Adobe wants you to edit its surreal AI video campaign

Leaps in AI creative tech come so thick and fast these days that it can be hard to make them sound exciting any more, but Adobe's found a clever approach to promote the latest updates to its Firefly AI Video Model and to try to get artists on board. It's launched a campaign that invites anyone to create their own edit of an unfinished film, using AI to unleash their wildest ideas.

The Unfinished Creator Film is described as a global, remixable video campaign. Artist and director Sam Finn got the ball rolling with an initial short comprising a series of apparently unrelated AI-generated scenes. He invites other artists to make sense of the footage: what's happening? Who is the man running from? You're invited to use AI to propose your own suggestions (you'll probably also want some of the best video editing software).

Adobe has already invited five artists to reimagine the five scenes and 14 shots in the short. Jad Kassis, Phil Cohen, Noémie Pino and Keenan Lam have each taken the initial material in very different directions. Phil takes a retro car for a spin and turns it into a spacecraft, Keenan bends the rules of gravity and Jad floods a museum with floating eyeballs.

“It used to take years of learning – and a lot of money – to make a film. Now anyone with a vision can start. I’m excited to see what creators from non-traditional backgrounds will make when those barriers fall away. That’s what The Unfinished Film is about: opening the door for new voices and unexpected perspectives," Sam says about the project on the Adobe blog.

The results make the project feel a bit like a contemporary version of an exquisite corpse story. The often surreal results demonstrate the power of AI video for realizing wild ideas, and how different creative imaginations will dream up very different possibilities.

Interestingly, the film I most enjoyed is the one that makes use of handmade art as well as AI. Noémie created a claymation doll, photographed it, and uploaded the shots as reference images for AI video generation using Google's Veo 2 in Firefly. As she says in the behind-the-scenes video below, the character feels out of place in the AI-generated world – giving her a fragility despite her massive size.

All of the takes on Adobe's Unfinished Creator Film show how AI video generation is allowing creators to explore their wildest ideas with next to no budget, deciding with each prompt what should or shouldn't exist in impossible dreamlike worlds (thankfully there's no of the AI gastro horror that's so popular on TikTok right now).

The open-ended collaborative nature of the campaign also highlights the fact that the process of creating a film is rarely linear and rarely the work of one person but rather a meeting of various artists using different tools and approaches.

In most cases, as well as using generative AI via Firefly or Firefly Boards, the creators also used other Adobe tools, from Photoshop to edit images to use as references for video generation, After Effects to add effects or footage more believable and Premiere Pro to edit the video itself.

Adobe's inviting anyone to use and remix the content to create their own version of the Unfinished Creator Film. I'll be interested to see if people take up the invitation and what they do with it, and to see whether a project like this can help change the perception of AI by highlighting the collaborative process.

The idea was to showcase the new Firefly video model V1.9, which provides more lifelike motion and fidelity and more control thanks to the ability to use composition references, keyframe cropping, and style presets. There's also now Generate Sound Effects (in beta), which allows the use of AI to generate custom audio from text prompts or voice cues.

But Firefly also now allows AI video generation with non Adobe-models, including models that may not be commercially safe to use. Some of the creators in the campaign chose to use non-Firefly models.