This is a sequel to my other story: The Fortune of François Martin, or How to Become a Crypto-Billionaire.
It is told by François Martin himself.
See Part 1

Using Artificial Intelligence to make realistic videos.

My daughter, Joséphine, knew from the beginning that using the Unreal game engine was not sufficient to produce realistic videos. It was made for games, not for videos. So, she knew she needed to find something else to polish the videos and make them more realistic: Artificial Intelligence tools.

She wanted to use only open-source tools. She asked me to find an open-source tool that would do the job of polishing the videos. I found a Spanish company called "Re-AI-listic" that seems to do the job. Their app was open source and it had many parameters that could be specified for the different parts of the video and the different characters. In addition, it could add open or closed captions to the videos.

Joséphine and her team tried the Re-AI-Listic app and found it appropriate. It took them another month, working part-time on the project, to learn the app and to work on the video.

When this was done, they added a short sequence at the beginning of each video (Marjos Entertainment presents...) and some credits at the end, including all the tools used to produce the videos.

It was now the end of May 2024. They had two versions of the 4 episodes of their limited series "The Conversation": one with closed captions and one with open captions. It was available only in English, but it was enough to see how the viewers would react.

During the first half of June, they put the videos on YouTube (with closed captions) and 3Speak (with open captions).
They posted the YouTube videos on X/Twitter and the 3Speak ones on the Hive blockchain using inleo.io.

I retweeted and reblogged their posts. And, of course, I voted 100% on the HIVE blockchain with my more than 500K Hive Powers.

The comments on YouTube, Twitter, and Hive were 95% positive. People mostly found the video realistic, as if they had been shot with real actors.

Of course, this was just a proof of concept. And they had spent much money to produce the video, mostly labor. Publishing videos produced in such a way was not sustainable. They needed the viewers to pay for their next videos. The model of course is Netflix where you pay a fixed amount every month and you can watch all the movies and the series they stream.

Where could they find the infrastructure for this?

As we were going in August and September to Hungary to visit the family of my wife, I told Joséphine that I would attend HiveFest 9, in Split, Croatia and present her project and ask how the infrastructure could be built.

And indeed, I went to HiveFest in Split. There I spoke to various people, including @khaleelkazi and @starkerz. When we came back to British Columbia, I had some answers for Joséphine.

Continue to Part 3

-- Vincent Celier