Common Thread Newsletter Pre-Q3 2024

Hello there, and welcome to the Common Thread Newsletter by FBRC.AI.

You probably know us through our work in the AI LA Community. This newsletter will keep you updated on the latest advances in AI-driven creativity. We are a team of industry veterans, entrepreneurs, creatives, and technologists building Hollywood 2.0!

View previous threads here.

Coming Up at the Living Lab:

We are hosting a private event for investors and founders on July 2nd. The event will include an exclusive first-look discussion about the Autodesk acquisition and a thoughtful exploration of the future of storytelling. We only have a few spots left, so if you are interested in attending, please reply to this newsletter.

• Thursday 6/27 - Gen Battle - Music Video edition (FULL)

• Sunday 6/30 - WebSim AI Micro-Hackathon

• July 5th (Free) - Cerebral Beach Launch - Volleyball tournament & beach party

• July 5th (Paid) - Into the Fold - Private mixer with tacos, tequila, and DJs 🔥🔥🔥

• Project Odyssey - Submit a project by July 15th!

• Scroll to the bottom to read about a new D&D + AI event

Picking up the thread…(what we’ve been doing since you last saw us)

Startup Showcase - Product-Pipeline Fit

One of the things we talk about at FBRC.ai a lot is the idea of Product-Pipeline Fit–how to identify startups that are solving for problems within production workflows in a way that can showcase venture scale. We decided to highlight this topic for our pre-AI on the Lot event hosted at ASU’s California Center in DTLA. 

For our Startup Showcase, we featured 3 workflows being augmented by AI and gave 3-4 startups within each workflow a chance to do a rapid-fire 2-minute pitch of how they’re solving challenges within that workflow.

Koobrik - Orlando Wood, Founder and CEO 
Cinelytic - Tobias Queisser, Co-founder and CEO 
Centillion - Nick Venezia Founder and CEO
Rivet AI - Sadaf Amouzegar, Founder and CEO

Quikture - Matt Hanna and Irad Eyal, Co-founders
Twelve Labs - Anthony Giuliani, Head of Operations 
Audioshake - Suzanne Kirkland, Head of Sales 

Wild Capture - Louis Normandin, Co-founder and COO 
Modtech Labs - Alex Porter, Founder and CEO
Playbook - Jean-Daniel LeRoy and Skylar Thomas, Co-founders
Plotloop - Sean Stewart, Co-founder

The startup presentations were followed by a panel of venture capitalists and studio innovation heads who shared how they evaluate AI tools. 

Scott Shane - Senior Investment Director at Sony Innovation Fund
Igor Mijavec - Vice President, Strategy & Business Development at NBCUniversal
Aaron Sisto - Partner, First Spark Ventures
Lauren Selig- Investor & co-founder of Shake and Bake Productions

AI on the Lot 2024

On Thursday, May 16th, we supported the second annual AI on the Lot. This year was bigger and better than last year, with over 850 filmmakers, AI startups, technologists, and media executives. Attendees gathered at the Los Angeles Center Studios lot and the Synapse VP stage for a full day of talks, panels, hands-on workshops, and art installations. 

The focus centered on operationalizing AI within the production process. The programming touched on how AI changes filmmakers’ workflows, disrupts cost structures, and enables smaller teams to achieve more with less.

Some of the topics included:

• Getting Started with Your Company's AI Strategy

• Enhancing Human Creativity with LLMs

• Simulation and AI Agents

• Integration of AI into the Virtual Production Pipeline

• Reaching Targeted + Customized Audiences with AI

• Bringing Control to Generative Models

• Generative AI Use Cases in Advertising

• The Evolution of AI Infrastructure and the Future of AI Development

• Gen AI Transparency: What Content Creators Need to Know

• AI as a Creative Ally in Real-time Content Creation

The day closed with DJs, drinks, and a generative art showcase at Synapse’s Virtual Production Stage at LACS. The show was curated by Nate Mohler, and was called Arti_fiċial Pėrspėctivės.

A deep thank you to everyone who attended and to the leading companies powering the Generative AI boom that were sponsors this year: Dell, NVIDIA, Adobe, Justworks, Cooley, Otoy, Late Arrivals, and Paramount Global Technology.

We’re already starting plans to make next year bigger and better. Please contact us if you’d like to be involved as a sponsor or partner! We’re expanding our programming and planning to activate popups globally throughout the year.

Cinema Synthetica

As a part of AI on the Lot this year, we assembled our first-ever Cinema Synthetica competition. Organizers Todd Terrazas, Max Einhorn, Mike Gioia, and Ian Eck carefully selected nine filmmakers with a range of experience levels and expertise in using the latest AI creative tools to participate: Jared Cotton, Kiri Margaros, Jonathan Muller, Nem Perez, D. Ryan Reebe, Reza Sixo Safai, Adriana Vecchioli, Jagger Waters, and Matthew Wenhardt. To keep things interesting and foster a sense of camaraderie, the organizers randomly selected three teams of three, encouraging everyone to learn from each other. 

