Royal Shakespeare Company to consider AI for theatre productions

The Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) is to look at using artificial intelligence (AI) and other immersive technology in its productions as part of a £13.5m government investment. The Stratford-upon-Avon based theatre company will lead pilot production projects in the West Midlands and Merseyside alongside US-based tech and media festival South by Southwest. Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy said the funding would support training, research and development across a range of creative projects "using new technology and driving growth". "Talent is everywhere but opportunity is not," she said.

BBC

Wed, 27 Nov, 10:01 AM UTC

Runway's Act-One Update : The Future of AI-Generated Characters

Runway's Act-One update introduces advanced tools designed to transform the creation of AI-generated characters. By integrating innovative lip-syncing technology, dynamic video capabilities, and seamless audio tools, this update enables creators to produce realistic and flexible AI actors. Whether you are a filmmaker, game designer, or content creator, these features simplify the process of crafting animated characters that feel natural, engaging, and professional. Imagine bringing your creative visions to life with characters that not only look real but move, speak, and emote just like humans. Creating lifelike characters often comes with technical challenges, time constraints, and the difficulty of avoiding the "uncanny valley" effect. Runway's Act-One update addresses these obstacles by providing a fantastic solution that accelerates and enhances the character creation process. With tools for lifelike lip-syncing, dynamic video creation, and seamless audio integration, Act-One allows creators to transform simple performance videos into polished AI actors -- complete with natural movements and dialogue. Whether you're crafting a cinematic project, designing an interactive game, or exploring animated storytelling, this update offers exciting possibilities to elevate your creative work to the next level. The Act-One update offers a variety of tools that enhance the creative process and elevate the quality of AI-generated content. These features include: One of the standout features of the Act-One update is its enhanced lip-syncing technology. By analyzing audio input, the system adjusts the AI character's mouth movements in real time to match the dialogue. This minimizes the "uncanny valley" effect, making sure that characters appear more lifelike and relatable. Whether you are creating talking characters for videos, interactive media, or presentations, this tool delivers polished and professional results. The precision of this feature makes it an invaluable asset for projects requiring natural and engaging dialogue. Enhance your knowledge on AI-generated characters by exploring a selection of articles and guides on the subject. Dynamic video creation is another key feature of the Act-One update, allowing AI actors to perform realistic movements such as walking, gesturing, or expressing subtle emotions while delivering dialogue. By using performance video references, the system ensures that character movements align seamlessly with the narrative. This capability adds depth and cinematic quality to your projects, making them more immersive and visually compelling. Whether you are crafting a short film, a game cutscene, or a marketing video, this feature enhances storytelling by bringing characters to life. To maximize the effectiveness of dynamic video creation, the Act-One update provides clear guidelines for uploading performance videos. These videos serve as references for the AI to replicate movements and expressions accurately. Key recommendations include: Adhering to these guidelines ensures smoother animations and more realistic character performances, enhancing the overall quality of your project. The motion intensity control feature offers creators the flexibility to adjust the degree of head and facial movements in AI-generated characters. For instance, you can reduce intensity for a calm, subdued performance or increase it for a more animated and expressive delivery. This customization ensures that the character's movements align with the emotional tone and context of your project. By tailoring motion intensity, you can create performances that resonate with your audience and enhance the believability of your characters. Seamless audio integration is another highlight of the Act-One update, allowing you to modify or replace character voices with ease. By using third-party tools like 11 Labs or Play AI, you can experiment with various voice styles and tones to suit your project's needs. This feature is particularly beneficial for creating multilingual content or tailoring dialogue delivery to specific audiences. The straightforward integration process enables you to focus on refining your characters' performances without being bogged down by technical challenges. The Act-One update simplifies the creation of dialogue scenes involving multiple characters. You can script interactions, adjust timing, and incorporate pauses to generate natural and dynamic conversations between AI actors. This feature is ideal for storytelling, training simulations, or any project requiring realistic character interactions. By providing intuitive tools for dialogue scene creation, the update enhances your ability to craft compelling narratives with ease. The tools included in the Act-One update are highly compatible with animated characters, particularly those with a Pixar-style aesthetic. However, the system has limitations when applied to non-human characters, such as animals or fantastical creatures. While this may restrict certain creative projects, the update excels in producing human-like characters that resonate with audiences. Its focus on realism and relatability makes it a powerful tool for creators aiming to connect with viewers on an emotional level. To make the creative process more accessible, the Act-One update features a redesigned user interface (UI). The streamlined UI simplifies navigation, tool access, and model selection, reducing the learning curve for new users. This intuitive design allows creators of all skill levels to focus on the artistic aspects of their work rather than technical complexities. By prioritizing usability, the update ensures that you can fully use its advanced features without unnecessary friction. Runway's Act-One update represents a significant step forward in AI-generated content creation. By combining advanced lip-syncing, dynamic video capabilities, and versatile audio tools, it provides creators with the resources to produce lifelike AI actors efficiently. Whether you are animating characters, crafting dialogue scenes, or experimenting with motion intensity, these tools enable you to push the boundaries of digital storytelling. With its user-friendly interface and compatibility with animated characters, the Act-One update is an essential asset for creators seeking to elevate their projects to new heights.

