes! And this is the crazy part it's rare. I know you guys have the experience. It doesn't happen all the time, not for me anyway. But for those that do lucid dream, can I just get some ideas of what you guys normally do when you're lucid dreaming? Can you switch it on? For me, the first thing that comes to mind is I always fly. But I have to do something tangible with my body in order to do so. So one time, I have to stretch my arms up straight, just like this, and I'll start to just slowly float, or I'll jump really high, or this one time, I had to hold my breath in order to start floating and then that's when you can actually take control and you can fly wherever you want. And the crazy thing is if you get too excited while lucid dreaming, you actually wake yourself up. And I'm usually always pissed when that happens but if you do get to just soak in it, you almost have to keep in a calm state in order to do so. Is there anybody else here that does things or crazy things in lucid dreaming? - Yeah. - [Woman] I would say flying. Flying? Okay. Right on.
Okay. Okay. - Flying through the sky? - Flying through the sky? Yeah, where do you fly? Just like Superman fly? Over a sea, okay. Yeah, and is it like flapping arms or it's just like Superman's dance? You're just wait, who technically isn't flying, he's just jumping. Look it up. I'm not kidding, technically, yeah. So what Mark is doing, what you're seeing on screen, this is part of the Stable Diffusion node system and we're creating these prompts that are actually combined, and this was a workflow that we found that best generated these images, the videos that you saw in that documentary that we just posted, this is the workflow. It was created in order to mimic what we imagine what that dream looked like. Because there's constant shifts that happen from one idea to another and so we thought, yeah, we thought this looked best as far as replicating what a dream looks like. And can we get two more lucid dreams? Yes. [Woman] I do run in water. Run in water! And I'd be like, how am I going to do this? Right, run on water. Yeah, I run on water. Oh, love it. - Okay. - I feel so powerful. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I love it. Running on water. Running on water. Okay. And then we got one more here.
Yeah. Sorry? Eating something. Eating. Okay. Eating. Yeah, but what are you eating? Yeah, what do you choose to eat? Come on.
Yeah. Interesting. And disappointed. I'm going to put, didn't know what it is. Yeah. That cream puff was gritty. - Yum! - Yeah. And so the fun thing that we were doing, just generating images, at first, it was just still photos but eventually, when we were playing with these workflows, we're like, yeah, let's start replicating some of the dreams that we actually experience and see if we can bring some of it to life. So the images that you saw on that video, a lot of it was inspired off of just our own dreams of just taking flight and growing wings and what not. But speaking of just sharing our dreams and communicating these ideas that happened in our dreams, I'm going to let Mark share some of his.
Yeah, so similarly to Alex, I do fly around a lot in my dreams, but I don't hold my breath or stick my arms out like Superman. It's more like, I have a physical device, it's almost like in this case, it's like a bicycle, right? But it's a mini biplane. And as a kid, I would hop into it and pedal as fast as I can and get above the neighborhood, try to avoid the wires and trees and things like that and this is ultimate feeling of just freedom and just having fun.
The second frame is me and my friends were running across the clouds. And we were just, at some point, I think I face planted while I was running and realized there was no pain. And so my friends and I in this dream, we realized there was no pain so we started punching each other and shoving each other because it was funny. And that's the third frame. It's a little bit different because there's instances where I wake up in the middle of night and I'll see something in my room and it's like, that's a weird thing in my room. It's usually made of crystal or something and it's glowing and I'll walk up to it and then I'll touch it and it disappears. And that's when I realize I'm actually not awake, I'm dreaming. So these images you're looking at are generated using generative AI and they're old dreams that I recently created because in the past, I would have to describe it either through writing or through verbal, trying to explain what your dreams are like and people just look at you like, yeah, yeah, that's interesting, but they don't really get until they see it. And so I wanted to capture that because I have-- Now that I have a son, I was like, "Oh, I want him to see what I always dreamed about when he was a kid." So but while I was having these dreams, my real world is a little bit different.
