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Creative Control Hackathon with Robert Legato and 2024 Retrospective

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Author

Todd Terrazas
January 24, 2025

Table of Contents

Welcome to 2025!

Despite reaching the “survive ‘til 25” landmark, we’ve had a difficult start to the year in Los Angeles, with many friends and members of the FBRC community who have been displaced or have lost their homes. We have been encouraged by the swift action taken by Angelenos to support each other. We’re also here to help in any way we can—please let us know what we can do.

As Los Angeles rebuilds, we continue to lean into our pillars around upskilling the community and expanding the list of those who can take advantage of new AI opportunities. We’ll share more on those initiatives here over the next few weeks and months, starting with our first workflow hackathon of 2025.

Creative Control - A FBRC.ai Living Lab AI Workflow Hackathon, with Luma AI and Robert Legato
February 8-9 in Venice Beach

We’re excited to partner with Luma AI through our Living Lab to announce CREATIVE CONTROL, a hackathon dedicated to merging and transforming tooling APIs into flexible production pipelines for creatives.

In traditional generative workflows, achieving the right shot can involve hundreds of attempts—often with a 300:1 or greater ratio of generated to final shots.

Guided by renowned VFX supervisor Robert Legato (Avatar, The Lion King, Titanic, and more), this hackathon aims to put creative power and clear artistic direction back into the hands of the director.

Participants will utilize APIs from Luma AI--as well as from tools like ElevenLabs, Mod Tech Labs, Playbook3D--to craft custom production to bring creative control to the process of bringing scenes from an original script by Robert Legato to life. Assume that Robert will make shooting decisions based on the workflows you create—meaning, you should consider: what does the creative direction with generative AI look like?

Participants build API integrations and ComfyUI workflows using Luma AI’s API, alongside APIs from Playbook, Mod Tech Labs, and ElevenLabs to build across 3 tracks: Creative Camera Control, Creative Scene Control, and Creative Actor Control.

If you cannot participate as a developer, creative technologist, or artist, you are also welcome to join us for the participant demos from 12-2pm on Sunday, February 9th.

If you’re interested in sponsoring or volunteering, please reply to this email!

Looking Back…

2024 was a busy and exciting year, and we’re so grateful to have been on this journey with you!

Into The Fold Friday

  • While a lot of our workflow research and work can’t be shared publicly (yet!) we can share the variety of areas where we’re working on projects, tools, and workflows

    • Creative Development

    • Social Listening

    • Hybrid 3D and Generative AI Pipelines

    • Training Bespoke Video Models

    • Enabling Cross-Format Translation between Live Action and Games

    • Generative VFX

    • AI-Enabled Editing

    • Lipsyncing and Dubbing

    • And many more!

  • In more public happenings, we had the privilege of hosting so many of you to watch the fog and sunsets and (very loud) planes during our Into the Fold Fridays at the Beach House. Thank you to everyone who came out over the year! We ended our stint at the Beach House with an Into the Fold chili night and we are excited for 2025, where we’ll be doing just as many events–just spread out all over LA.

  • With Lori Schwartz’s Story Tech, we hosted NAB Show’s first press tours, as well as their first AI and ML tours, helping attendees navigate the show floor while giving them an introduction to the way AI is utilized in broadcast workflows

  • We partnered with AWS Startups to pull off the inaugural Culver Cup, which brought together a curated group of 50 top AI creators to work off of shared assets from our friends at Global Objects and a creative treatment from David Slade to create short films. Competitors used Luma AI and Playbook to create incredible short films across a variety of genres while experimenting with 3D + AI workflows. The top “Elite Eight” films were screened during a bracket-style competition at Culver Theater and are now hosted as a curated collection on Escape AI. Make sure to check out winning short Mnemonade by Meta Puppet!

  • We also ran a number of other competitions and hackathons to bring the community together in experimenting with new workflows, include The Big Game Competition with .monks, and hackathons with Pika Labs and Twelve Labs in partnership with Youtubers like Johnny Harris and Drew Binsky and more.