Geeky Gadgets

Wed, 18 Dec, 12:14 PM UTC

Meet ReelMagic -- a new AI video tool for creating entire short films from a single prompt

Generative AI video tools have reached a point where you can create five seconds of video almost indistinguishable from a human-filmed clip. However, consistency is still an issue if you want to make a short film, commercial, or music video as characters aren't carried between clips. It is possible to do this, but you need to use an image first and ensure consistency across every image you use in the video prompts. The first platform to tackle this was LTX Studio from Lightricks but it is limited to models in the platform. ReelMagic from Higgsfield changes that. ReelMagic brings together the best AI content workflows into one platform, generating a script from your prompt, creating an image with custom characters for each shot and then allowing you to turn those images into videos and customize the story in a timeline view. You can create a short film up to 10 minutes long and can pick between Recraft, Keyframe, Flux and Higgsfield Frame for the images and Runway Kling and MiniMax for creating video. You also have sound effects and voices powered by ElevenLabs and lip-syncing for the AI actors. ReelMagic plays on the fact every AI image or video model offers something different. Some are better at capturing emotion, others at ultra-realism. When I craft an AI video project manually I often have to use a combination of models to achieve the desired effect. To make a 3-minute video with AI it can take the best part of a week if you include writing the script, planning the shots, and generating each image (remembering that often you'll need to run the prompt multiple times to get the exact image you had in mind) and then generating the video clip from each image (again, running it numerous times due to any errors). Then you need to move on to sound design once you've got the videos, crafting sound effects, atmosphere, music and voiceovers. Some shots will also require lip-synching. After watching it back I often find it is missing a shot, so will have to go back and repeat the process. ReelMagic does all of that in one go from a single prompt. You get presented with a script that you can edit, a list of images that you can regenerate or replace and then a way to generate video for each shot, model-by-model or as a whole. It automatically adds sound effects which you can also adapt to your own needs. Higgsfield, creator of ReelMagic, wrote that it "enables creators to edit specific elements without affecting the look/feel of their overall story." My favorite feature is being able to define and design characters once and have them change throughout the project. I gave ReelMagic this prompt: "The night is when they come out, the shadow creatures born of our hate. The stuff of nightmares that haunt our dreams and whisper words of destruction and despair into the ears of the powerful. Nobody knows where they came from, nobody has ever seen them, but they are always there and have always been there since the dawn of human civilization. Some say they were the first species on Earth -- the spirits carried on the stellar winds from a long-dead world. Others say they are figments of our ancestors that couldn't let go. All we know is ... they are getting stronger." I then had to select a "style". This could be inspired by an existing show, such as Wednesday, or a custom concept. I went with the original as I wanted to see what the AI came up with. After about three minutes I was presented with a screenplay and a cast of characters and a location list that I could adapt, redesign, assign a voice to, or change to fit my idea. As I was doing this to test the platform I went with all the settings as offered, including the screenplay. I didn't change anything as I wanted to see what the AI came up with on its own. The idea is to see how well it can craft a full project from a single prompt. The storyboard view lets you review all the generated shots and make any appropriate changes. This includes regenerating a single shot with a different image model, swapping faces if it doesn't match your vision and generating the video. You can then go into Editor view. This is like a typical video editing platform where the individual clips are placed one after the other on a timeline, complete with sound effects and speech. Once you've generated videos you can also have each face view lip-synced to the generated voice. I decided to have it generated using the same model for all clips -- Kling 1.5 Pro -- as it is a good all-rounder. It is also the slowest of all the models on offer, so this article took a little longer than I was hoping. You can see the final output above in the YouTube video, complete with voice-over, lip-sync and sound effects. I also made a short, 30-second example of how I might have handled the opening scene using my normal workflow in Pika 2.0 (below). Considering the process is largely automated, the final output was closer to something I'd have created manually than I expected. I wouldn't have taken the story as written because it was a little on the basic side, and I'd have changed up the characters, added more variety to the shots and included more subtlety, but for a one-shot attempt -- it wasn't bad. The true value is in how easy it is to change any single element within the process. This makes it a production tool as much as a way to create a longer-form AI video from a single prompt. I can use it to storyboard an idea, rapidly iterate over changes and then generate in one place across different models. This is an example of where I think the next generation of AI tools will go -- productization. Models are improving at a rapid rate so the next logical step is creating AI-powered tools that you can use to generate a project, rather than a single clip.

