Transcript: Karim Youssef: THOLIN, Voyager 7, Dishonorable and Making Films With the Tool He Built

Live on Instagram for the first time

0:07 [music] Hey, we are back and live. And I just needed to make sure that we needed to not unmute ourselves. There we are live on Instagram today for the first time ever. And we've got a very very special creator session here with my boy Kareem. Can't uh believe that it's taken this long to get you on the show, honestly. But, uh, thank you so much for joining, man. Well, thanks for having me. And, you know, it's better late than never. So, [laughter] let's go. And if you're new to the show, let us know whereabouts the world you're tuning in from. Glenn's already there letting us know from New York City, baby.

0:54 We got San Francisco in the house. We got Canada in the house. We got more Canada's in the house. Oh, let's go. Let's go. Should have flown in to come and join you, gents. Well, it won't be too long, Mary, to be honest of you. I think that our paths will cross sooner rather than later, to be honest. Sacramento in the building. Let's go. We got Lebanon as well. We're international. Yeah, Lebanon. You got England. Where people are coming from. Kazakhstan. Here we go. Man. And the difference in people's backgrounds as well, I've noticed as well. Some come from advertising, film making, music, video making. Some are just straight up like never been a creative before in their lives and just, you know, AI's enabled

1:40 them to get into the game. It's fascinating. Exactly. Oh man, it's so good to be back on another creator session. We were live yesterday and we watched Kareem's piece yesterday, but we're going to watch it again today. Dishonorable. But the story about that man, I wrote about it in the newsletter today. Just crazy how you posted it and then it didn't get the love it deserved for some unknown reason on the X algorithm, but it blew the hell up on Instagram, which is really interesting to see. But then you discovered that someone had taken your exact post, posted it without your consent and without tagging you. Um, and the strangest thing, Andrew, was that this person wasn't someone with like hundreds of thousands of followers.

Dishonorable, reposted without credit

2:26 They literally had less than a thousand followers like something. Yeah. It went 200 followers and it just went bonkers. It It reached hundreds of thousands of people and then Karine retweeted this complaining about it being stolen and not getting the credits. And his retweet went butt viral as well. But nice. What a crazy sort of like way to get your thing out to get the justification of the views it deserves, right? It's the the funny thing is I I was not really complaining about the guy because I don't think like the 200 follower account expected this to blow up. But the video was more about the algorithm. And I was like, how is it possible that I post a video, it gets thousand views, then another account that has 200 followers posts the video without any like tags or something because you know like you you

3:18 tag the people that were involved blah blah blah and that somehow decreases your reach by thousandfold which you know it was it escalated a bit because then the community got involved and I think I really think this guy wasn't expecting this to happen and for it was less about him personally than more just like in general where I'm like what is this algorithm on X because on other social platforms um for example Instagram I feel is much more consistent with um if you post a video uh well I've found it on Instagram too on other accounts um but it was less annoying because I got my views in on my own content whereas on X right I didn't get any views And sadly what

4:05 got traction uh because Selma you always says Twitter loves drama and that's just how it is man like [laughter] there's [ __ ] drama and you start complaining and then all of a sudden the post blew up for all the wrong but that's the algorithm game at the moment. It's it's so hard to still and it's it's not a science because you'll get anonymalies like this. So, it's uh yeah, and it I found it happens across pretty much all platforms. I see it happen on LinkedIn. I've seen it happen on on well, don't know about Facebook. I don't know if anyone posts on Facebook anymore, but I've seen it happen on in uh on X as well. So, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It happens all the time, doesn't it? And like these things are so beyond our comprehension because they are crunching billions of

4:55 parameters that we could never hold in our head. So, it's just, you know, the reason I brought attention to it out of the gate is just because great creative might not get the love it deserves in a certain platform, but eventually other platforms and, you know, whatever spiral makes it go, it will catch on hopefully. And it's something just to be aware of that, you know, um it crazily blew up in Instagram, you know, like 7K blue views, which is what it deserves, you know, and on X, it's such a strange place at the moment. And if you're I see a lot of it in WhatsApp groups, people don't know what to post on X in order to be relevant and stuff like this. And they're looking at alternatives and so yeah, even threads, you know, can be very hateful towards AI and stuff like this.

5:41 Um Oh, yeah. Shout out to uh just shout out to all the AI haters because they're always like when when you start reading the haters, you know, okay, now we're viral. Now we're outside of the bubbles. They help with their engagement. So, thank you to all the haters that engage with the post and help. [laughter] Very, very true. But what you did was actually smart and I mentioned it yesterday is that at the end you put your name in it. And I think that's what's going to have to happen soon is that people not nec like there was a I don't know if you remember in when hip-hop probably early 2000s all of the producers were putting their names in in the songs because like they was like this is Jezy Fizzle and all of this because it's like nobody could copy it.

Should you watermark your work?

6:28 You almost got to do that now but you could have [laughter] a producer mate. Yeah. subtly putting your your face in in the video or subtly putting something that people know is you so you can't they can't get away because you'll always say look that's me that's my trademark and I think that's what might have to happen because people then just try and just take it for themsel or two things I think some people will try and play it like it's theirs or somebody might be sharing it out of love but people think it's theirs so they're like I don't know who the creator is I'm just sharing it but people's like oh this must be you because you shared it So this is why I think it's important to start putting those little like little Yeah, I I used to put watermarks in my video, but then I find them very ugly. So this time I was like, "Okay, let me just put my name there." And then afterwards I realized, well, I should have put my handle there too, I guess.

7:19 But you know, then it becomes all this weird thing where I'm like, why would you not just do the simple thing and click one repost? Yeah. uh click and repost it, but you go through the lengths of downloading it, re-uploading it, and I'm like, okay, you know, I was just So, the problem is the problem is we've always had people stealing. I don't know if you I'll just very quickly tell you this story before we get into the videos cuz it's one of the best documentaries I've ever seen. And everyone in the chat, if you've seen this one, let us know. But there was this guy back in it was the 70s and his name was Michael Jackson. And he had a group and in his group he created this song and it was called Blame It on the Boogie and he created this song and it was like he was putting it together and it was like he was getting excited and he was saying to his friends I could

8:10 I just can't control my feet and he was like let's put that in the song and he put it in the song and then his manager took that song and he had a meeting with Michael Jackson's dad and he was the guy Michael Jackson's dad was asking for songs and he played this song which hadn't been released and then he looked at the song and goes, "Can we have this song?" So, the manager sold that song Behind Their Back, the Jacksons created Blame It on the Boogie, which is what we know nowadays, and this guy called Michael Jackson, which is the same name. You don't hear about him anymore. And in fact, the day it was released, the week it was released, they released it at the same time, and there was this big thing, especially in the UK, who's going to win Mick. They called him Mick Jackson or Michael Jackson and the Jackson 5. And obviously, he won, but he created that song and it was stolen from him. So, the moral of the story, got to find think of ways to be creative to put your watermark in the in the

9:01 graffiti in the background or something cuz when I heard that story, I felt so sorry for crazy. You don't get over that. You don't get over that. That is, you know, Uncanny Harry when he was having Uncanny Harriet posters and stuff, it made me think about producer tags, you know, like um when you hear like a producer tag, you can hear it throughout a beat, you know, and what is that subtle way of having it's great actually segue because Kareem has such a style, you know, like he has a very particular style that he's known for and this is the next level visuals is what stood out Kareem, you know, throughout and this is a great segue even to start Because this video that we're going to start with is only a 13-second clip, but it's 3 years old, Andrew. And already at this time, Kareem was experimenting with like liveaction

Why recreate Chainsaw Man in live action?

9:53 versions of like anime shows, which is what you're really into, right, Kareem? You know, and this one is called Chainsaw Man. So, do you just want to tell us about how this came and what got it was so viral and what happened with it? So, uh, the, uh, Chainsaw Man one came out last year, November, I think. So, it's not, uh, as as old. It came out when Nano Banana came out and Okay. Yeah. I wanted to try Nano Banana and I also wanted to, uh, just, you know, practice my directing and my like scene building. So, growing up on anime and I was always a big fan of of anime in general, I thought, okay, how can I train and get better without having to reinvent

10:40 universes and characters? And then I realized, well, I can just take anime that and and scenes that I know I like and are iconic and are just cool and are what I want to be able to do myself one day and just recreate them because that forces you to take them apart frame by frame and understand how do they paste these things? What do they put in there? And the first one was the iconic con scene from Chainsaw Man. And that was my first viral video which had uh you know a million views very quickly on Instagram. It had a million on uh on Twitter. Then I saw it like blow up in Japan where it had even more. So, this like went around and it kind of um I like to believe that it kicked off the AI

11:29 liveaction anime wave because after I posted that video, not long after I saw it popping up everywhere and people like also recreating the scene that I made and it was crazy because after I did that video, even Duolingo Japan made the con video again which at that point that episode was already older, you know. So, it's it could be a coincidence. I like to believe that this was just, you know, such a big cultural moment also for the show that, you know, I I was like, "Okay, let's continue." Because again, um, shout out to Salma. Uh, she told me back then like, "If you see that something works, like double down and do more of that." And so, I was like, "Okay, if this works, then I'll keep

12:17 doing that." And that's how I started building this account. So this would be like the first key takeaway that I learned was that is like just experiment. Try a bunch of things. Try something that you actually like. Like don't try to do something because you want it to go viral or do numbers or something, but do something that you really enjoy that you're really into. Yeah. And keep doing it. And if you see that something pops off and people like it, then build on that because that's your hint that this is what's working. People enjoy it. So now you have a beautiful overlap of I like doing it and there's people that enjoy watching it. And um yeah, that's how it all got started because I initially made the content to promote Let's AI. Like I'm the co-founder of Let's AAI.