So this might look familiar to some of you. This was back in 2007, and this is one of the last photographs I shot in a workplace or in a cubicle environment. Cozy. Yeah, this is where I worked and I don't want to name the company because I think they're on the floor somewhere. Oh, they're here. Yeah. We saw them. But this was eight years into my career and of doing Photoshop, Premiere, After Effects, just everything you could get my hands on, including Macromedia Director or RealPlayer, Real audio and video, if you guys are familiar with that.
So at that time, if I wanted to see something fun or creative, I had to make it on my screen using these Adobe products and it was great. But during that time, I also started a side hobby where I bought a camera and I started shooting photography and I became super addicted because now, as a person who was very shy and introverted and would prefer to stick to my computer, I was out on foot and I was capturing what I saw and bringing that to the screen and the Internet flick, I think it was like Flickr at the time.
He doesn't look that old, does he? Yeah. We're all the same age, actually. It's the Asian genes, yeah. Yeah.
I clearly missed something.
So yeah, it was just this whole new way to express myself and share my view of the world and I didn't know it was unique until I saw how people responded to it. So this was a huge catalyst in how I was able to communicate to the outside world.
So eventually, something happened and I got a message on a forum called Model Mayhem. And it was just this portfolio site where you upload your portraits and stuff. And this message was from this photographer, and in his portfolio, he had I think his main image was Mariah Carey, right? And I looked at his portfolio, it's all A-list celebrities. And I'm like, what does this guy want? This is totally made up, right? And he tells me that he wants to meet me and I have to fly out to New York immediately. And I'm like, this is not real. This is not a real thing. And so he's very persistent. He's like he said, "No, this is very real".
Here's the phone number to my agent. Here's the phone number to my studio. You could talk to my assistants. He was very persistent. And so-- - And slightly creepy. - Yeah. Yeah, I mean, creepy, I guess so. Yeah, I didn't know what to think of it. It seems so unreal. But once I realized he actually was a real person, I decided to go on to a shoot with him. And so this is just a few weeks after I shot the previous image. And the person on the right is Mary J. Blige, and they were shooting her album cover. And the photographer's name is Markus Klinko with Indrani. And this was my first time seeing a major set, so this was a two-day shoot and they had a DJ that just spun music the entire two days. They had a chef and you just walk up to him and say what you wanted, and he would just make it happen. And he pointed out in his camera, the grip on the camera grip on his right hand is made of ivory. And he explained to me, "But I don't like killing elephants, so this is honed from an extinct woolly mammoth tusk that I dug up in Sweden" or something like that.
So I was in this universe that I never knew existed and he let me do literally anything I wanted to do. I was like, can I shoot this? Yes, you just go and do whatever you want. He didn't care. And at some point, someone else there pulled me aside and he's like, "Hey, did you know who you just had lunch with?" And I'm like, "No." And he's like, "You just had lunch with Mary J. Blige's dad and the president of Geffen Records." I was like, "I'm glad I didn't know because if I did know, I would have been way too afraid to go over and sit down, let alone have a conversation with them." But that was what happened. And then I went with it and I was like, this is a sign I should probably be doing a lot more photography. - Yep. - Yeah. That's not a bad sign. Yeah. So these are some other examples of photographs that I was shooting in the following years. That's Hugh Jackman with his wife, Fergie from the Black Eyed Peas and Kevin Durant. At the time, he was playing for the Golden State Warriors, photographed Jessica Alba, Alicia Keys, Pharrell, Lady Gaga, Rihanna, Kim Kardashian and just a bunch of other-- It was insane, like there's times where I was having dinner, and at one table, it would be Larry King on one side and Jay Z and Beyonce on the other side and-- What dinner conversation do you have with Larry King and Beyonce? I didn't get to talk to them. Oh, oh. Yeah, they were just there. But it's just a very surreal experience to be surrounded in this environment. Yeah. Coming from a cubicle right before that-- Yeah.
I think being naive was the key.
Because when you're naive, you're not afraid of anything. Yep.
But the camera is what allowed me to share my version of the world and pursue my dreams in a new way that I didn't know I could before.
