Want to weave different video clips generated by Stability AI into your movie? Now you have the tools to do it.
Morph Studio, with its proprietary text-to-video model, has just introduced an AI filmmaking platform. The eponymous tool takes the form of a storyboard, allowing users to create and edit shots by entering text prompts for different scenes, and then combining them to create a coherent narrative.
Powering the creation process is a partnership between Morph and Stability AI, but eventually Morph plans to introduce a series of generative video models for users to choose from. At Morph, we call the generation, editing, and cross-cutting processes “workflow.” Users can share their own production workflows with Morph's community of creators, and others can clone and modify templates by simply changing her AI prompts.
“In traditional filmmaking, shooting, editing, and post-production were separate steps, but AI blurs the boundaries between these stages and turns them into one continuous process. “AI has introduced a new workflow to filmmaking,” Morph co-founder Xu Huaizhe said in an interview with TechCrunch.
Xu is part of the computer vision doctoral team. A dropout from the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, he founded his Morph Studio in 2023. He sees his CapCut, ByteDance's popular video editing app that also leverages AI, as a potential competitor to his Morph, and wants to make sure his startup is not. I am. Another he can be easily replaced with the ByteDance app. ”
According to Xu, Morph's moat depends on building a vibrant user community. “Community is irreplaceable,” said the founder. Regarding the technical moat, Xu said Morph has put a lot of effort into fine-tuning the model “to suit creators' needs.”
Morph currently employs about 10 people and has raised $2.5 million in funding from Baidu Ventures.
Meme generation
Xu's commitment to building communities around video is evident in Morph's first product effort: a place to share AI-generated memes. The startup started with a mission to tackle high-definition video, but to explore use cases, he first tweaked the model for creating GIFs from text prompts.
“Young people these days communicate and consume news through memes,” says Hsu. “There are a lot of image-based communities, like Reddit and 9gag, but until now there hasn't been a video-based online community.”
This observation led Xu to create a Telegram group where people can “talk” only through GIFs. Within days, the group's membership grew to 300, with users posting GIFs of him featuring Elon Musk in a spacesuit, Donald Trump dancing at a disco, and more. These were all generated with his AI model in Morph. A similar Discord channel of his was also started later. Recently, Morph has been focusing its resources on improving its film production platform.
“We found that people don't really care if a GIF looks a little fake. They like knowing it was generated by AI,” says Xu. “People use memes to convey a greater meaning than words can express.”