13:06 Um, and to promote the platform, we decided, like, you know, a lot of other platforms to just start making content to show what the platform can do. And that's what we said, Andrew, wasn't it? It's like, why aren't you using your platforms to make advertising for yourselves with in-house people? We're going to get through to all of that in a minute, by the way. Um, this 13-second clip for Chainsaw Man is really crazy. Now that you've explained that it was Nano Banana, it makes total sense why it Oh, that makes a lot of sense. Did you hear the ice cream van a minute ago, by the way, Andrew? No, I didn't hear it. Oh, you didn't hear it? Damn it. He He made an appearance on a Wednesday, but uh [laughter] I think it was too too dim for people to hear. But let's check it out. Chainsaw Man live action.

CHAINSAW MAN LIVE ACTION

14:00 Cool. Okay, it did unmute ourselves, it looks like. Oh, nice. Okay, good. That is I was worried cuz we're live on Instagram and it was automatically muting ourselves, but yeah, apparently it's okay. Yes, that is crazy. You can see why it went viral instantly. You know, that looks like it was made last week, not like a year and a bit ago. Like that's crazy that you made that so long ago and it looks that's what I mean Andrew about his style. You know I've known Kareem as Next Level Visuals but going back into his history it's always been that way. You know whatever the boundary is that video was at Kareem was always pushing it basically. Um and using the models exactly like we said inhouse to make next level stuff like that to go viral made with Let's AI.

14:50 Here's the prompt. He's even shared prompts to me and when he shares a let's say I link it shares the actual prompt alongside the video clip that he's generated or you know when Cream came out as an image model for example he was showing me a load of characters with the prompts exactly how he created the character uh very very useful and uh California can we see it again yes of course let's watch it again Cool. Wild stuff. Just wild. And 13 seconds to get million views,

15:35 you know? That's how like visually like impactful it it can be because three at that time. Chainsaw Man is also like very very well-known franchise. So that is another part of it is is like it was so iconic and never before done in live actions. Chainsaw Man doesn't have a lot I mean Chainsaw Man is like if for those who don't know it's an anime about the guy who can turn into a chainsaw demon and his head and arms become so you know it's very out there. It's very out there, but um it has a huge fan. A niche fan base, but it's big. You know, as you say, it's like it's like any like football or racing or cars or anything has got like a diehard fan base. So, if you know, you know. That's the type of thing you share with your friends. That's why it goes viral.

16:24 You you can totally see, but it's authentic to you, which is, as you said, the most important bit. You didn't just do it because it was algorithmic. you actually enjoy that content and wanted to remake and learn how to do that in the AI sphere, which is the underlying message here. You know, essentially whatever you're into, you know, there's an audience out there if you can find viral natures for it. There's like I've never seen one to this date. I've seen the most obscure stuff that you think there's no way that can get a million views and somehow some guy will make it or some make it and you're like, whoa. I've even seen R2-D2 toasters, you know, like what whatever it may be. Like this guy like he he he made 10 million followers on an Instagram account just about this one toaster and you're like for real, how do you do this? This [laughter] is a it's a creative mind getting out content.

Where did Karim come from?

17:15 You know, that's the thing. It's the creative mind. So, what I'd love to do is I'd love to hear more about your creative mind, Kim. Like, where did you come up with these ideas? Like, like was it something as a kid you've always thought about? Was it something where you like you've kind of had the idea but now the technologies caught up to your idea so you can make it happen like like give us a bit of background of how you got into this space. Yeah. So I always had a vivid fantasy. I always was into fantasy like as a kid it was like Lord of the Rings, Star Wars then at some point I discovered anime and I initially wanted to study uh 3D design uh when I was young and I grew up in Luxembourg. I am from Luxembourg. And so my mom said, "You're going to get or learn something to get a real job because you will never find a job with this 3D

18:04 stuff in Luxembourg, right?" Um, so that's what I did. I did the second best thing and took my creativity to the agency. So with our agency Neon Internet, shout out to Neon. I'm actually wearing one of our t-shirts. Um I started doing the concepts for marketing campaigns. So you know basically what I now do in film just a more tamer version to kind of you know just apply this creativity in that environment but I always wanted to do uh films or series. So I always dabbled in uh Blender for example, Unreal Engine. I made like little things there. Um, and yeah, 3D was

18:52 kind of my passion, but I was never very good at it because everybody that's tried it and attempted knows that it takes years to really become good. And there's a million disciplines like character design and rigging and animation and all these things are like disciplines that each discipline takes so long just to master that you cannot really do it on the side, right? [clears throat] And then when AI came out, that was the moment when I realized this might be your once in a-lifetime shot because it's I think I say once in a lifetime because a big established industry like film or entertainment doesn't change that often like this. Last time it changed was uh when Tron came out which was like what was it 89 or something when CGI became a thing and the entire

AI as a once in a lifetime shot

19:40 industry started working differently and yeah this time I felt like okay this is my passion. So it started really as a hobby but also as a job because finally I could apply it to my business and it was useful for the business for me to make this content and also to stay on top of the tools there's no better way to do it than to you know have your project I think like with anything you want to learn like if you just theoretically learn it is one thing but uh as we always say with our team is like um talking about the thing is not doing the thing planning the thing is not doing the thing, reading about the thing, doing the thing is doing the thing, and that's what makes you better, you know? You know what I really love about you too is that you're very practical about the way that you're going about your creativity.

The Seedance 2.5 launch ad for LetzAI

20:31 Like the next clip we're going to show, I'm going to ask Andrew and give him a bit more context around this, but um you can explain to us how Let's AI started and why you're doing exactly this type of world building for your creativity. But as an example, like a straight, there's been loads of these examples to date, Andrew, but I've grabbed a recent one where they added Cance T2.5 to the platform, so you can go use it there. And then Kareem made this. Sorry. Sorry. So sorry about this. [panting and sighs] She dance 2.5ish

21:25 now live on lech AI. Let's [ __ ] go. Give me a credit. Sweet. We can go up to 30 seconds now. Editing. They are not real.

22:13 They got Frank. You said they're not real. Phew. That was intense, huh? Love it. Love it, mate. Absolutely awesome. You know what's so fun about it is you mentioned there Andrew about having, you know, the producer tag and did you see the little L throughout the logo? Yeah. Yeah. It was on the credit. It was on the front and the back of the device, the handheld. It was everywhere, you know. And this is exactly what you was referring to, I assume. You know, like having smart integrations of your branding throughout a video, like constantly there to remind people

23:03 even if they don't know what that might mean. It's like you're just showing this L almost subjectively like subconsciously, you know, like uh throughout videos. It's brilliant. And did that one perform well? This one performed well but the one before performed better where because uh yeah maybe I can explain a bit how this came to be because as like in this journey of having the first viral videos and really understanding how socials work and understanding that the best thing to do is just do your own thing. I was like, let's not just do another, okay, this thing is here now. Uh, here is my product, buy my product, whatever. Um, we try to, my goal was very simple. I set out to make an advertisement

23:50 that you would like to watch where you're like, okay, that was actually fun to watch and not something that you kind of sit through. And that's how the whole thing started. So I was uh in a mindset of you know blank slate I can do whatever I want which is one of the perks of being a co-founder is like if my idea is cool enough to uh convince my partners then that's it there's no one else to like I've shown this to other friends that were like this is so cool but my client would never let me do this of course of course but you're in control here like as you said as the CMO your role is to get as many free impressions as possible through organic distribution in social media. And what's great here is that like the repeat world building of characters, Andrew, so check this one out.