And what I found was creating something exciting in the entertainment industry is actually pretty easy. You just had to be there. And if you're there in that industry then, it's exciting already and you're capturing it. But what I wanted to do later on in life is bring that excitement to back home. Yeah. Back in San Jose, where we worked on a lot of tech stuff. Yeah.
So here's a quick example for one of our favorite clients at AMD.
[Music] To be clear, they didn't make all the games. - Yeah. - But that's still pretty cool.
Thanks.
So that product animation, we were approached by the Product Marketing team, Matthew and Adit. They came up to us with an idea they had where they wanted this graphics card which, I guess the code name is Navi, based on the-- Yeah, we have very exciting code names.
And so they wanted this graphics card to be born in the universe and come down to Earth and everything. So when we were creating this, they wanted to have this idea, this nebula, and the first step we had to do is create the style frames, the concept of visually, how does this world look, right? So at the time, the two options were to paint it in Photoshop, design this nebula, or try to find something in stock photography that looks like what you want and either put it straight in or modify it until it is where you want it to be. So we chose to paint our own nebula and we showed in front of the shareholders and they're like, "Oh, that looks cool but let's change this." And then we change something, and the next day, they're like, "Let's change this." And then it's like, "Oh, let's try something completely different." - So-- - That never happened. Yeah. So we're starting to run out of time. We had six weeks to do this from beginning to end. Yeah, extremely short deadline. Yeah, and we were just like, what other options do we have? How do we get this approved with all the shareholders, get them all on board and visually communicate what it's going to look like and make them happy. Meanwhile, so our animator could just go to town. And so we ended up going to Midjourney, which was maybe the first version of it. Very early. Very early, Midjourney when it first came out. And we just started generating nebulas, and we were just blown away at the speed of which you could just create just random things.
And the old way of doing that was actually just having our designer, Payton, Photoshop what that nebula looked like and any changes, he had to recreate that and based off of those changes, so we needed a faster way to pretty much communicate this idea and get all the stakeholders on board and yeah, and I guess, in the process, before we start the animation. Yeah, and so luckily, our key Visual Designer, Joseph Lynch, we were able to write him enough options where he could get the concept going and get it signed off on so he could finish the key visual. And then once we got that locked in, we were able to run with the animation as well, and that's how we got to where we were. Yeah, it was a huge time saver because in the end, if we had to recreate those the traditional way, the old way, then I don't think we would have made that deadline.
Here's another example of using generative AI for a product launch. And it's similar to the previous one.
We had to get this concept approved by all the shareholders. And with photography, if you shoot a photograph and you share it with a client and they don't like it, it's already too late. Because you have all your lights, you already casted the talent, you already have your set location, all the design locked in, right? If they come back and say, "Oh, we don't like those headphones", you might be able to change it. But if they say, "We don't like their clothes or something", it's a little bit more of a process. So what we did here is we generated a ton of images, use dialing in the angle of the shot, the type of-- Even the ethnicity, the headphones, the type of clothes they're wearing and we dialed in the lighting as closely as we could to what our target was so that we could get signed off by from the shareholders.
Yeah, and once it was signed off on, we were able to have our crew get going on, we show this to the crew, which is me and Alex, really. And we show up and we know exactly where everything goes and what we need to shoot. And the product that comes out, which is the face on the right, is the full still image that we shot versus the concept that sold the idea on the left side. Yeah. And again, traditional way of doing this was to actually write draw out a storyboard of the angle and the clothing, possibly even hair, little details and then maybe add in some mood boards and what the lighting might look like or the mood we're going for. But that whole process just dialed down to just generating an image again, huge time save.
Yeah, so this is one example of how we generate generative AI for photo but what about video production? Yep.
[Music] [Man] Founding a company is really hard work. The biggest advantage we had when we started the company was that we were naive. Creating something new is difficult because no one really succeeds by themselves. This is just what you do to live the dream long enough to make it work. You believe in this mission or you believe in this vision that you have for a thing that you think will make the world better and you just go for it, right? But at no point do you actually have any idea about what you're signing up for.
