For about 45 minutes each day, I slip on Meta's Quest headset and smash through shiny targets flying at me with virtual baseball bats synced to the beat of Taylor Swift, Madonna, Imagine Dragons, Eminem, Coldplay, and many others in my living room. Throughout the workout, which Supernatural calls "flow," my body drips with sweat, and my breath explodes in thunderous bursts.
My job is to make sure the best song lands in the right place in the show. Within the budget that we have at hand (laughter), you know, that's another aspect that I think a lot of people don't think about. In other words, we're not just sitting back and staring at the sky and pulling song ideas out. We actually have to make sure that we can afford certain ideas, and we actually have to make sure that we can get them cleared.
"Cinematography does it all for me," Grammy-winning musician Raphael Saadiq told IndieWire over Zoom. The R&B icon, who has seen decades of success as a solo artist, as a member of the groups Tony! Toni! Toné! and Lucy Pearl, and as a writer/producer for everyone from Erykah Badu and Earth, Wind & Fire, to Alicia Keys, John Legend, and a few key names he'll get into later, has been explaining the way films have inspired a few of his biggest hits.
"Klay uses its interactive tool Large Music Model, which is trained solely on licensed music, to "reimagine listening." The company states that Klay "is not a prompt-based meme generation engine," but rather a "new subscription product that will uplift great artists and celebrate their craft." Klay prides itself on working with the music industry to enhance human creativity instead of trying to replace it. The company hopes to include independent labels, artists, publishers, and songwriters next."
It is 20 years since Guitar Hero was launched in North America, and with it, the tools for the everyday gamer to become a rock star. Not literally of course, but try telling that to someone who has nailed Free Bird's four-minute guitar solo in front of a packed living-room audience. Developed by Harmonix, published by RedOctane and inspired by Konami's GuitarFreaks, Guitar Hero gave players a guitar-shaped controller with which to match coloured notes scrolling down the screen in time with a song.
Outrage spread Monday over President Trump's effort to mock the huge No Kings protests over the weekend by posting an AI video of himself dumping waste on demonstrators. Supporters of the sprawling rallies that drew millions slammed Trump for posting the 18-second clip depicting him wearing a crown and piloting a KING TRUMP warplane over some of the sprawling crowds that gathered on Saturday to protest his hardline second term in power.
Much of direction is production: the material conditions under which a movie is made plays a major role in the creative process. Movie lovers tend to think of producers as dictators of formulas, oppressors of originality, the enemies of art, but that just reflects the unfortunate history of studio filmmaking in Hollywood and elsewhere. In fact, producing a movie can be a kind of art in itself, a practical imagining of possibilities for filmmakers that they wouldn't themselves have come up with.