The big-brain alien

24:40 So this is just another little clip that I found and I didn't tell Kareem I've even got this one. So this is these are the type of things that's really fun to me, you know, where like oh I you noticed within that large sea dance clip there, one of the alien characters. Well, check this out. For a skills and memory thing, this little brain puff was great. [music] Do you know what I mean? So simple, but such a powerful way. That's what I'm saying, mate. Like, you know, imagine that you needed to make a quick announcement and you needed like 10 of these videos

25:28 and you've got characters in your world. One of them is your alien character. So, you go, "Oh, you can expand his brain. This is the skills in memory." It's sort of a visual analogy. End with the logo. Bish bash Bosch. You know, you get 10 of these out and that's like maybe reached a million impressions. How much would that cost you? 10,000 $15,000 in real cash if you were gonna pay your way to reach that same audience. Like it's crazy good marketing as a CMO to do that type of stuff and just be able to this this was Sasha who did it. So that's the cool thing like we have a couple of people that's great in the in the team that that know how to do these things uh to a certain extent and so yeah as you can see is like

26:15 it just if you have the character locked in you can just have different people in the team work with it too and that is another beauty of it like you don't need to reinvent the wheel you know like it's like having your own little show you know you know your characters and at some point it's like intuitive of like oh yeah this character would do this and that or uh yeah, right? I'm going to um make up for my mistake earlier when I said the chainsaw man like was 3 years old. What I actually meant is Yuko. Yes. Your project that you made is three years old. This is the three years old one, isn't it? So, we're going to flash back and forward in time here, Andrew, because that was really fun the other day when we did that, wasn't it? We were looking at things made in 2024 and then we were looking at things made in Cance 2.5.

YUKO, three years ago

27:05 And I love the juxiposition for people that are new to the industry and don't know how far we've come. My first question about this before you introduce what Yuko is. Are you planning to redo Yuko in like a modern 2.5 era or is it something that you're going to continue the world of in some regard? Um the world is uh well this is I need to be very careful to not spoil anything here because um a big part of Yuko is Tholin. So okay what is Tholin episode one now you see like the prototype the first time that I had this idea for this character. Oh, so we have kind of or like I have had this idea like a lot of my ideas when I make videos is ideas that I've carried

27:55 like for sometimes years where y at some point in time the stars align and you're like you know what I'm actually going to give this one a shot and yeah so uh in this in a sense um I guess we're going to have a look at toolin 2 so people can see the difference really of exactly also how I approached it three years ago versus how I approached it this year. Yeah, that's key. Yeah. Yeah. Well, now I know that they're related. Obviously, we'll show those back to back. I was planning to show thin later, but yeah, let's do it. So, this as again for context for people three years ago, you know, most people had never even tried an AI image model or any LLM back three years ago. So, it's kind of insane that you were even pushing the boundaries of what was possible 3 years ago.

YUKO

28:46 And it obviously relates to Theren, but let's have a look. In this world, some of us are born, others [music] are made. My name is Yuko, and I was made two days ago. I have dreams about a past life. Yet I don't know who I am or why they're after me. The only thing I know is I want to be free. I want to live. I love that. Three years ago, man, as starting out, you know, posting on your YouTube channel, cuz Andrew and Meta Puppet both agreed to this. You know, many many creative ideas are brewing waiting for the technology to be able to unlock them, you know, and that

29:38 was clearly brewing in your mind and you were making examples, posting them to YouTube, building an audience, and then you had the platform to be able to get Tholin out to the world. And so tell me more about Tholin straight after that. How did that come to be? So um after working uh with PJ on um the Nexus wet markets of Kafar and the trailer we did uh for Nexus. I met Steven Kash. Shout out to Stephen. So around that time I was like okay maybe with sea dance is finally the time to you know give tholin a shot because it's one of your like it's I would say it is my most elaborate story that I thought about the most and that I have the most

How did THOLIN come together?

30:28 concrete scenes in mind and stuff and I started with a video that you actually saw like a little proof of concept to get a feeling of the world because I was like as we said earlier talking about the thing or thinking about the thing is not doing the thing. So I just started doing it, just started getting into it and started shaping it. And after we were done with Nexus, I worked uh very well with Stephen and he's a traditional filmmaker. So also like someone that you can learn a great deal from. [snorts] And for him it was like he wanted to learn more about AI. So he just, you know, straight up told me if you want to do something together, um like if you have any project that you could use some help, like just let me know. And I said, you know, matter of fact, [laughter] funny that you ask because I actually do have something.

31:19 And um then uh we talked a bit and you know, we're really sometimes you meet people that you feel like you've known a long time and you're just on the same wavelength and with Stephen that was the case. So we just were like, "Okay, let's let's do it." And we actually the stars were aligned because for these two weeks we both had enough time to do it. So we did it in in a bit like I think it was two weeks and um that's like how it came together. So you can that's wild two weeks to get this together. I was there as you say for a lot of it in WhatsApp and we watched this on the live show Andrew so you'll recognize this piece. Um, Kareem also did a beat in the beginning which he asked me to like remaster and it made

32:05 um and it was you know I was just astounded by the next level visuals you sending me. I was like dude and then I you know I did the proper thing today in the creator session. I dive back into your YouTube and brought those pieces up which I wasn't telling you that I was going to do and I was like ah I see where it all came from now. You know, the Chainsaw Man live action, the you know, the Yuko project that then turns into Don. I've seen I've seen Kareem after the next level visuals, Andre and then I went back to see that he's always been doing this basically, you know, like push it pushing it for three years. It's awesome. What what I can also say is that what you just said is absolutely right. And it's also important to understand that I want to like anime has this thing about it where they manage to create real epicness and realistakes

What anime does better

32:54 because in anime one of your f it's a bit like Game of Thrones if you will where your favorite character can die at any moment is like whereas if you watch something um for western audiences a lot of the times it's like shielding the viewer so they they don't feel too sad while watching uh the episode or the film and anime has this thing where um it has a lot of parallels with AI film making because first of all a lot of it is is handdrawn. So they they have a lot of the same issues that we have with AI where they have to tell a lot of emotion for example without having the luxury of detailed facial expressions. They they have to draw the faces. There's only so much you can do. So, they have really mastered um invoking emotions and stakes and like when it's epic, it's really really epic.

33:45 And I always wanted to see more of that in live action. Um and that's what I'm trying to and working towards mastering to bring this epicness and this approach to it. Um, which also for example, Dishonorable is a great example where I just wanted to make something that's just like epic and there's like if you break down the action and this is what anime can do really well. It's not that much happening but when something is happening it is it builds up to that happening and then just one move can already be like oh my god this is craziness. You know it was epic watching Dishonorable yesterday. I was saying to Kareem in the green room how great the music was Andrew when we watched it yesterday. Remember and uh we're going to watch it again later on today about say we're going to play it again maybe the show yesterday.

34:34 Yeah. But without further ado, you know, we've learned the Yukio uh has led to Dolan and Dolan is an 8minute piece to strap into. Um so get ready guys and get your questions about how this all came together. It is really next level. I love also the explanation about, you know, all characters could die at any minute and that's the type of anticipation and world building you want because again that makes a lot of sense to this type of environment. So let's check it out. Cyberpunk. [music] [music] [music] [music] Con, come upstairs now.

THOLIN EPISODE 01

35:25 I'm busy now. Come on. Come on. [music] [music] [music] [music]

36:12 He's at Senden. [music] Bring me my chrome alive. Batau will be there. Don't leave a mess. Line disconnected. What's wrong with him? Why don't you ask him yourself? Kim is doing more than you right now. Always happy to help. Always happy to help. [panting] Thank you.

37:01 Are you the stitch? My gear, it's bricked. Yeah. No [ __ ] [panting] [ __ ] Good morning, sunshine. Promise me I'll end up looking better than that guy. If you do, you won't know it. Anna, I'm putting you under.

37:46 Close your eyes and take a deep breath. Diagnostics complete. Results inconclusive. So, custom job. What else? Implants are unregistered. I will keep digging. Initiating procedure. Sincha, customers upstairs.

38:33 Okay, Kim, I'm coming. Excuse me. We're not taking any customers. Chin Chaba Mera track that unknown substance risatic [music] growth particulate conductive it is damaging surrounding cells 3 mm since scan [music] start trajectory spinal column then brain stem what is this you've gotten so tall but you're still the same handsome boy how's your father still a very impatient Man, Hanoi is full of them these days.

39:22 Component is I am unable. Stay with me. The substance is signal active. It is interfering with my system. The man you have is dangerous. [music] Jin, when you were little, you used to hide here. Who fed you when your father didn't come home? Don't pretend you're here to protect me. Where is he? He's downstairs with a woman.

40:10 Full manual override. Your call, Anna. This is not what your father would do. My [music] father sent me. Overwrite [music] manual control set. [clears throat] initiating lockdown. [cough] [gasps] Don't forget who I am, boy.

40:57 Lockdown has been initiated. Mera, what's happening? Rebooting. Your safety is our priority. My open the door on it. You touch her and you'll be [music] the next body in the basement.

41:48 [snorts] Mirror, override security. I can't get past the lockout. Someone is taking the elevator.

42:33 What the hell? Hey, I was in the credits. I forgot about your name in the credit. Oh, I also saw the watermark as well at the beginning with your name and Steven's name. I love that as well. But overall, California Girls already said one.

43:21 That was really cool. Oh my god, there's no voting on this one, guys. The main show, the greatest are the best in the world. That's what we bring to you. You know, they don't need voting. They uh oh, you know, Mary got the qu the best thing here. When Destiny comes calling for the Thorin into the MCU universe, do you say yes or do you pull a Denji and ask [laughter] toast the jam? What does that mean? What does Denji and toast the jam mean? Give some explanation. I mean, uh, first I'm not too sure about the what I would do. It would depend a lot on the conditions around it and uh yeah how much creative freedom one is uh was given

Would he take THOLIN to Disney?