[Man] I think entrepreneurship is really the engine of the worldwide economy. [Man] There's always a question about whether you should just call it quits or whether we're done here. You encounter these times when things are extremely difficult. You have ups and downs and real downs as a founder. We have had some high highs and some low lows. Those first few weeks, months, years, that's pushing the boulder up the hill the whole time. [Man] What weighs on you isn't that boulder but the accumulation of small rocks or sand that starts to give way to self-doubt. Almost everyone on the planet that we could find that has money to invest in healthcare stuff at this point had basically said no. So to keep on taking that emotional burden that just happens all day every day, you need to be resilient. The funny thing about building a company or the actual reality is you're never actually as good as you think you are and you're also never as bad as you think you are. If you actually think about your lifetime, you're already gone, if you actually compare it to your relative importance of the world and the universe, right? 80 years, 100 years, how do you actually live it to the fullest? How do you make a mark? Small way, that's the only way you get to live forever.
All right, so I have a question. Yeah.
Other project with that unreasonable client that only gave you six weeks, this project-- Yeah. Are you finding clients now thinking you can do more faster because of the tools that are out there? Are they starting, the client's getting the hype and going, well, clearly, I'm a little worried that you said you could do that project and there's somebody out there going, oh, they could do that in six weeks, so-- - Yeah. - Okay. Yeah, I think that demand is always there no matter what. Yeah. I think even before all these AI tools, I think there was always asks of as far as deadlines go that are just unreasonable, and most times, I think there's a lot of educating the clients and it's like, oh, this takes this long, this takes that long. It might be less than, more like six weeks, it's probably going to take more like eight weeks, and instead of that, I think now having these tools, I think there's a lot more conversations about, well, if we could speed up the process, if we can actually use some of these tools and possibly hit that deadline, but I think, yeah, it does open up the conversation a bit more where before I think there's a lot more just educating as far as no, we can't do that because of this and that.
But this is a series that actually just launched on Hulu earlier this month. We actually shot this last year. This is a series that we produced and directed for Hulu or, sorry, for Hulu but the producers, the executive producers were actually LinkedIn and HubSpot, which you actually saw the founders of LinkedIn and HubSpot were actually part of the documentary. And basically, this whole series is really covering the founders of startup companies from seed round startups all the way to billion dollar unicorns. And the whole premise is really diving into their lives and seeing where these ideas come from, where their inspiration of their companies come from, who are the people that are surrounding them that supported them along the way? And so our only ask was that, "Hey, for all the CEOs, we just need three days." Three days is really ideal for us to capture your interview, get the b roll, to compliment your interview and have the extra time to really dive into your lives as far as the people that made your companies possible. And the thing we learned was that, out of the four episodes, only two were able to give that to us. One said, "No, we can give you two hours". And I was like, "Oh, okay.
Two hours? All right". We can talk about that. And I get into my mental space as far as, okay, I then need to explain to HubSpot, no, there's no way we can do this in two hours. It's like it's not happening. But HubSpot was very adamant about this specific client. They are Jasper. For those that know of Jasper, they are pretty much they're a tool, a software based tool set that they actually provide to marketing teams for small and large businesses. They were the big ChatGPT before ChatGPT. And they got involved with the whole, gosh, just the whole AI game before it really became public. And they provided this to their clientele at the time. So when I revisited this to see, what possibilities can we do to produce like a 15 to 20-minute episode in just two hours of their time, okay, we can look in to see the options. Okay, we have photos that we would ask of them as far as talking about their childhood. Okay, there's a checklist that we had as far as b-roll, okay, we can use that for their early days, looking at the-- Talking about AI in general. Here we have a lot of stock clips, stock footage that we can possibly pull from. So we recovered there, but there is all of these holes in their episode when we were doing the pre-production and laying out the foundation of their story. How do I tell the story of them meeting, they met at a wedding. How do I tell the story of them coming up with the idea, all of the pivots along the way in their business? And we were so desperate on b-roll. I think after those two