Sora AI isn’t a ‘magic trick’ says Shy Kids’ Air Head BTS video

If you were anything like me, you probably watched the first creative short videos made with OpenAI’s Sora with a mix of both horror and fascination. The AI video generator announced its first foray into filmmaking by letting filmmakers and creative directors try it out.

Top of the picks was Air Head, created by media brand Shy Kids who are based in Canada. The short film is a quirky and whimsical story about a man with a yellow balloon for his head. And it was so well done.

What really stood out was the story-telling aspect. However, visually, everything seemed so perfect that many of us were convinced that some sort of witchcraft was involved—at least in the Sora algorithms, anyway.

Now, Shy Kids has released a behind-the-scenes video about how they made ‘Air Head’, and it’s not nearly as straightforward as say, using an AI image generator like Dall-E or Midjourney. It’s actually a far more complicated process.

“Sora is very much a slot machine as to what you get back,” says Walter Woodman, director and writer for Shy Kids. The team explain that it’s just not as easy as typing in some text and getting back the perfect video scenes that you ask for.

From inconsistencies in balloon colour to Sora’s lack of grasp of filmmaking and camera techniques such as pans and zooms, almost everything had to be painstakingly altered and edited by the (human) team, pretty much in the same way that they would work on any other project.

Ultimately, the team end on a positive note about exploring and embracing the possibilities of new technology, especially in terms of smaller indie productions. It’s a great point and something that all of us should keep in mind.

As a tool, AI is not scary and is not about to run off with all of our jobs. As humans, we want to tell human stories that touch other humans. The method of telling those stories will inevitably change, as will the technology used to create them.

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