On Tuesday, AI lab Moonvalley announced the public release of Marey, a video model designed as a production-grade tool for professional filmmakers.
Marey—pronounced “Mary” and named after early film pioneer Étienne-Jules Marey—was trained exclusively on explicitly licensed material. Cofounder and CEO Naeem Talukdar says this approach helps avoid the copyright risks associated with video generation tools trained on unauthorized footage. “Marey has no idea what Star Wars is,” he says. “It has no idea what Toy Story is.”
Just as importantly, Marey offers a level of control uncommon in most video generation tools, which typically produce clips based solely on text prompts. “Our thesis is that these models aren’t really set up for real, professional-grade creators,” Talukdar says. “It’s very difficult for serious filmmakers to create things with that.”
While users can begin with a prompt, they can also upload scenes shot with real actors and ask Marey to generate similar footage—with altered objects, backgrounds, or costumes. The AI preserves actor movements, including mouth motion, allowing speech to be seamlessly dubbed or interpreted more loosely.
In a demo for Fast Company, Talukdar showcased an AI-generated clip of a running bison, where both the camera angles and the animal’s motion closely mimicked an existing car commercial-style reference provided to Marey.
Filmmakers can further refine the generated video, dragging objects to animate them or specifying camera movement for virtual pans and zooms. In the coming months, Moonvalley plans to roll out additional features for controlling lighting and audio, and for defining characters and placing them on a virtual set, Talukdar says.
The company is also beta testing a tool called Voyager, designed to help users manage character libraries and adjust lighting and scene details with increasing precision—far beyond the capabilities of early prompt-only video tools.
“Our conviction is, you’re not going to make a movie on a chatbot,” Talukdar says. “You need a lot more sophisticated tooling.”
Rather than replacing filmmakers or generating entire films automatically, Moonvalley’s goal is to create AI software that serves as a “power tool” for creators. According to Talukdar, Marey can help level the playing field between big-budget studio productions and independent filmmakers by enabling complex scene creation at a fraction of the cost.
Although the system currently generates about 10 seconds of video at a time, the model and control tools maintain a strong enough grasp of continuity to allow filmmakers to extend those sequences or generate related shots for full scenes.
“The directors can realize the full extent of their creative vision,” he says. “The way that they want that scene to look is how they’re going to make that scene look rather than having to be deeply constrained,” he says.
Marey was developed in collaboration with studio Asteria, cofounded by Bryn Mooser and Natasha Lyonne, which is using the tool to develop its feature film Uncanny Valley.
Moonvalley raised $70 million in seed funding last year from backers including Bessemer Venture Partners, Khosla Ventures, and General Catalyst, and is currently in the midst of a new fundraising round.
Subscription plans are available at $14.99, $34.99, and $149.99 per month, each with varying credit limits to use the AI; additional credits can be purchased as needed. Talukdar says credit prices are expected to drop quickly as faster computing chips become available.
To assemble licensed training data, Moonvalley partnered with independent filmmakers, commercial creators, YouTubers, and studios globally. Talukdar himself reached out to potential contributors, helping the company collect a diverse range of footage. In some cases, they even acquired physical media to extract unique training data.
“Any kind of filmmaker, for every minute of footage that they actually publish, they probably have 10 to 100 minutes of B-roll that’s just kind of sitting there,” Talukdar says.
Войдите, чтобы добавить комментарий
Другие сообщения в этой группе
The flash floods that have devastated Texas are already a difficult crisis to manage. More than 100 people are confirmed dead
Amazon is extending its annual Prime Day sales and offering new membership perks to Ge
How would you spend $342 billion?
A number of games called “Spend Elon Musk’s Money” have been popping up online, inviting users to imagine how they’d blow through the
As Elon Musk announced plans over the Fourth of July weekend to establish a third political party,
Dolores Ballesteros, a Mexico-based mother of two, was getting desperate. Her 6-year-old son kept hitting his brother, age 3, and seemed angry at her all the time. No matter what she did, she coul
Rarely has Silicon Valley experienced a more profound period of transformation than it has in the past handful of years. The big VC boom of 2020–2021. The great VC hangover starting in 2022. The g