44:09 the the Denji uh toast uh I'm sorry but I'm I'm not getting the reference. [laughter] Oh Mary give us give us more give us more heads. I mean Denji is from Chainsaw Man. So I agree with this though. The fact that you made this in two weeks means that basically you forgot what sleep looks like because that's insane that you pulled that out in two. That's both both of them are true. Uh and another thing is a fun fact about this is that we created 13 versions of the script before we were happy with our that was what Lara's question was was it script first? Uh um it's a back and forth really. So first um it's like finding the characters

13 versions of the script, and the move to Vietnam

44:55 and um so initially I wrote this to take place in the Philippines for some reason. I have like some friends from the Philippines whatever but it's not like I've never been there. I have no attachment to the I just thought like Southeast Asia would kind of be a different twist um just locationwise. And then Stephen is Vietnamese and like Vietnamese American. [snorts] And then he was like, "Do you mind if we like switch this to Vietnam because then I can actually tell you what it's like and like we can draw from real stories and real culture." Totally. And we did that. And funnily enough, we both liked the soundtrack so much because the soundtrack is in the native language of the Philippines. And he was like, "Yeah, leave it in. It's just such a banger. We're going to leave this in as like a tribute."

45:47 Um, and it's very funny because a lot of uh people from the Philippines commented under the video were, "Oh my god, this is my language." Yeah. And Lara got the music, too. You know, I think the music was very important to that. And I was very honored that I saw my name even being involved in just the remastering cuz you made the music. You just sent me it to remaster. So, I didn't really remaster. You did. I heard I listened to it on like speakers and everything. It's really crisp. Is uh Oh, that's great. We're also working on the music video by the way which has been in the works for a while now because there was so much again back and forth and then like we have it almost done but then we're both like I don't know something is missing we need to you know and then I'm like oh my god it's already been almost three months you know [laughter]

How many projects can you run at once?

46:36 right question [clears throat] I had when you're working on a project like this as you said it's like two weeks u non-stop how hard is it to then go back to client work or go back to your work or are you just like I don't want to. It must be really hard because you're excited working on this and then you've got to go back totally get your energy back to CMO mode. Yeah, you're you're absolutely spot on. And in this one it was actually um not so hard because I kind of just took some time off to do it. Like I was still doing other things but it is exactly how you say it. It's very hard to go back to a project that you know somebody else has the lead and tells you what to do and that kind of stuff.

47:22 Especially when it's like advertising, uh it can be very challenging with with clients sometimes. Um, but I also discovered for myself and learned about myself that the way for me to do it is to just not have more than two, maximum three projects at the same time because I feel it's important to kind of live in that world and not be like thinking about other stuff uh too much. And that is another lesson that I feel like a lot of our friends too um discovered where it's you have to say no sometimes because you have all these opportunities some like you work very hard then opportunities come and then you want to say yes to everything but you can't it's not sustainable you need to decide and actually a lot of my friends uh decided to

48:14 take a step back from the commercial work and to work more on their own things because I also think we're now in a period where that can really pay off if you take some time because you basically have two strands right or two two routes to go right now. It's like you either just work on your own thing or you work on someone else's thing. [laughter] I mean that's like if you work for someone else of course you have to pay the bills etc. But you need to be aware that um if you keep doing that you're building their brand and not your own. Totally. Totally. And I think as an active creator, you have to constantly have those creative moments as well. So, it's a balance, as you say. I think two to three is a lot for most people.

49:01 They wouldn't be able to do two to three big projects alongside a day-to-day job. But, it's good that you know that you you found your like tipping point, you know? So, if you're watching, don't think that you can also do two to three movies on the side as well as like a full-time job. That's what is something that to achieve or aim for at least you know or the other way around. Yeah. Right. So you might be working on two to three client pieces and one thing that you're working on as well. Exactly. Find your balance of week to week what you can do, how much you're willing to give, what your skill set provides. You know, you might be better at client work and not even realize it. That's the thing. And and it has also some advantages. Like right now I'm working on a very big project and I'm very focused on it.

Where Dishonorable came from

49:46 So I don't really have time to do a lot of other things which is by the way how dishonorable came to be because I was like I just want to do something again like I want to just have some fun generate something. No crazy story and whatever. And it can be very um like it can make things much simpler if you just get your script and your characters and everything and you just like just have to direct the episodes. But it's a different ballpark than if you have to come up uh with everything and take all these decisions and that is that is so in in a way uh if you have the right clients uh and like right now I really like it's a very good match everybody's like very well aligned we get along well output is there etc etc

50:33 then it's a real pleasure to work you know but then again that is also entertainment that right now is not agency so this is like for me a very important point too because at this point versus like just a couple of months ago I focus only on the studio entertainment side of things and uh I basically retreated for the most part of the agency because you know the people are handling it very very well and we just like need to to balance the the whole thing. Totally makes sense. That's why you have that's why you're the boss, you know. It's like you Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Other people to do it, you know. So, yeah. Being a co-founder and CMO means that you can actually give your, you know, other

51:19 people that Yeah. responsibilities and yeah, the characters that you've built, you know, the character sheets that you've gi to them and stuff like that's one of the main advantages of AI. So obviously the X-P prize was one of the things that grabbed your fancy as well and congrats on making top 10 man like um we honestly thought having watched all of them live even Jeff's we saw Jeff's emphasized and Andrew reminded about us yesterday when we watched it live that we did watch that in the same episode that we saw your one and it stood out like to us it would have been at least top three you would have been in LA doing that thing and it was just a testimony again cuz you I think with these projects you're a bit like Diane

Voyager 7 and the XPRIZE weekend

52:05 uh Afro Futcher this is in that if you've got a really good idea that you feel is worth entering because you know you're going to be up against really good ideas with $2.3 million then you'll find the time and just get it done in a weekend or something crazy short because that's what Diane does as well. Is just so like ready to go if the boundary is, oh, I've got a weekend, but I've got a good idea for the pitch or something. So, again, I Does that factor in? Did you think Voyager 7 was like something that you'd been cooking up that would really enter this competition and it would be worth entering? Was that why it made your two to three alongside your day job? Um it was actually quite funny because I was at uh the door brothers house with a couple of friends and then we started talking about ah you're submitting something and

52:53 I was so caught up in other work that for me I literally forgot about it and this was like the weekend before but then somehow I felt like you know what um it could give some good exposure because you know the judges and the people that are going to look at this you know who knows what's might come of it if the right people see your work, right? So, I didn't do it because I was like, oh, this is going to or can win or anything. I just thought if I can get just uh far enough that you know some industry people see my work, maybe something will come of it and that's what happened like I got approached and that is one of the like the main project that I'm working on right now. So, in that sense, I'm already very happy.

53:38 The other thing is that here um we just made this again in six day like six days basically. So I just told Stephen like you're going to hate me but uh I'm going to [laughter] I'm going to need your help. And then he's like does he have kids? [snorts] Does he have kids? You are both very lucky that you're in the prekid era, you know, because things will change as me and Paul and Andrew will rightfully tell you. You can't just tell your m your buddy, oh, can we do an all nighter on this project because kids to stop that from happening. So, eat it up whilst you can, man. That's what I'm doing about that. Yeah, that's what I'm doing. And the idea for Voyager 7 is also something that I've had in my mind for a very long time. Actually,

Why robots will reach the stars first

54:25 a lot of the pieces that I do, they are kind of connected in the sense that they all happen in the same universe, but in different timelines in a way. M that's so one thing that I wanted to explore is um this idea that or let me start this differently. One of the things that I find a bit annoying when it comes to um a lot of science fiction is that humans doing these long journeys in space would be very very hard if not impossible. And the pre like the stage before that would be sending robots. Like a robot will set foot on Mars before a human will. Like that is just in my mind it's obvious that we're going to send the robots.

55:12 The robots are going to build all the infrastructure and then when everything is ready that's when we go that we don't go there and build this ourselves. That's like that that would be very dangerous. Um people would totally sustain like just space radiation by itself without anything else going wrong very hard to deal with. It would be immoral almost. It yeah it would it would be it would cause a lot a lot of problems especially the further we go. So, I always wanted to do something that kind of shows robots not as um just machines in a way, but like copies of us that I always thought to myself that if humans ever make contacts with aliens on another planet, it will probably be with our technology, not with ourselves.