Tom's Guide

Wed, 18 Dec, 4:05 PM UTC

How to Use an AI Voice Changer, and What It Offers Content Creators

Carly Quellman is a movement artist, storyteller and disability advocate whose work challenges and strips perspective around the human experience. As an advocate for young women, artistic potential and the "anomaly" identity, Carly dedicates her time to spreading the power of expression. She resides in Los Angeles. Not long ago, I was watching a movie where the sound of the antagonist's voice annoyed me, and while I couldn't do anything about that movie, it got me thinking: If I'm creating content, how do I get the voice that I'm looking for? One option is AI. AI voiceover generators could come in handy for content creation with a low budget, like social media posts and YouTube videos. They could also be an accessibility solution for those with visual impairments. I found Artlist, a hub of digital assets and tools for creators, in a long list of AI-powered voiceover generators (looking at you, Speechify, Rebind, Murf AI, ElevenLabs and WellSaid). What originally stood out to me about the company was its ethical, artist-first approach to content: Artlist's roster of more than 200 musicians receive compensation for their work -- about 2,000 tracks a year alongside existing voiceovers across music and video categories -- as well as a share of revenue. Founded in 2016 by self-taught filmmaker Ira Belsky, the technology company originally launched to support the gap between high-quality music at an affordable cost. In November 2023, Artlist launched its voiceover tool with artificial intelligence as the driver. The voiceover tool's capabilities include a catalog of various voices and text-to-speech functionality. Today, the company offers four features on its site: Artist-created music and special effects, AI voiceovers for video content creators, story footage from filmmakers, and Lookup Tables (photography color filters). While I'm not a content creator, I (apparently) have opinions on how sound integrates into visual forms of storytelling. With Artlist, I could explore the possibilities of different voices -- and music -- within content. Step 1: Navigate to Artlist's homepage and access a free version of the subscription, which provides you with a small taste of everything within its premium plan ($35 per month). This will give you access to 400 words of voiceover creation -- about three sentences -- before needing to upgrade to a voiceover plan ($12 per month) or a premium plan. Step 2: From the left side of the screen, choose Voiceover and Artlist's voice catalog will open. Here, you can browse and filter by category and gender. (At time of publishing, only male and female options were available.) Step 3: Above the catalog, a text box is available to create your own voice over. Type the text you want to generate into speech. One character equals one credit. If on a voiceover or premium plan, you can type up to 2,000 characters for each generation. Step 4: Next, locate the three drop-down menus below the text box for customization. Choose your country of origin, including whatever accent you want, voiceover speed and emotional tone, which has the most robust of choices, including emotions like Optimistic, Sad and Surprised. Step 5: Click the Generate button on the bottom right corner and give it a few seconds to create. Your file will show up below the voiceover generator box, and under the tab My Voiceovers directly below it. You can download your file, get AI-powered content suggestions or add to an existing or new Artboard, Artlist's AI-powered asset organization tool. If you're having trouble with Artlist's voice-over generator, there are resources available to help, including an AI voiceover guide, tips to generate voiceovers and various voiceover blog posts. Artlist stands out for its digestible learning curve and a more seamless integration into media projects. I appreciate its straightforward interface -- one that didn't take ample time to understand its landscape. Where its competitors like Murf AI and ElevenLabs focus on the quantity and types of voices available for its users, Artlist focuses on the production quality of its audio assets. (Shouldn't quality always supersede quantity?) Yet, since Artlist focuses more on text-to-speech, its $12 voiceover plan (billed annually) isn't as bundled or robust as its competitors. Artlist has a vast library of multimedia voices that can replace the voices in your library -- but while there's an option to alter emotion across a "natural voice" spectrum, it lacks the natural-sounding voices and voice-cloning capabilities that other tools already have. If you're a content creator seeking royalty-free music and sound effects -- with the option to utilize its AI voiceover feature -- then Artlist is a choice for bolstering your needs. (Or to bundle into a content creator-focused premium plan, $35 per month billed annually.) But for creatives that fit into a broader range of work, Artlist, while polished, could be too niche for your needs.

