The team at Moonvalley, a Los Angeles-based AI video-generation startup, doesn’t think you can prompt your way to making a movie. That’s why the company on Tuesday opened up its “3D-aware” model to the public, promising a “hybrid” approach that gives filmmakers more control than other standard text-to-video models.
Moonvalley first launched its model, named Marey, in beta in March and has now released it as a monthly credits-based subscription. Users can pay $14.99 for 100 credits, $34.99 for 250 credits, and $149.99 for 1,000 credits. Users can generate clips up to five seconds long, which is in line with industry standards for publicly available video-generation models.
The startup, co-founded by former DeepMind researchers who worked on Google’s own video-generation model, claims Marey is one of the few models trained entirely on openly licensed data. That fits neatly with Moonvalley’s target customers: filmmakers who want to avoid future lawsuits over AI-generated content that might resemble copyrighted material.
For independent filmmaker Ángel Manuel Soto, Marey’s biggest selling point is that it democratizes access to the top AI storytelling tools, especially for people who have long felt shut out of traditional filmmaking. Growing up in Puerto Rico, Soto said you’d first need to scrape together hundreds or thousands of dollars just to rent cameras to make a film.
“Back home, we needed to ask for permission to tell our stories,” he said. “AI gives you the ability to do it on your own terms without having to say no to your dreams because someone refused to finance it, because they didn’t think a story from your country could return a profit.”
Now, Soto says, Marey has helped him cut production costs by 20% to 40% and work more freely.
Soto previously worked with Moonvalley’s studio, Asteria, on the HBO docuseries “Menudo: Forever Young.” Asteria, also known as XTR, was acquired this year by Moonvalley, according to Hemant Taneja, CEO of General Catalyst. (GC was a major shareholder in Asteria and invested more money into the combined entity.)
Source: https://techcrunch.com/
