realism remains halfway

• Toys”R”Us is the first company to publish a promotional short film created using artificial intelligence.

• Creation of audiovisual content took “several weeks”

Sora is not yet available to the general public, but some people have access to it. alpha version of the tool for a long time. Nick Kleverov, creative director of the Native Foreign agency, is one of them, and this week he presented work done in collaboration with Toys”R”Us Studios.

This is the first commercial created together with Sora. According to a press release, the audiovisual content, just over a minute long, tells the story of Toys”R”Us founder Charles Lazarus and how he came up with the brand’s mascot, Jeffrey the Giraffe.

Toys”R”Us short film created by artificial intelligence.

The short film, first released during the 2024 Cannes Lions festival, opens with a bike shop in a quiet neighborhood decades ago. Antique cars are parked around the area next to the deciduous trees. Little Charles falls asleep and falls into a deep sleep.

Suddenly he finds himself in a magical world where all sorts of toys float around, but one in particular stands out: Geoffrey the Giraffe, who has big eyes and stars painted on his long neck. The talisman gives Charles a toy car in his fantasy world, decorated with glittering stars.

The short ends with a real-life photo of Charles Lazarus next to a giraffe and another photo of Jeffrey in front of Macy’s. Of course, each viewer will be able to draw their own conclusions from the work, which can be seen in full on the page of the creative studio, but we could draw such a conclusion. realism is left halfway.

We don’t know whether this is a product of a decision made by the filmmakers or, on the contrary, due to the limitations of the tool, recall, in the alpha version. In any case, the most noticeable thing is the lack of naturalness in some of the characters’ movements and the clear feeling that we are looking at synthetic scenes.

OpenAI describes Sora as a tool that can generate “realistic and creative” scenes from text clues. So, other than the differences, it’s the same mechanics as image generators like DALL·E and Midjourney. And we’ve seen some pretty impressive demos.

It took Toys”R”Us Studios and Native Foreign “several weeks” to create the promotional short film. Those in charge claim that it was created almost entirely with Sora, although they did add some corrective visual effects. The music, in turn, was written by Aaron Marsh of the indie rock band Copeland.

Of course, we will have to continue to wait to see the final version of the tool and, in all likelihood, realize its full potential. At this point, it should be noted that this is not the only alternative on the horizon. In recent months, alternatives such as Vidu, Veo,
Dream machine and runway Gen-3 Alpha.

Images | Toys”R”Us | Native Foreign

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