56:01 So they will find one satellite that we sent there a hundred years ago or maybe even a robot who is just exploring these planets and then they don't make contact with us directly. They're going to think the robots are the life forms and then to them it would be a crazy plot twist being like oh my god these these are not the like these are not they're not the final form. Yeah. They are just the creations of this other life form. Right. Right. And Yeah, somehow it's like uh um was it McLuhan that said that humans are just the sexual reproductive organs of the machines. That is a bit how I went about it was like okay what if we spin this and we say the hey Filipo what's up

56:47 and um the now I lost my uh my train of thought. No the robots think the robots yeah exactly. [snorts] So that the the robots um being the or or the point of humanity being or something that's inevitable is us creating these robots and the robots will explore the universe beyond what we would be physically able to do. Now I can't stop thinking about what type of like alien thing we'll encounter i.e. The technology that they've created that will be ultimately way spread further than their their [clears throat] civilization. It makes so much sense. And the more technologically advanced we get, the further and like Voyager,

57:34 the the original Voyager, which you've obviously named this after, isn't that like light years out into space now? Basically, it's gone the furthest thing of all. It's the furthest object. It was sent in like the the like the 1920s or something. Super early, wasn't it? Basically, one of the first ever rockets, Andrew, that was able to go as far as possible. And it's left the solar system and and whatever. And it's out there, right? Like right out there. So, yeah. Again, I love that idea of like, yeah, that's millions of miles away than Earth's humans have ever been and will ever be, no doubt. Like, how the hell we're even going to make it to a lightyear, I don't ever know. and these meat bags. But yeah, that's great context. Also, the idea that they will never come back did something to me, you know, and I think that's part of what this made this

58:27 trailer so powerful because I played with this intentionally that at first you think they're humans because they look like us. They you're like, "Oh my god, these are like badass mother. Look at them. They're like on these planets." [clears throat] And then you find out, oh, they're robots. But yeah, it does something to you because I think if we look into the future, robots in space travel will be like our ambassadors. And I always wondered why do we make robots in our shape? Like what would be a good argument for that? And I thought that well if exact if an alien meets us and he looks at our creation, he understands or assumes that we made them in our image. This is what we kind of look like. And you know for us it's a humanoid is a

59:13 deform on this planet that has had the most in surviving. But that is deep thinking. You know what my brain instantly thought is because there's no radiation on Mars and it's got a lot less gravity would probably be dwarfs there you know i.e. the ideal humanoid form would be very short because the taller you are the sort of more like blasted you'd get and stuff. It's crazy. Um, I saw that uh in the expanse, I don't know if you know that show, they have a really cool uh like because that is like a science fiction show that's like more on the science side than fiction. So everything they do is scientifically as accurate as possible and there is one scene where they bring a Mars guy to Earth and he's taller than the

59:59 others because of the low gravity. They are talking. He cannot stand properly on earth because his muscles are not made for exactly his body has never been exposed to that gravity. So he has to he's like that's what I'm saying struggling just to stand. You know that's what I'm we would have to export like humanoid robots in a factor form that would make sense to their gravity and all of the other factors on each individual planet. So it'd be like it would be hard actually because what we do right now is we do the ideal form factor nonhumanoid. You know, it's just a random box shape or a triangle shape. Have you seen that one? It's also got a helicopter drone. I think that was the one on Mars, actually. Um, it had a helicopter drone that left it and uh it like it was a little rover, Mars rover type thing, and

1:00:45 then a helicopter got out, flew in the environment, was made for the environment of Mars, which has very little wind. So, the blades look totally different to what you'd have on the Earth and stuff. Again all of this. Let's let's watch Voyager 7. We watched it at the time. As I said, we watched it and loved it at the time. It got straight ones from our audience. So, this is the first time you're seeing this. I'm surprised because it was very good in our show and then it popped off in social media, didn't it? Even the images, which we'll talk about afterwards, went actually more viral almost than the piece, which was crazy. But let's watch the piece first and then discuss the images.

VOYAGER 7

1:02:07 I want you to see something. And you can only see it at night. You see those lights out there? Mhm. Those are the last vessels of the Voyager expedition. [music] Do you think they get lonely up there sometimes, so far from home? I don't think so, my love. They won't be lonely. [music] They'll have so many adventures. They won't have time to be sad. What if what they find is scary? Then they'll have to be brave. [music] Do they come back?

1:02:59 No. [music] Never ever. Never ever, my love. [music] Not even to tell us what they found. [music] That would take a very very long time. [music] One day I will go with them [snorts] and I'm going to tell them everything about home [music] so they know where to find us. They found it. There is life out there and we are alive to see it.

1:03:47 How do you know? Because that's what we built them for. That's what Mr. [music] Wi said. And what else did you learn in school? He showed us how the engines work. [music] I discovered tons of aliens and name one after you. You would be so good at it. Oh, we uh are we muted? Oh, there we go. Was that the competition where it had to be is it dystopia

Who is the future really for?

1:04:35 and utopia? Yeah. positive vision of the future and the brief said like you know science fiction but again a bit more science than fiction. So they said like no crazy uh invented stuff please. Yeah, a beautiful message and so inspiring as Jason says and the my favorite part I mentioned this in when we watched it was the daughter interaction you know throughout the entire process Kareem was sending me these next level visuals Andrew and I was like go bigger on the environments you know the the just the giant environments and the small people it looks epic man it looks like next level I've seen a lot of the entries and it stands out but the bit that really stood stood out after all of it is the daughter interaction with the mother.

1:05:25 You know, the conversational based thing as well as Yeah. the emotion that ties it all together. That's why I really thought it was top three for me. You know what I think? Sorry, you're going I I was just about to say that um for me this is if we talk about the future even I don't even if I don't have kids like for me that that is the future. Like if we're talking about the future, it's not for us. we're like, you know, relatively old when we're talking about the future. It's more for the kids and the world that they will grow up in and not so much about us uh or even like, you know, we're not that old, but you know what I mean. Yeah, [snorts] totally. The next generation. What were you going to say, Andrew? That's got merchandise in it as well. Oh, yes. Exactly where the money is.

1:06:11 You know, you that's what we said was that little character when you saw them up like in a Disney store with mate, you know, as well with a little with a little millions of dollars. Yeah. Fridge magnets, plushy toys, pillows, you know, I had everything ready, bro. I was ready. [laughter] It's you already you already are on a project which came from this and no doubt you know this world could be bought as Mary said earlier into a bigger thing and that I talked to one of the craziest people at Upscale in San Francisco and she's the largest AI creator in the whole of Asia and she makes that claim quite easily because she's sold like 20 million

1:07:00 KFC like tokens of her character alone. And that was one KFC integration on one of her AI things. And it sold 20 million key rings. And you're like, this is like people are flocking to get to KFC to get a Happy Meal or whatever the box, you know, of chicken is. So, they don't even go to KFC just so that they can get this one-of-a-kind integrated partner really. And and me and Andrew know this, you know, like when we worked in big marketing campaigns and what and we we've shown marketing examples for ages, mate, haven't we? You know, massive campaigns long before AI. Like this is like seven, eight years. We followed big agencies and how they made viral examples of this sort of stuff.

1:07:46 And this sort of character world building is it, you know, it's really what it is. What what one question I want to ask you before you go is you've spent a lot of time on a project like you as you said two weeks on this one, six week uh six days on this one like you're putting a lot of blood, sweat and tears in it. How do you go about promoting it? Because obviously what you're going to people will have I think this is going to be I've I've been saying this for a while. I think distribution is is what going to be one of our biggest especially when everyone there's going to be a lot more say in two years time a lot more people have entered this market you're making the the move now so hopefully by the time two years time you're already up there but how do you go about promoting your stuff?

How does Karim promote his films?

1:08:36 Um this is actually an interesting question because I went full circle on how I approached this. So at first um you know this this bell curve the bell curve it also has the meme and on the left side you're like I don't need promotion I just make cool stuff and then you start being like oh my god I need all this promotion and I need to have my emailing list and blah blah and then you come back to I just need to do cool stuff and that's where I am right now. Um and it's it's odd because it's like thanks to Mr. beast in a way because he said he he said something that really stuck to me and he said that if your video is not performing as well as you thought then it's probably not as good as you thought and so I just put all my effort into making the best

1:09:27 content that I can and then let the algorithms and the community do uh the rest and it works quite well on most platforms but then you know X is one of these platforms where you're just like this is viral everywhere just not on my X account which is something I still need to figure out how to crack and Chris talked about it earlier that is images oh my god they went bonkers viral for this one hundreds of thousands of views yes in an image carousel the large stills like you know the 4K stills of each character in like big you know portraits basically and they were like side on view portraits of like giant

The stills that beat the film on X

1:10:13 really high res versions of the characters reached 300,000 plus impressions alone. And what's great about X is that you can sort of retweet the video underneath so that they could see the carousel of images and then straight up play the video and that gets more impressions and stuff. But yeah, as you said, everyone's universe like threads and X seems the most similar in that nature of being able to, you know, do those like retweets and tweet threads and whatever, but Instagram and LinkedIn and all that doesn't operate anything like that, you know, and YouTube again. So I think the game you're playing cream is the right one. You know the X one just add the images carousels and anything else to pull it up when it you know you don't get the love that your content is obviously showing on every other platform

1:11:01 which is ridiculous truthfully that X is the the odd one out cuz even LinkedIn you're going bonkers numbers you know so X really is the ugly brother here or whatever. Uh yeah and I think like the that is the promotion in a way that I try to give people something that they could find interesting or useful. So like Chris said I gave like the first uh high definition images that I had that made me go okay this is the alien that I'm going to choose. Then I gave them uh different concepts of what the alien almost looked like because I went through so many iterations. I think that is something that you just have lying around and sometimes it's just too bad to know that nobody will ever see this even though

