What would Marcel the Shell look like in Balenciaga shoes?
That’s one prompt a startup developing generative artificial intelligence tools for filmmakers and TV show producers plugged into its model, part of a broader showcase of its tech using several Oscar-nominated films.
Mihail Eric and Julia Turc launched Storia AI, a tool for filmmakers and TV show producers to visualize different hypothetical prompts based off lines of text. The goal is to let creators experiment with different ideas to map out their creative vision in pre-production, reducing time and costs.
Storia AI recently placed first in the Madrona Venture Labs Launchable Foundation Models competition, winning $250,000 in pre-seed funding. The startup, launched in December, works mostly remote from New York and California.
Eric is a former NLP researcher at Stanford and an early employee at autonomous vehicle startup rideOS. He also worked as a machine learning scientist at Amazon Alexa and founded Confetti AI, which was acquired by Towards AI in 2022. He’s joined by Turc, a University of Oxford masters of computer science graduate and former researcher in the Google BERT division.
About a year ago, Eric and Turc teamed to create an AI model that could process text, speech, images and video. Their initial prototype was Rick and Mortify, a tool that generates a storyboard for a TV show episode that includes dialogue and images.
After generative AI systems continued to improve, the duo developed Storia to serve a broader audience. As part of its rollout, Storia unveiled a collection of digitally altered clips based off Oscar-nominated films to demonstrate the tech platform’s capabilities.
Part of the rollout included a stylized change of a scene from the movie “All Quiet on the Western Front,” where the AI altered the colors from blue to orange. It made changes to the movie “Elvis,” replacing star Austin Butler with actor/singer Harry Styles. Storia also shared a panel of images of the animated character Marcel the Shell in Balenciaga shoes, produced by its model.
“The whole point of the creative process is constant experimentation,” Eric said.
The emergence of generative AI tools has been a cause for concern over intellectual property rights, as content creators and studios fear their work is being utilized to train AI models without compensation or acknowledgment.
Storia’s models are trained on proprietary IP under license agreements, Eric said. Since the content made with Storia is intended for pre-visualization purposes, it will only be shown internally, he added.
“Though the concerns are very gray at this point in time, we’re doing everything in our power to ensure we are on the right side of the copyright concerns debate,” Eric said.
London and Los Angelas-based Flawless AI, founded by Hollywood film director Scott Mann and tech executive Nick Lynes, is also developing generative AI tools for Hollywood. The startup is primarily focused on video editing functions like auto-dubbing, whereas Storia plans to concentrate on pre-visualization and pre-production workflows, Eric said.
The startup plans to offer its software platform through a subscription. It will mostly target enterprise-level costumers, as well as some consumers that purchase high-end tools for their content, Eric said. The company has raised some venture capital but did not reveal its total funding to date.