CNET

Thu, 19 Dec, 2:09 PM UTC

Explore Google's Experimental AI Tools for Creativity and Innovation

Google Labs is currently offering a suite of experimental artificial intelligence (AI) tools, providing you with a chance to engage with innovative technology during its trial phase. These tools discussed by Vladimir Chopine cover a diverse range of applications, including generating visuals, composing music, crafting recipes, and analyzing photos. While some features may be limited to U.S.-based users or require joining a waitlist, this initiative presents a rare opportunity to experiment with AI innovations before they are fully launched or commercialized. By participating, you can gain early insights into how AI is shaping creative and practical solutions across various fields. These tools are designed for anyone curious about exploring the possibilities of AI, whether you're looking to create, innovate, or just have a little fun. From generating stunning visuals and crafting fusion recipes to composing music or enhancing your writing, these tools cover a wide range of creative and practical applications. The best part? You don't need any technical expertise to dive in. Whether you're a seasoned creator or someone simply looking to try something new, these AI experiments offer a glimpse into the future of technology and creativity. But there's a catch -- they're only available for a limited time. So, if you've ever wanted to experiment with innovative AI without the commitment, now's your chance to explore, play, and maybe even surprise yourself with what you can create. Among the most captivating tools in this collection is the AI image generation feature. By entering simple text prompts, you can create detailed and imaginative visuals in a variety of styles, such as abstract art, cinematic effects, or cartoon-like designs. For instance, you could design a chess set inspired by Star Wars or Disney, with each piece reflecting a distinct aesthetic. This tool is particularly valuable for artists, designers, and creators who want to bring their ideas to life quickly and effectively. The ability to produce high-quality visuals without requiring advanced design skills makes this tool accessible to anyone. Whether you're working on a professional project or exploring personal creative interests, the AI image generation feature offers a powerful way to visualize your concepts. Google's AI music creation tools open up new possibilities for composing music, even if you have no formal training. These tools allow you to generate tracks in a wide range of genres, from retro 1980s disco to contemporary K-pop. You can experiment with blending different styles, creating loops, or adding unique elements to your compositions. For musicians, this tool serves as a source of inspiration, allowing you to explore new sounds and ideas. For hobbyists or those curious about AI's role in sound design, it provides an engaging way to experiment with music creation. The flexibility and ease of use make it a valuable resource for anyone interested in exploring the intersection of technology and music. Advance your skills in AI Tools by reading more of our detailed content. For writers and content creators, Google's AI text manipulation tools offer a practical way to refine and expand your ideas. These tools can suggest synonyms, generate descriptive phrases, or even provide playful word associations based on your input. Whether you're brainstorming for a project, overcoming writer's block, or simply looking to improve your writing, these features can help you explore new directions and elevate your work. The tools are particularly useful for professionals who need to produce high-quality content efficiently. By using AI's capabilities, you can enhance your creative or professional writing, making it more engaging and impactful. This resource is ideal for anyone seeking to improve their communication skills or streamline their writing process. The "Food Mood" tool takes culinary creativity to a new level by allowing you to generate unique recipes that blend cuisines from different cultures. For example, you could create a dish that combines Italian and Japanese flavors, complete with step-by-step instructions, ingredient lists, and even AI-generated images of the final product. This tool is perfect for food enthusiasts who want to experiment with new culinary ideas or add variety to their cooking routines. Whether you're a seasoned chef or a home cook looking for inspiration, the recipe generation feature allows you to explore fusion cuisine and push the boundaries of traditional cooking. Chess enthusiasts can use AI to design custom chess pieces tailored to specific themes or characters. Whether you prefer a traditional set with a creative twist or something entirely unconventional, this tool enables you to bring your vision to life. Once designed, these pieces can even be used in digital chess games, adding a personal and artistic touch to your matches. This feature not only enhances the aesthetic appeal of the game but also allows players to express their creativity. It's an excellent resource for hobbyists, collectors, and anyone who wants to add a unique element to their chess experience. Static visuals created with AI can be transformed into dynamic animations using external tools like Sorer. This capability is particularly valuable for content creators who want to add motion to their projects, such as animated videos or interactive media. By combining AI-generated images with animation software, you can produce visually striking and engaging content that captures attention. This feature is ideal for marketers, educators, and artists looking to create impactful visual narratives. The ability to seamlessly integrate AI-generated visuals into animations expands the creative possibilities for a wide range of projects. Beyond the core features, Google Labs offers experimental tools that highlight the versatility of AI in addressing both creative and practical challenges. These include: These tools demonstrate how AI can streamline everyday tasks and support specialized projects, making them valuable for professionals and hobbyists alike. While these tools offer exciting possibilities, it's important to recognize their experimental nature. Some features may experience server downtime, have limited functionality, or be restricted based on your location. Additionally, these tools are designed for exploration and creativity rather than commercial use. Despite these limitations, they provide a valuable opportunity to engage with emerging AI technologies and gain insights into their potential applications. Google's experimental AI tools offer a unique chance to interact with advanced technology in a hands-on way. Whether you're an artist, musician, writer, or simply curious about AI, these tools allow you to explore creative boundaries and discover new possibilities. Take advantage of this free trial while it's available, and experience firsthand how AI can transform the way you work, create, and innovate.

Geeky Gadgets

Mon, 6 Jan, 12:11 PM UTC

AI Shakespeare

Contact for Pricing

About AI Shakespeare

Related fields

Related News

Similar products

AI Screenwriter

NovelAI

RolePlai

Voicify.ai

HumanizeAI