1:11:47 they're really cool and I just chose not to use them. So this is something the promotional part is something that I'm still trying to figure out. Um, but at the same time, I think for most creators, like if if I would go back in time and talk to myself, I would just be like, "Dude, just focus on doing what you love and making the best thing you can do and then worry about promotion." Like, first do something that is worth promoting. Because what I see a lot um is that and this is one of my key let's say one of the things that annoys me most um right now is that there's this narrative of like AI made this video where yeah I'm like that's Instagram and ex nonsense clickbait

Why AI made this is nonsense

1:12:37 absolute you know a lot of people believe that and I know that is why and and I agree to a certain extent If you generate a video and you post that video, that video to me, it's not interesting. It's like you have not done anything with it, you know, even though that okay, coming up with the concept, the references, this entire process to even get one good video, it's not easy, but that is not impressive where it starts getting impressive. And one of like the role models was also on the show here. Gossip Goblin is a great example of you just make what you want to make and instead of spending time doing other things, you spend time on improving making more fleshing out this universe

1:13:22 and then once you have uh I guess the once you have an ROI in view where you're like okay now we can actually because up to that point and that includes me and a lot of other creators people don't realize that we do not only invest a lot of time but also a lot of money to make these things without getting paid for them at all. Exactly. And so once there is an opening to having an IP and a world that people are actually willing to pay money for to support you doing that. That is, I guess, when real promotion would start where before that it's just it's hard to to create a new IP and it's hard to establish it, which is part of why all the big production houses, they

1:14:12 recycle their stuff because they know it's cheaper for us to recycle what already worked than to risk creating something new and spending so much money and nobody will like it. Yeah, that's why there's so many versions of Batman and Spider-Man and like they're just like we tried different superheroes. People don't want them. So, let's just go back to Superman again. It makes it so much easier because Dishonorable is a great example where at first I was like, "Ah, this is going to get a lot of heat because it's IP." But then again, Star Wars is culture. Like, this is not just an IP. This is something that has been around for so long that one of the great advantages is when I want to create a short story or like this fight in particular, I don't need to explain anything. People know, oh, red lightsaber, that's a Sith. Oh, not red lightsaber, that's a Jedi or like probably the good guy.

Star Wars is culture, not just IP

1:15:04 And that's it. You know, shit's about to go down now. And what you can do with a cool IP when you build So true. Yeah. Whereas established interested audience and you did um you know the funny thing about you naming it dishonorable is that you did it very honorably you know you did the world justice uh and yet you made it your own and made it interesting. We watched it yesterday but as Andrew said let's watch it for the audience that haven't seen us yesterday. Let's watch it again. Dishonorable. Please.

DISHONORABLE

1:16:02 [music] Hand me the saber and I shall grant you a quick death. Heat. Heat. [music] Heat. Heat. [music]

1:16:54 Heat. [music] Heat. Heat. [screaming] [groaning] [music] Heat. Heat.

1:17:42 [music] Heat. [music] [music] Tell me, tell me you dishonorable coward. [music] [music]

1:18:35 really like that. Really like that. Yeah. Oh my god. You know what? For me, like I'm not like I I like Star Wars. I'm not someone that will dress up as a Stormtrooper when just before the new film, but I do like Star Wars. But there was some two things that really stood out to me in that. one the bit where the kid put down like put the lightsaber down and then he went like that to the to the to the skies and then the storms were coming and then the guy in the black he just looked both ways like I little things like that I really appreciate like cuz it's like the attention to detail and then the last bit when he's like kill me like don't let don't like don't be a coward like give me a a warrior to death like things like that I really like that and it was obviously not Not much dialogue, but the dialogue was very powerful.

1:19:23 A true fan, you can tell a true fan is making this of multiple genres, you know, of the Star Wars universe, of the anime universes, of many different things. And your Yeah. So, quick question. Going back to that bit when you turned around, did you prompt that or did it? Oh, I prompted everything. Like, that's the thing I think that most people um get uh wrong. Also like when I read all these like oh yeah AI made this is like everything you see was prompted to happen like it's it doesn't just happen by itself. So you go in and you say okay you describe this scene of like and and this is how I work. Um I literally try to uh put myself in this character's shoes and think like how do you react to that? And if you're like, I don't know how clear this is, but this is it's the Sith that keeps this arena up because he's so powerful.

Did he prompt that?

1:20:16 Like this is just what I wanted to convey is that they both know who the underdog is. And even like the guy whose name I'm not going to spoiler, I can actually spoiler it. The guy is called Sarinin. And Sarinin knows very well that he's outmatched, outclassed. There is no way for him to win this. So, at the same time, when he manages to kind of push back on this storm, his brother's like, "What the fuck?" Like, how is he even like he's not as strong? But if it if he doesn't have to worry about other things, he can like mess with him enough. But this was for me the whole thing of showing this guy the underdog. You root for him. You can see he's struggling.

1:21:02 He doesn't have the upper hand in any of these scenes. So he has to be cunning and his only way to win is to do the dishonorable thing and it's actually in Star Wars is called Tracata which means like Sith and Jedi have this honor code that you do not ignite a lightsaber during battle. Like that's why you you're not allowed to turn it off and turn it back on again. That's dishonorable. You don't do that. And even the Sith uphold this moral code. And I like this idea that this guy, and this is again spoiler territory, spoiler alert, he's not a traditional Jedi. He's something different. He doesn't give a [ __ ] He's like, I'm not going to die here, bro. He's [laughter] like, I'm going to take one shot and I'm going to do a [ __ ] move and walk away alive.

1:21:51 I love it. It reminds me of the Kavan episode. Remember, Andrew, the rules of the universe in which you're going, like the Robin Hood universe or the Tinker, you know, you have to abide by and bend and know where the gray lines are and all of that. Like, it's so to be truthful to it, but also to adapt your spin, you need to know where all of the boundaries are. But what what Kim was really saying is that before there's an honor amongst thieves, but this guy's like, I don't care about that. That's old rules. Yeah. Yeah. I'm going do what I'm going do what I what I have to do cuz I know what brilliant. Yeah, I love it. that hence also the title and it's also like you said Andrew it is such in the Sith's eye he's not only dishonorable but also a coward because first of all he beat him he takes his lightsaber

1:22:42 he takes his ship and then he doesn't kill him which means for a Sith there is no greater humiliation like he would have much rather have a warrior's death and just be like okay I died to a forbidden move whatever but now is like th so this is a Beautiful setup for this is not the last time. Like now it's personal. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. And this is where it's like I want you to do more more do more of these. I want to see I'm working on them. I'm working. I showed Chris a sneak peek of Yes. I saw one in the green room before earlier today. It was very fun and epic. And I said to him, you know, don't worry too much about getting them out though, Andrew, cuz he has got like really big projects that have come in from that

1:23:28 X-P prize stuff. And he's working on some of them as well. So, it's just finding a balance, you know, and not going crazy basically because obviously now his personal things are taking off as well. And it's like, how do you, you know, get your attention on all of those to deliver on all of those? But yeah, you you're you're doing it, man. You're crushing it. It's so awesome to have you on. Like I said, I can't believe it took this long to get you one, but it's so awesome that timing was perfect. Timing was perfect. It was perfect. Yeah. And we'll have to have to get you on again. Yeah. Yes. We'll have to get you on as a duo with Steven perhaps. Um, and we know that we've got uh the next Dolan coming out as well, which will be interesting to watch the next one. And we've got other things to watch from you. Do you want

Black Sun, and a story without faces

1:24:15 I'm going to give you because this is your episode. I'm going to give you two options, two paths here. If you like to finish the episodes. I can showcase Black Sun which I found from your YouTube that no not many people know about and I want to know about where that fits in with your universe timeline thing and if it's going to be future or we can go to very modern news about Robo Dots which came out yesterday from Open AI because I have a funny video that I found about this and Andrew talked about it in the live show. So which path would you like to take? Black Sun or dots and agent. I'm gonna say honestly I haven't looked into dots much so I I just know that apparently it's the open claw product of open AI and I haven't tried it yet so I can really not contribute much to

1:25:09 it to be honest. Fair play. Fair play. Well, we will watch Black Sun then. So what is Black Sun? Where did it come from? Uh it was very interesting colorwise and all the characters that you've got in there. Um tell us more about it. Yeah, so this is when Cance 2 came out and uh we got early access by Bite Dance and uh [snorts] the only problem was they had the face blocking going on there. You couldn't do an add Yeah. Faceless character and stuff. That's right. So I I was like, "Okay, I want to test this. I feel like I can do something cool with it, but I cannot use faces. So, how do I tell a story without any faces? And I generally when I make videos like this, I always try to

1:25:58 push myself to make it interesting. This is like another thing that to anyone who is interested, one piece of advice that I follow myself, how I do things is if you don't put in extra effort, it will not look extra good. So you need to always find something that people haven't seen yet. Do something different and just get out of your comfort zone basically, which sadly with Gen AI means spending time and money on stuff that's not going to work and you're just going to be like, okay, this is not good. But in this rough, you find the diamonds sometime. We're like, oh, okay, this actually is cool and I can work with that. And for me that's like usually when that moment happens all the rest falls into place.