hours, we knew that they were having a company lunch. We're like, "Yeah, we'll be there." But there's only so much of footage of them eating that I can really show in a 15 to 20 minute episode. So, I'm like, "Okay, what else are you doing?" We're going to stick around Austin for a little while just for fun, hey. They said they're going to play golf on the weekend. We're like, "Okay, yeah, yeah, we can do that. We'll capture it". The golf course actually told us, "No, you cannot bring cameras onto our exclusive golf course." We're like, "Okay, that's fine." We packed our cameras into golf bags, and we showed up and pretended to be members. We're like, "Hey! Is that golf course? We can just grab this golf cart?" And we grabbed the golf cart and we just took off looking for these guys on this golf course and we were able to get some good golf footage. [Woman] Not recommended. Not recommended, but you can get a sense of how desperate we were. - That's called gorilla shooting. - Yeah. - That's what that's called. - Yeah, yeah, yeah. We've all been there. We were just completely desperate for b-roll. And still with that, we were missing a lot of pieces in their episode. So what else can we compliment that with? Luckily, they are an AI company and their website actually has a very similar system to Midjourney, so they do generate still photos. So we're like, okay. Well, there's a possibility there, playing around with the website, it's a little clunky but we can generate some usable images. But placing these images, even like some test footage that we were sampling, we're like, it doesn't look right. We're just going from b-roll to interviews to all of a sudden, to footage that looks like clip art like stacked together. I'm like this is not going to work. So then we started exploring the idea of generating video, and this is actually very early stage of image generation as far as video goes, and the only guy I knew that was doing this was just Mark Donohue. And he's based in the Bay area. He was doing all of this cool trippy, AI videos using all of the skateboard footage that he captured. And so the discussion started there. We knew that this was a possibility and a way to make the AI footage look intentional, we really were planning to do this all along. And after some discussion, we actually reverse engineered this in order to make this work. So we knew we had to figure out the weaknesses of generating AI video. And for those that have done images or video, you know some of the weaknesses that are still there today. But one is fingers. Fingers, it's just awful, especially once you start animating it, it's crazy how many fingers they can generate onto one hand. And the faces, making faces look consistent from one generation to another, it's almost impossible if you even get a face.
And all these limitations were like, okay, let's write down all these limitations. What can we do to work around these? Because there's nothing we can do to fix the problem. How can we work around them? And so we had the idea of within those two hours that we had them in front of our cameras, we're going to spend five minutes doing a full 360 capture of both of their heads. Smiling, not smiling. Okay, cool. We have some source footage that we can actually implement their face into the generated clips and then animate from there. We're like, okay. We got a way to fix their faces. We're going to avoid hands, any kind of body movements as far as contorting the body. If it can't tell where the arms and the legs are, it's crazy what it'll try to morph the body into. So we're like, okay, no crazy movements, it's just going to be a lot of talking heads and animating this idea of how they met. And here is a little result and sample of their episode.
[Music] If you can describe the setting for that day when you first met, in just prompts or keywords, what would those prompts be? [Dave] Rural was the first word for the prompt that I would use to describe the setting. I get we were in a town-- [Chris] Country. Of 2,000 people, remote, isolated.
That's it.
That's funny. I went to a friend's wedding. He was getting married in the middle of nowhere Arkansas and was sitting around a hay bell at the reception and in walks this big 6'8" guy, which is Dave, and I said, "I'm starting a software company", which was not technically true, but it was like on the path I was on. And Dave said tell me more about that. When I met Chris, I had had this note card in my pocket for about five or six months, and I wrote this thing down and I'd signed it and it basically said, by the age of 30, be financially free by starting multiple profitable companies and creating passive income streams. And I had no idea how to do any of that. And so I think I just had this weight sitting there and I was always scanning, always looking to find ideas that can help me along that process. And so when Chris said he's got this course that I could take that teaches you how to do that, it was just, it was like a damn breaking through, something I've been thinking about for so long there. And he said, "I'm starting a software company, and this course teaches how to deal with no idea, no money, and no skills". I'm like, this is me, this is us, we're all of those things.
