Adobe announced media- and entertainment-specific AI partnerships with a range of Hollywood talent agencies, visual-effects studios, film schools, production companies and directors through a new product that it calls Firefly Foundry.
The partnerships will work with Adobe’s in-house engineers and nearly three-year-old Firefly AI model to build bespoke AI tools to create video from organizations’ in-house assets for everything from feature-length film shoots to short-form marketing and social-media posts.
The company said the partnerships will allow it to further hone Foundry, which it said allows companies to “collaborate directly with Adobe engineers and scientists to create brand-specific generative AI models, responsibly trained on their own IP and designed for safe commercial use.”
The announcement, made the day that the Sundance Film Festival debuted in Utah, holds promise in particular for many smaller and independent creative shops (such as those dozens of indie projects on display during Sundance) in both entertainment and marketing for enterprises.
The announcement includes partnerships with Hollywood’s Big Three talent agencies (UTA, WME and CAA); hybrid and AI film-production companies Wonder Studio, Promise.ai, Infinite Studio and B5 Studios; Parsons School of Design and two other art colleges; design studio Cantina Creative; and prominent directors David Ayer and Jaume Collet-Serra.
“Our mission is to protect the soul of the work as tools evolve,” said Justin Hackney, Wonder Studios CCO and co-founder, in an Adobe blog post. “Partnering with Adobe removes the friction between imagination and execution, allowing creators to enter true flow states. This unlocks new visual languages and stronger emotional bridges, driving what has the potential to become the most transformative era in creative history.”
Entertainment creatives and the union guilds that represent many of them have been alarmed by AI’s potential to cost them work, or even careers. Adobe emphasized Foundry would help improve video-creation workflows from visualizing a project to creating marketing material based on a finished project, while preventing unauthorized use of copyrighted material.
Adobe suggested the tool has possible uses in several parts of the video-production process:
- Storyboarding, pre-visualization and concept development early in the development of a movie or series.
- Processing film dailies during on-set production, both speeding the ingest process and enabling quick evaluation of creative options during shooting.
- Filling in and fixing scenes during post-production, including generating pick-up shots, continuity breaks, editing and other improvements when the cameras have stopped rolling.
- Quicker production of short-form social content from a company’s existing store of video and other material.
- Building brand and fan experiences more quickly for amusement parks, live activations, digital displays and mobile apps.
