AND REGISSOR, OR HOW TO PAY AND STAND
Hey. My name is Maxim Sluzarev. I’m a creative director, director, producer and writer. For over 20 years I’ve been making movies, commercials and music videos. He had time to work on Hollywood projects and with the most famous actors and musicians. My work has been awarded international and Russian prizes. And tonight, I want to tell you about how I wanted to make a technological startup, and I did a neuroserial.
PART 1 ♪ INSTRUMENT
December 2021. It’s snow winter. My friend Julia is calling to tell me that she’s found a publisher for my book The Heart fairy tale. I’d like to do a show on it. Animating or playing, whatever, it’s all about doing what’s in my heart. Stimpank fantasy series? It’s not real. Too much money for an unknown media product. No one’s gonna pay for one of these. That’s why I’m trying to publish a book to recruit readers and fans to get the evidence base for investors in such a big project.
Negotiations with the publisher are bizarre. I don’t see any of them as helping books to be born. I see people doing their job badly. Rather, their work is not about finding and producing a good book, but about making a quick profit to the owner.
March 2022. The publication of the book has stalled. The publisher left Russia. I’m already spinning in the arm of the model, and I’m sorting out Google Collab with scripts for python. They’re sending me an invitation to Midjourney’s bet. From now on, it’s hard to imagine the impression these images were making. But I’m burning up the idea of making a movie that’s not based on it. The prospect of this technology is an opportunity for me to make the Heart Tale much cheaper than I thought it would be.
Inspired I decide to start a startup, which will create a tool for making movies on neuronets only from the text. I’m looking for a team and investment funds. I’m formulating the project’s mission as the creation of an I.I. director. I call this project «Vstory.» I’ve never launched a technology startup, even though I’ve made up one before. I’m inspired, I believe it’s gonna work! After warning, I put my own savings into the start-up.
The artist inside has to take a walk, give him time and strength to carry out his ideas, otherwise I’m gonna go for it. There’s not much to breathe from management tasks. So I write a story every week about the Immortal, developing the idea of civilization of the people left behind in history. The new stage of evolution-- Angels have long gone beyond multiverse and multi-measured. And people just watch their tracks, enjoying immortality. I fear the prospect of unemployment. And there’s no better way to reflex it than to write it.
For humanity as it stands, it is as if there is no future. And the only question is whether the next evolutionary transition will be conservative or not. In other words, whether we connect with the car, or the car won’t need it. I’m making sure that the chapters of the neuronet-generated images are published. And the publications of the Immortals are immediately highly resonated and resonated. Thousands of likes, over 70,000 views at the posts.
January 2023. As an example of how to market my I.E. product, I am publishing the first series of my neuroserial Immortals in English. And he only creates images in midjourney, which I then cut and anime by hand to create a parallax effect. Everything else is human work. The voice-over is my friend Bob Daniel, Kong Grisudarege’s music. For all the others, I’m myself, director, writer and producer.
The theme of the series is a direct reflection of the experience I have with this startup. In the face of artificial intelligence, mankind is afraid of the animal, which will lose its primacy in evolution. And I choose the first hero of Rob’s story, an old man who becomes immortal in a world who can no longer understand.
PART 2 OF THE EXPENDITURE
In the first stage, we decided to focus on making visual novels, not full films, because at that time the video generation was not at the right level. By May 2023, we have the first prototype, it works and even generates stories from the texts. It’s not a joke to start a startup. I’m faced with the fact that I can’t do it all at once, looking for investment and controlling the quality of the project takes a lot of time. I have to work for three. And the body’s rioting.
The following is the structure of the back-up of our project. At the entrance, the text that then breaks down and transforms into prompts. They create images, test their consensibility, create voice, music, and publish the work.
I have to admit, I started the startup because I was scared to get out of the middle class, which disappears in late capitalism. And not being able to earn a living if my skills are replaced by artificial intelligence. I’m chasing horses. But the political situation that hit the markets has made the landscape looking for investment extremely unfavourable. I’m starting to feel that the advice never invests personal savings in the project is not just good advice, but advice I must have learned on my own skin.
One of the publications of the Immortals is answered by an old friend of mine, Peter Markin, and offers to record an audio version. I’m very happy with his offer, but at that point, it becomes impossible for me. I can’t write any more because it takes all my time to find an investment. And compared to working on the Heart fairy tale, it’s just a draft. I thought about my first book a lot deeper before I wrote it cleanly. I can write 36 chapters before I realize that I have to give up and that’s in favour of starting.
By the end of May 2023, I can spend all my savings on product development, and I can’t find a big investor. And the video isn’t at the stage of surpriseing people far from the industry. It’s a tragedy to me. I lost all the money I earned, and I got a little investment from my friends, but it wasn’t over. Now, in analysing what happened, I realize that I’m not right to hire. The people I hired for the project didn’t have enough expertise in neuronets to offer solutions.
I didn’t have enough of this expertise to work with programmers to make the necessary adjustments that could move the project forward and improve its quality, which would make the product interesting to investors.
June 2023. On top of everything, I crash on a mountain bike in a storm that makes us at the top of a mountain, and I lose my ability to carry out a project. The right hand requires long-term recovery.
This is the end of my startup. The lowest point in my career. Everything I’ve worked for is gone.
PART 3: RECEIVABLE
July 2023. There are large commercial video generators like Runway ML Gen1, which are characterized by a much greater conspiracies of the image than diffusion models. And I’m starting to slowly test them and collect the animist of the 2nd episode of the Immortal «The Endless Travel of Admiral Ivanova» in order to take on some kind of rehab.
Because the first powerful leap that everyone sees is image and video for artificial intelligence, my friend Ithichnik laughs that creative people will be replaced faster than others. A strike by actors and writers in Hollywood, as if it were a direct confirmation. I’m getting more and more scared about losing my job, but experience with neurons somehow teaches me the opposite. There’s no way I can get any help from them in the creative commercials I work for, or in the stories I write for the Immortals.
Runwal ML releases the video generator Gen2. In that time, I’ve been polishing the animist of the 2nd episode of the Immortals many times. And in just a week on Gen2, my friend Matway and I are turning him into a full-blown neurofilm.