Google unveiled Flow on Tuesday, its new artificial intelligence filmmaking tool designed to help professional and upstart directors develop scenes for TV shows and movies.
The new model was announced at Google I/O, the tech giant’s annual developer conference held in Mountain View, California. Google shared several core Flow features, including:
Scenebuilder: lets filmmakers “seamlessly edit and extend existing shots — revealing more of the action or transitioning to what happens next with continuous motion and consistent characters,” according to the company’s explainer
Camera Controls: allows directors to “master” their shot with “direct control over camera motion, angles and perspectives”
Flow TV: a showcase of clips, channels and content created with Veo, Google’s generative video model, that will give users prompts and techniques that they may want to use in their own AI-backed videos
Flow is designed to work hand-in-hand with Google’s other AI video tools, including the aforementioned Veo, Gemini and Imagen, its text-to-image model. When creators make a subject or scene, they will be able to integrate them into different clips and scenes using Flow; they will also be able to use a previous scene image to generate a new scene.
Thomas Iljic, director of product management at Google Labs, told TheWrap he is excited about Flow because it will help filmmakers enter their “creative zone,” where they can show and tell exactly what they want.
“Growing one shot into the next, it should feel like molding clay. With Flow and the level of control it offers, you can iterate on your ingredients and audition different things easily like camera angles, subjects, locations, lighting,” Iljic explained. “This is a tool for those moments of exploration and a place where you can bring a story to life.”
Flow evolved from VideoFX, a Google Labs experiment that the company started last year. The new tool is available to subscribers of Google AI Pro, which costs $19.99 per month, and Google AI Ultra, which runs $249.99 per month, in the U.S. starting today; Google said it plans on rolling the tool out to more markets in the near future.
The company also said it has been working with filmmakers before its official launch to better understand what creators are looking for. Those directors include Henry Daubrez, Junie Lau, and Dave Clark, who used AI to develop his two recent short flicks, “Battalion” and “NinjaPunk.” (The image for this story comes from an AI-generated image from Lau’s upcoming short film “Dear Stranger.”)
In related news on Tuesday, Google was one of the new investors that was announced in Promise, the LA-based film studio that was behind “NinjaPunk.” Other investors include Crossbeam Venture Partners, the Michael Ovitz-tied VC firm, and Andreessen Horowitz.
While AI continues to quickly weave its way into Hollywood, many stars have said they are wary of it becoming too integral to the production process. For more on how stars like Ben Stiller, Aubrey Plaza and Joseph Gordon-Levitt are pushing back on how AI models are trained using copyrighted material, click here.