  • A big focus for us was enabling a deeper dive for our community into the technologies surrounding AI and how they could realistically be operationalized at scale. In addition to fireside chats at the Beach House (including an exclusive behind-the-scenes conversation with Wonder Dynamics CEO Nikola Todorovic about the Autodesk acquisition), we had the privilege of launching our quarterly “AI at the Edge” event series with our friends at the Verizon Innovation Lab.

  • We worked closely with AI LA around the creation of AI on the Lot, especially around two new additions to the programming line-up:

    • Our Startup Showcase, which brought together 11 startups for a curated pitch session that also showcased the role each played around emerging workflows

    • Cinema Synthetica, a 48-hour generative film challenge that brought together 9 of the top AI creators in three teams of three to develop a short film based on a dialogue-based script by Emmy-award winning writer and producer Bernie Su. The films spanned a variety of genres and were screened at AI on the Lot. Be sure to check out the winning entry, “Love At First Bite,” created by Team Cyber-Kubrick: Nem Perez, Jagger Waters, and Adriana Vecchioli. The documentary around the marking of the shorts, created in partnership with Joey Daoud from VP Land is now live—check it out!

  • We were sponsors and judges for the inaugural season of Project Odyssey and were excited to return for season two! We had lots of fun as sponsors of the best after-party at NAB with Curious Refuge.

  • We got to talk about AI and showcase our startups at several events throughout the year: SXSW (alongside Mod Tech Labs and our partner Dell), CogX Summit, Digital Hollywood’s Virtual AI Summit, Production Summit LA, and more

  • Thanks also to HAND, SVG, Silicon Valley Video Group, HPA Net, TEA, ThinkLA’s Gaming Brunch, the TV Academy’s Emerging Media Peer Group, and more (!) that had us join to talk about how AI workflows are evolving. We also spoke at our friends at Sun Valley Film Festival, Bentonville Film Festival, and joined with Renard Jenkins and Kathryn Brillhart in New Zealand to talk about the intersection of worldbuilding and AI.

    Fireside AI Salon with Wonder Dynamics & MaC Ventures

…to Look Forward

We’re excited to continue building in 2025! In addition to continuing events, projects, workflow initiatives from 2024, we have some new things on the horizon, including:

  • Curating startups for NAB Show’s Propel ME startup space, located directly between the Main Stage and the AI Zone

  • Developing an Educational Track to enable industry upskilling through AI on the Lot

  • Working in partnership with USC’s ETC on their Grants 8 and 9 to experiment with hybrid and end-to-end workflows around generative AI.

  • And lots more!

We’ll also be streamlining the work we do across two primary ways to engage:

Innovation Studio

We’re continuing to work with leading studios and production companies as a distributed agency (drawing from our roster of over 4,000 AI artists and leading expert production and development teams) to develop project workflows and integrated pipelines with AI at the center.

Living Lab

Building on the workflow-centric hackathons and competitions with AWS Startups, Twelve Labs, .monks, Pika Labs, and more last year, we’re building a series of quarterly hackathons exploring how to operationalize the new pipeline stacks around production. We’re kicking off our Creative Control hackathon with Luma AI and renowned VFX supervisor Robert Legato.

Some of the other hackathons in works center around these topics:

  • Spatial Computing and AI at the Edge

  • Continuous Cross-Format Narratives

  • Worldbuilding Animated Worlds with AI

We’re currently bringing on a limited number of startup and corporate Living Lab partners to help shape the parameters and technical foundation of these hackathons and our broader research. If you’re interested in learning more, reply back to this email!

Content

In 2025, we’re working on creating more content resources for the FBRC community to dive deeper into the tech and bring others along. We’ll be sharing more of our workflow research and explorations throughout the year, both individually, and with our great partners. Stay tuned for our next newsletter, where we dive into our predictions around broader 2025 AI trends. And, look for essays throughout the year on:

  • Production at the Point of the Consumer

  • Minimum Viable Story

  • The Evolution of Capture and Creative Decision-Making

  • ROX: Return on Experience

  • The Evolution of UI with AI

Back to the Future

It will be a busy year, and we’re excited to enter and journey through it with you! It has been great to see how the AI creative community continues to build and transform—as ecosystem partners, our foundation is built on collaboration and the mindset that a rising tide lifts all boats. As you go through this year, let us know how we can support you.