As Hollywood gears up to celebrate the world’s best actors at this weekend’s Oscars, AI-powered studio Particle6 continues to ruffle feathers with its AI actor Tilly Norwood.
This week, the company has launched a musical comedy video featuring Norwood, called Take the Lead. Particle6 described it as “a fun, high-energy, pop-meets-musical-theatre anthem calling on actors to embrace AI as their next creative superpower”.
The music video release comes ahead of Norwood’s official AI ‘acting debut’ later this year and offers a first look at the evolving Tillyverse, a new entertainment world – based in the cloud – where AI characters live, interact and work.
Take the Lead is inspired by a recently published essay written by Eline van der Velden, CEO of Particle6 and its AI spin-off Xicoia, as well as the growing industry conversation around AI. The lyrics reflect on last year’s backlash following Norwood debut on the global stage, but mostly focus on the humanity and creativity behind the character.
According to Particle6, the thinking behind creating the musical comedy video is to show how AI technology is rapidly evolving and how the studio is testing, learning and using the latest techniques to push creative boundaries with original work.
Take the Lead was generated using Suno, with the accompanying video created by the team at Particle6 using a suite of readily available AI tools, combined with its proprietary creative process. New techniques deployed, only available this year, include performance capture – whereby Eline van der Velden actually acted out Tilly’s performance.
The team comprised 18 real humans in roles such as executive producer, director, production designer, costume designer, creative prompter, creative technologist, comedy writer, editor, production assistant, production co-ordinator and an actor.
Van der Velden said: “Tilly is, and has always been, a vehicle to test the creative capabilities and boundaries of AI – not take anyone’s job. I have loved bringing Tilly alive for this video and feel that the ability to now use performance capture in this way, to fully inhabit an AI character, is a phenomenal way to bring an unknown actor like me closer to the craft.”