1:26:46 Like for hours you sit there you have no idea what you're doing. You're just like you know vibing through images and trying and then you have this one image or sometimes a song that comes on or whatever where I'm like okay I want to do something with that and then it falls into place. So, Black Sun in that sense was like a training exercise where I wanted to see what Cance 2 can do. But I also wanted to be like, let me actually um do a world building exercise here and really think of what does this world look like? How is it in this world? What makes this world different? And how do I tell a story about a faceless entity that we don't know anything about? Right. Right. Right. in a world you don't know anything about. So, I was going to ask about the faceless part, but making it make sense.

1:27:36 I completely forgot it was because so much has happened since then. But yeah, Andrew, we saw a whole spate of like faceless videos, didn't we? Because the per the people with early access sea dance essentially were blocked because it came out of the gate without the ability to upload faces. It would detect a face in any image you uploaded and instantly reject it. So, it was a way of being able to create stuff with the next level cuz sea dance 2.0 when it came out the gate changed everything. Yeah. It literally changed everything. And then the multi-shot and everything, you know, was just like next level. But with all of that context, Yeah. Let's uh Should we watch it? Let's go. Let's do it. Let's watch it. And then we'll get some more Q&A and then we'll finish up on that, guys.

1:28:22 So, get your final questions in. Door brothers just dropped a message before you. Oh, no way. What's up? If he's coming over to hang out later. Apparently, he is. And I'll be flying to Lisbon. Are we all invited or how [laughter] does that work? Are you coming today, Chris? I'm flying to France tomorrow, which is crazy. Oh, you're at the shake uh shake. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Uh we need to get over to Lisbon, Andrew. I think it's just basically done. But uh yeah, to the door brothers, I'll be I'll be coming over this week. Today is going to be to be tough, but uh maybe tomorrow, the day after tomorrow. Oh, let's go. Hail to the door, brothers. By the way, Andrew, I I messaged Jonathan earlier saying um he dropped some really nice claimation

1:29:14 looking thing like one hour after the live show yesterday. So, that'll be in next week's live regular show. Uh, a new door brothers piece um for Pippet. I think it's for Pippet, which is another one of Bite Dance's, you know, many, many outros that we've come to find. But yeah, let's check out Black Sun.

BLACK SUN

1:30:27 Oh, huh. Oh, keep running. Go

1:31:19 hey [music] oh oh Heat. Heat. N. [music] [music] Heat. [music] Heat.

1:32:09 [music] Heat. Heat. N. [music] [music] Heat. [music] [music] Heat. [music] [music]

1:33:22 Heat. Heat. Keeping

1:34:16 [music] [groaning] like that. Great. So smart. So smart when it's just like look,

1:35:05 we we're restricted by using a face, so let's basically use music, no voice, visuals, man, storytelling. Love it. the color palette and the music alone, I was sold. But the characters and the sound design and everything else on top, it's like it's just a almost that creative block was meant for your style in a way, you know, in that you could show off a lot of what others couldn't uh when Cance first came out, mate. That was like five, six months old, right? Like think about that, Andrew. That is what I meant by game changer. We went from VO3.1 to that and now we're at like sea dance 2.5, you know, which is like I think just taking it to a new level for characters that Karine designs cuz they're photoreal a lot of them, you know, and the worlds he builds

1:35:58 are photoreal, which Sea Dance 2.5 has lost that c plasticky look that Sea Dance 2 had, you know. Um, so we're at like the level whereby I think Sea Dance 3 uh might be Kareem's ultimate toy that you can unlock all of his stories with that. Uh, you know, we I know that we've not had a chance to play with Cling 4. It's only just come out to a very select few people. Has Let's got Cling 4 in the pipeline. Is that one you add? Um, it really depends on the final cling because the Flash, to be very honest, I wasn't very impressed with it. Um, there is an argument to be made that it's cheaper and whatnot, but I my priority is quality, not price. So, yes, it's cheaper, but it also doesn't look as good.

Kling 4 and what goes on LetzAI

1:36:46 And so, I try to the the thing with Leti is pretty much everything that's on there is something that I use myself. If I wouldn't use it, I will push back on having it on the platform because I find it fair. Yeah. Problem. When we get the full roll out of the full version, as you say, the light version is not even something really fair to compare to, is it? So, the flash or whatever they're calling it. Um, yeah, when the full rollout comes, I think they're saying October. So, we'll keep keep people informed about all that. Have you I've got to go. Yeah. Sorry. Just like one one thing to say there is that before sea dance my go-to model was clinging 3. So you know I was a very big believer in cling. So I hope that with the not flash version they're going to blow us away because

1:37:36 cling for flash had a lot of this like ugliness when people were speaking and you like this typical weaknesses. So [snorts] I hope if they can get rid of that and have multi multi scenes then who knows. Yeah. [clears throat] Ah, yeah. Let's see. Another great session though. Yeah, we've been waiting a long time to get you on and it's worth it. I I'm always taking notes. So, I've got a whole page, like more than a page full of stuff of notes. Some quotes that you said like the Mr. Mr. uh Beast quote. Um you said uh if your video isn't Yeah, the Mr. Beast one. You've got uh what other ones I've said? When the story isn't right, everything else falls into place. I've got the questions. There's a lot of stuff. I've even got the the the visual of the

1:38:24 Oh, yes. That's brilliant. Send me um send me an image of that on WhatsApp and we'll add that to the newsletter, mate. That's brilliant. I love that. I'm taking Yeah. Oh, look, John's joining in. He can only make it again. What's up, brother? He's busy in the meetings and we appreciate you taking the time out as well. We know that you're in the middle of a lot of stuff, man. My pleasure, man. Um, we can also do a quick Q&A if you want because I saw a question there um about music and we haven't actually talked about music. Oh, yeah. Um, someone asked about the latest LLM to make cinematic film schools anime style themes. V6, Sununo, Trebau, um, 11 music is surprisingly good.

What does Karim use for music?

1:39:10 Um, what would you suggest? I do almost everything in Sunno. Shout out to Sunno. Um I also think their smallest plan gives you a lot of um a lot of like a lot to work with. You can do a lot of songs with it. The only thing is that it's an iterative process. So for example, this song that I used in Folin is like I spent days like going back and forth tweaking the tone, tweaking the lyrics, doing these iterations. Then trebble I find very very good. But when you have music that needs to lead and that needs to do a lot of heavy lifting, I like to use music bed for example um to have like real uh humanmade music because for example great sacrifices is the name of the track from Dishonorable.

1:40:00 Luckily enough like I got in touch with uh with the [clears throat] creator and he actually enjoyed my video because I was like oh no he's going to be like I hate AI take out of your AI video. But no, he liked it. So it's really what I use depends on how good my result is. And I found that I didn't manage to get the level of audio quality and epicness that I wanted to carry this video because as you said earlier, the video does so much work because if you break it down, if you watch the video without sound, it would be like two guys standing in front of each other. Two guys standing in front of each other from another angle and two guys [laughter] standing. So music is 50% of every video and sound I would say in general makes have

1:40:51 there's a lot of clips that started for me when I heard a song and I was like I want to make something with that song. Yeah. Yeah. Paul's always said the same. He actually goes through art list as well, you know, just through the royalty-free stuff and then something will trigger his mind into like an editing style or something. And this is key when you're working with people like Coca-Cola cuz it always has to be royalty-free music or something like this. You can't choose a banger, you know, that's the problem with listening to Spotify or YouTube. It's like, oh, you listen to bangers. It's like great, that'll be $10 million, please. [laughter] You know, okay, Mr. You know, I would love to, but you know. Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. [laughter] Mr. Find royaltyfree bangers out there. You're like, "Bro, this is" That's how I started, by the way. I I took royalty-free

1:41:38 music from YouTube and stuff. Then I went to Art List. Then I started making my music. Now I'm at like, do I choose Music Bed, Treble or Suno? So yeah, music is very important. As John says, sound is everything. And yeah, man, it can elevate your edit. uh and it's something that I kind of um was not taking that seriously in the beginning. If I had to give my early days a uh one piece of advice, it would be like sound is hard and it is tricky but it is worth it because if if with the right sound you can sell the illusion because that's what we're doing, right? We're selling an illusion. All these videos they have nothing to do with each other.

