Google is forging deeper into AI video generation, launching a new version of video model Veo 3, a new AI video tool called Flow, and a strategic partnership with director Darren Aronofsky, who is launching a new storytelling venture called Primordial Soup which will seek to use the emerging tech to create compelling content.
“Filmmaking has always been driven by technology. After the Lumiere Brothers and Edison’s ground-breaking invention, filmmakers unleashed the hidden storytelling power of cameras,” Aronofsky said in a statement. “Later technological breakthroughs – sound, color, vfx – allowed us to tell stories in ways that couldn’t be told before. Today is no different. Now is the moment to explore these new tools and shape them for the future of storytelling.”
Primordial Soup has inked a strategic partnership with Google DeepMind to work with researchers and filmmakers on original films, with the first effort, Ancestra (directed by Eliza McNitt) debuting at the Tribeca Film Festival next month. The film blends live action (with, the company notes, SAG-AFTRA actors) alongside imagery created by gen AI tech.
Aronofsky’s venture comes as Google unveils Veo 3 and Flow, hoping to turbocharge the AI filmmaking process. Thomas Iljic, product lead at Google Labs, tells The Hollywood Reporter in an interview that it was use cases from creatives that sparked the development of Flow.
“We often only offered text to video [in prior models], but the quality of the model had reached a point where we started seeing highly creative folks starting to create three, four minute kind of shorts. And that told us, okay, there’s something there,” Iljic says. “We were like, it’s starting to becoming a paint brush that’s useful enough for the highly creative people. And so we went back to the drawing board, basically for the past six months, working with a bunch of these AI filmmakers to understand what are the main things when they think about their idea and they want to lay it down and they want to actually get their vision into place, what’s missing?”
Matthieu Kim Lorrain, creative lead at Google DeepMind, says that the company spent time talking to bothAI-focused filmmakers and more traditional filmmakers when developing Veo 3.
“We’re talking to very different audiences across the creative community. AI filmmakers and early adopters are an exciting one,” he says. “Another community we’re talking to a lot are what I call traditional filmmakers, top filmmakers in the industry, all respected figures we all know, because we think they have, of course, that incredible expertise, and they have very hard problems to solve, and Veo 3 can help. And here are a lot of use cases we’re seeing already.”
You can see the trailer for Primordial Soup’s Ancestra below.