[Music] And so we use their platform. They love the idea. We use their image generating platform to create the b-roll that we needed. We even used their LLM platform to create the dialogue and the narration in between the chapters of their episode and they just, not only are we highlighting them and their story, but we're highlighting their product. And so it was almost like this win-win that morphed from a problem that we had. And when we look back, this concept is even better than what we originally planned on because I think, for me, I can really get stuck into the traditional ways of film making, where you capture what you see and you use what you capture into that final product. But what AI tools like this, what it does is it really opens up your minds, because even when creating the b-roll, once we knew what we were capable of, it was a fun process because you're not limited on what was in front of you anymore. It's actually what's inside of you, a dam breaking loose is how he described it. Yeah, let's generate a dam breaking loose. And the two guys standing in front of it, the possibilities just became endless in this episode. And in a lot of ways, the possibilities actually became endless within our own company. And I can't tell you, I mean, I can't even calculate how much time you've heard about all those instances where we have saved so much time in the conceptualizing process, with all these projects for AMD. But when we talk about just little things like emails, long form emails, emails to our crew, the time that it took me to write something motivating to get everybody amped up for the next day, for the next shoot, I can just run right into a ChatGPT platform, "Hey, write me a nice email about this, this, this, and showing up at this time." And minor edits but I'm guessing maybe around 10-15 minutes I'm saving with every long form email with all the explanations. And then when you look at even on the research side, to research all of these people that we documented, the traditional way of doing it is going through a web browser, typing their name, looking at all the articles, reading all of the articles that they were highlighted in, but now just placing that link into a ChatGPT and just giving me a summary of that article, now we're talking hours that I'm saving throughout the pre-production process, even story boarding process. I know we were talking about conceptualizing and coming up with concepts, but as far as storyboards go, there were so many instances where we had to draw. I had to hand draw each storyboard an idea and shot that we were going to capture for our clients, and to be able to just generate that. Now we're talking about days of times that we're saving and even weeks if we're looking at all of our projects throughout the year. And so the question is what do we do with all of this time that we're saving? And when we really look back, a lot of it is actually spent in pretty much what we originally wanted to do. What got us into this industry in the first place is that we're creatives. And that time that we're saving, we're actually just spending more of that time doing what we love, which is just the creating processes, the coming up with the stories and the scripts and the ideas, and in the end, we're really making the final product better for our clients. But outside of that, I think for Mark and I, we were actually new dads. My daughter is three years old. - It was just her birthday. - Start by creating things. Yeah.
She is holding Mark's son who at his first birthday, just a few weeks ago and this-- I'm trying not to tear up here but they always tell you, when you're a new parent, especially, Vo, soak it up now because this time is just going to go by so fast and I didn't get it until I became a dad, and seeing in these last three years go by so fast. We've talked about AI in such a way where we're saving all of this time and yes, we're spending a lot of that bettering our products and doing what we love but at the same time, we're getting to be better dads in the process and we're also spending times with our family, which we also love. And there's all this talk about AI being so disruptive to the human experience and all this scare and fear behind AI. But from our experience, I've seen quite the opposite because if anything, all of these tools have allowed us to be more connected to our families. And yeah, in the end, it's been just an amazing experience. So with that, I'll just say that thanks to AMD, all of our dreams are coming true. Speaking of dreams-- Oh, wow! That was-- You're welcome.
But speaking of dreams coming true, I think you got-- Oh, yeah. And so we're going to switch right over to see what images that we generated from your dreams. We had four prompts. Father talking to his daughter, a woman flying over the ocean, running on water, and eating something sweet that tastes sour. That's what we input. And when you put these things in here, you never know what you're going to get. Sometimes it gets it right, sometimes it gets it wrong. A lot of times it gets it wrong. And so we end up doing a lot of iterations but we get one chance to do one iteration today, so this is what we got. To give you an idea of bringing an idea to reality. It is a lot like dreams.
- She turned into that dessert. - Yeah. That was a little disturbing. Yeah. I'm not sure that was the intent.
So We could probably prompt all day. Yeah. Thank you everybody for hanging out and joining us. - Thank you. - Yeah, thank you, guys. Thank you, audience.
[Music]