1:42:25 Yeah. Yeah. He's [laughter] getting down the extra illusion. The pad's getting over spilled at this point. It's like if you do the illusion right, it seems like, oh my god, every shot works so well with each other. But at the end of the day, most of these shots have nothing to do with each other. The art is to bring them together in a way. It's like a movie. In a movie, they shoot stuff like months apart and they cut it in a way and they're just very well prepared. So it sells the illusion that this is one continuous stream of events when in reality it's not at all. Yeah. Oh soundtrack we could go for hours. Yeah. This needs to and also Chris can say much more about this than I because you are uh like very music enthusiast through and through. So for well we all are me you Andrew John every you know this is the underlying thread of all the best people

1:43:19 you know Cavan said 90% of it was audio and so many people I feel they a broken record sometimes because I just hammer home on the music so much but then you realize everyone comes to the same conclusion whether or not you like or don't like audio it's like no you can play visuals like you said like a trick but you can change the entire theme by the music. You know, you just give it a haunting music soundtrack and you can make the nicest kid-friendly thing seems sinister as hell. And this instantly changes like and that's how powerful it is. It's like nothing else can do that. Visuals can't do that themselves. Only the audio can steer visuals to do this.

1:44:05 It's like deeper than visuals, you know? Oh, and back then you had to put the sound effect together yourself. Now, Cance gives you sound. That was not always [laughter] like this. Sound is the soul of video. Wan says great LinkedIn comment. And look, Marco's coming in as we're 15 minutes over and all the legends are just popping in. Let's [ __ ] go. Um, I also saw another question because I haven't actually talked workflow at all. So um if it's okay for you guys I'll just answer this. So my favorite tool is Let's AI obviously um I'm the co-founder of Let's AI. So I want to make if you look at my work that's what is feasible with the platform. So the work is really good like I do not do anything

Karim's tools and workflow

1:44:54 in my videos that I cannot do in my platform. So, if you watch my stuff, this is with Dishonorable is the only exception um in the sense that um Dreamina uh got me into like the high tier partnership blah blah blah. So, I get a lot of free credits and I feel like it would be dumb to not use them. So I decided to, you know, okay, I'm gonna be transparent and I'm going to be like I did everything with let's say except like generating all these things in high quality if I can do it for free because you know just because I'm the co-founder of the company doesn't mean that everything is free for us like we [laughter] still have to pay for it. So um that's that. And for image models, I only use Cdream 5 for my vase images at this point because

1:45:41 it's cheap. Um, and you can iterate quite fast with it. So that's what I like to do is just like go in there for several hours and just generate and I use um, nano banana for editing GPT image 2.52, but it still leaves this ugly pattern. So I avoid it as well as I can. Hates it. Once you see it, you cannot unsee it and it ruins almost everything. Um because you can just Yeah. So those are I would say my um my tools and the workflow really is that uh it's it's a very intuitive thing. So you start with images. Half of the time I'm I'm there tweaking prompts and uh trying different things. So what I like to do is not to go like and this is I think one of the biggest differences to traditional film making versus

Don't fight the AI, and flex shots

1:46:33 uh AI film making is avoid working against the AI like don't be married to your idea. If you see that this is not working like this and you see something else is working, then you pivot and you build on what's working well instead of there are some shots where I'm like clients would realize that oh my god clients understood that we our lives would just change if clients make things easier. You can have one shot like this. This is a bit like a rule that Stephen and I we kind of established for the future episodes where I'm like I'm okay with having like one or two flex shots where you will spend hours just to get this two seconds right and everybody will be like how did they do this? Well, we just brute forced it and threw money at the front

1:47:20 until we get like money at the problem. But in general, I try to just avoid things that don't work. And it's usually Yeah. either the sound or the one visual that I also shared about Voyager 7, for example. When I had the alien, I was just like, "Okay, that's it. That's him. I just know it. It's not like a crazy voodoo process. I just look at it and I'm like, "This makes me feel something." This is the thing. Listen to your emotions. When I'm like, "This makes me feel something. This does something to me. I trust that maybe it's going to do something for other people too. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Artist intuition and you just want to be trusted as a creative and not micromanaged as a client. You know, again, I'm just telling clients this and I'm not trying to be ruthless. You know, you're hiring creatives, you're outsourcing your creativity.

1:48:09 Let them be creative and trust their intuition and stop, you know, you know, fighting with the AI because it just it has changed. The way that we do deliverables now has changed and the process is like, you know, I'm not going to go into specifics, but we asked we got asked by a client recently for just something that's not possible yet. And we're not we're just beating our head against a drum like 3 hours a day trying to make this thing where we're like, we can give you all these 10 variations, but the thing you're asking for is just not quite possible yet, you know? So stop beating on your drum and just let us tell you what's possible and how to make it work, you know, because that is the creative decision making of the AI person on the edge of stuff right now. Yes. And another thing that I would really watch out for um which I try to keep in mind at all times is what my co-founder

The IKEA effect and killing your darlings

1:49:02 Mish coined the value of the syntographic object. Other people know it as the IKEA effect is that a lot of the times you will like it because you made it. So don't judge it immediately after. Give it some time. I watch my videos a million times and if I find that I can still watch them without feeling the want to skip. I know that I didn't do everything wrong in the edit. But if you do not want to watch your own video for the 15th time, then you need to change something in the video. Because if you don't like it, then other people that don't know you and don't know your process and quite frankly don't care. They just see the result. And for me, that is like one of the things where I used to be like, "Oh my god, I want to get this out as fast as possible because I'm so excited about it."

1:49:50 Now I see the value of waiting, taking things slow, revisiting it a couple of like not touching it for some days, coming back, and then being like, "Okay, I would change these things." you notice mistakes. For example, Black Sun, I was like watching that I was like, "Oh my god, this cut terrible. Why did I do that?" This like sound uh uh transitions that didn't work and stuff. And uh yeah, that's another thing like we have a tendency um to get too attached to things that we just made. And so the other rule that we kind of established is kill your darlings. If you really like a shot, you're probably better off making it shorter because that makes the person crave what's next. Like the otherwise you give it too long and then the magic is gone and you disconnect but you have to find this edge where they're always like oh

1:50:40 no this shot is over and then you have the next amazing thing that you're seeing on screen and you have to like keep this up for at least in the beginning until people are drawn in enough and care enough right it's also great to have someone to bounce it off you know like that's what Paul always tells me he's like mate I've watched this so many times I don't even know if it's good anymore or you need to give me a new perspective on whether this is actually good cuz I'm so into it that I don't even have a perspective on whether or not this is actually now which is crazy. But yeah, guys, what an episode. Where can where can we where can people see your stuff? Where can we stay in touch? We've been live on Kareem's YouTube and Instagram this whole time. I should have kept reminding people that we're multistreaming

1:51:26 sort of everywhere today. Um, so you may have found us either through our YouTube channel or Kareem's own YouTube channel, but he has an Instagram and uh on LinkedIn you have Kareem Yousef, right? And then my actual [laughter] Yeah. And then everywhere else it's Karine yourself which is like because I have like the I have a very common first and last name and back then I just chose that handle and now it's a bit of a headache because I'm like okay how do we how do we make this findable for people? Um yeah because if you just uh find like search for my name you will find the agency you will find let'sii you will find like a bunch of different things when if you want to see one specific thing

1:52:14 um yeah the social handles is always kareem_you yourself yeah I love that you're in LinkedIn by the way with your real name now and I get to see every version of you the ex version the Instagram version the YouTube version the LinkedIn version has been taking a lot of notes by the fans of it as well in today's session. I think it's been one of the most noteworthy sessions. You're just dishing out the advice and I'm loving it, Kareem. I'm honestly loving it, mate. And it honestly shows that you are a CMO as well as a director. That's the thing that really stood out from today's discussion for me is that you really are thinking across the board about distribution. And Andrew talks about this all the time and he's like, "What next though?" You know, like the distribution thing, you know, like you've made something, but what next though? You know, and this is the thing that's going to happen more and more is

1:53:01 actually when you came back to the original X-P and you put out those high-res images. I think what is clever in the creative process is to start just banking things up like that. You know, on the off chance that the video doesn't get enough love in X and you've got a bank of assets to quickly post straight after as like high-res images or small scenes that are slight or variations that didn't make the cut as you said earlier. Whatever else you've got that could potentially go viral and then bring more attention to the original project. I think that's the way to think about it, guys. So, yeah. Yeah. And like said too um like I don't remember who it was. It was the the rapper, this goofy rapper. I don't remember his name anywhere. He said that you know if you put a lot of time and effort into

1:53:47 um something you made, then you also need to keep talking about it. It's not enough to just put it on social once and then not like you need to follow it up and be like I made this. I'm proud of this and I want to show it to people and show like different dimensions of it and not just make one post and then wait and do nothing. [laughter] Exactly. And enter it into awards if it makes sense to do that, you know, and uh yeah, do all sorts of distribution with it. We've been talking about Roku. We've been talking about other places that are going to be real options in the future. Amazon, Prime, Netflix, HBO, they're all coming. You know, every single distribution arm is going to have some variation of this. Yeah, guys, I'm going to have to run. Same, mate. Same. I'm going to have to run. But it was a pleasure. Thank you everyone in the chat as well.

1:54:37 Yes. Thank you so much. If you're in France, let me know. Show shoot me a DM if you're going to be in France tomorrow at Shake Festival. I don't know when the next live show will be, but luma.com/ai live show and you'll see the new event pages when we uh are locked in that we can do the next one. Yeah. Awesome. Thank you so much everyone. Take care. Cheers, guys.