On the weekend before AI on the Lot, the three teams were given 48 hours, and tasked with utilizing GenAI tools to create the most original and innovative short film based on a dialogue-only script written by Emmy Award winning Creator and Screenwriter Bernie Su (Artificial, The Lizzie Bennet Diaries). The resulting films were to have a  2-5 minute run-time. There were no workflow restrictions, and each filmmaking team had a firm budget of $500 to source props, costumes, and anything else they needed to make the best film possible. Each film had to be edited with Adobe Premiere Pro, the industry-leading editing software for video pros.

The 3 projects premiered at AI on the Lot, and a panel of judges including Max Einhorn, Jeff Clanagan, Kathleen McCaffrey, Momo Wang, Rachel Joy Victor and Jackee Chang selected Love at First Bite by Team Cyber Kubrick as the winner. 

AI on the Lot + Cinema Synthetica Footage on YouTube

If you are curious about the process of creating a generative film in 48 hours, we’ve got you covered! Award-winning filmmaker Joey Daoud produced a short documentary alongside the competition to capture the behind-the-scenes production process.

You can see the BTS he captured for each team (as well as the final project entries!) on the AI on the Lot YouTube channel, and Mike Gioia at Late Arrivals wrote a blog, “Inside the AI Filmmaking Circle.”

• Father Time by Team Neo Spielberg

• Heart Wired by Team Blade Ridley

• Love at First Bite by Team Cyber Kubrick

Speaking of which–you’ll notice we have a new Youtube channel for AI on the Lot. This is now a dedicated place where we’ll be uploading recordings of the Keynote and Panel talks from this year’s AI on the Lot. Be sure to follow, since we’ll continue to post content from the event throughout the next few months–as well as new videos we create that touch on the changing state of the industry.

Twelve Labs Multimodal Hackathon

When discussing product-pipeline fit, one of the first startups that comes to mind is Twelve Labs. It uses multimodal embedding to simplify video search, thus reinventing content management and editing workflows. Most recently, Twelve Labs was featured as part of our NAB Show Press Tours and AI and Machine Learning Tours. They also presented as part of the AI on the Lot Startup Showcase we curated. 

They were our partners for our most recent Multimodal Hackathon hosted at the Living Lab, along with AWS, Fireworks AI, WndrCo, and Vast.ai. This event brought together over 50 participants, forming 15 teams, for an intense 24-hour coding marathon, building on Twelve Labs’ API, including some of their unreleased features. Participants could choose between a number of challenges, including finding ways to support the production workflows of content creators like Johnny Harris and Drew Binsky, or the editing and consumer workflows of sports and movie providers. 

A lot of teams were able to turn around fully completed projects within the short 24 hours–and a couple of them are now exploring spinning out startups based on what they prototyped. 

Check out the write-up on Twelve Labs’ Blog to learn more about the winning projects and the hackathon in general.

FBRC.ai @ AWE

Our co-founder Rachel Joy Victor was on a panel with Erin Reilly, Evo Heyning, Julian Reyes, and Craig Allen called Creative Frontiers: Navigating the Artistic Landscape in the Age of AI. We got to share how we think about the role of tooling that augments creators–and the variety of AI modalities that can augment the process. On Friday, after the conference ended, we also hosted an afterparty at our Living Lab for AWE attendees to debrief and share their favorite takeaways from the event.

We were also really excited to see that our cohort startup, Playbook, won the pitch competition and received an Auggie Award as a “Startup to Watch.”

What’s Next!

Cerebral Beach

If you’ve come to the Living Lab before, you know that it offers the chance to take in a beautiful view of the ocean. We want to open that opportunity to more people, so we’re excited to announce Cerebral Beach, AI LA's newest initiative designed to bring the greater LA and SoCal tech ecosystem together through a series of active lifestyle events.

As our kick-off event, join us on July 5th for a beach party and volleyball tournament where you can network, have fun, and embrace the vibrant tech culture. ​If you have a team of 4 or want to join a team to play in our volleyball tournament, please select the Vball Tourney free ticket option. We'll contact you closer to the event with more details.

We’re also hosting a private “Into the Fold” party at the house during the Launch Event exclusively for friends of FBRC.ai. 

LA Tech Week Hackathon Oct. 12-13

Building on the multimodal hackathons we’ve hosted, we are planning a HUGE hackathon for this Fall. We’ll be collaborating again with Twelve Labs, AI LA, Redbull, and some cool sponsors we can’t quite talk about yet! Participants can look forward to new challenges, more opportunities for collaboration, and the chance to work with cutting-edge AI tools.

If you’re interested in sponsoring, reach out to us at [email protected]

If you’re interested in participating, stay tuned when we announce the sign-up information!

D&D Lovers

We’re working on something internally for fans of D&D and AI. If that describes you, email [email protected] with a sentence or two about what you most enjoy about D&D. 

Thanks for reading our newsletter!