San Sebastian’s Zinemaldia & Technology Startup Challenge Winners

Lithuanian sound design platform Sonic Alchemist has won the European competition at this 12 months’s San Sebastian’s Zinemaldia & Technology Startup Challenge. Spanish voice dubbing software Dubme won the strand’s domestic competition. Each projects secured purses of €10,000 ($11,168).

A special mention entrepreneur prize of €3,000 ($3,350) was awarded to Danish company Kaspar K1, an editing program that enables filmmakers to go looking through hundreds of hours of footage using text prompts.

Along with their money prizes, this 12 months’s winners are also conditionally eligible totally free access to an incubation space throughout the first 12 months following their visit at one in all the Business Innovation Centers (BIC) belonging to the Basque Technology Park Network. Also they are now qualified for possible funding of as much as €500,000 ($559,000) to develop their project from subsidies managed by the Basque BIC Network and supported by the Basque Government Department of Economic Development, Sustainability and Environment through the SPRI and the Provincial Councils.

The San Sebastian Film Festival launched its Zinemaldia & Technology Startup Challenge in 2019, with the primary winner being an AI-based company, LargoAI. Within the five years since, little seems to have modified except that AI has gone from a buzzy little bit of tech to probably the most talked-about force within the audiovisual industry. Things aren’t any different in San Sebastian, where every Zinemaldia & Tech pitch, roundtable and watercooler discussion looked as if it would center on artificial intelligence.

With its ubiquitous rise, AI has change into a bogeyman for a lot of working within the industry. No person at Thursday’s presentations pretended otherwise, and lots of the day’s pitches included assurances that their software was developed inside an ethical and legal framework. When it wasn’t addressed during a pitch, the primary query from the event’s panels of judges was often concerning the legality of the product being promoted.

One other trend common in lots of the day’s discussions was the rise of independent content creators as a industrial force within the screen industries. Nearly half of the day’s pitches were designed not only for giant media firms but included B2C business plans for solo digital-first content creators akin to YouTubers, influencers and independent animators.

This 12 months’s European winner, Sonic Alchemist, uses computer vision to synchronize and adapt sound effects for film, creating editable multitrack sketches. Kaspar K1 works like a search engine that scans through an editor’s library of footage for specific shots and can eventually allow for AI-generated rough cuts using the unique footage.

Other European pitches got here from Filmanize, a U.K.-based company developing a platform that enables filmmakers to streamline the movie-making process by semi-automating processes from pre-production, script evaluation, and call sheet creation. Phont is a German-developed software that evolves the long-unchanged art of subtitle display through the use of AI to jazz up on-screen text, much like how comic book fonts are used to convey emotion on the page. Thol is a sound design suite for content creators and firms that scans video footage and creates sound effects to match on-screen motion.

Spanish winner Dubme was one in all the day’s most skilled pitches, delivered by company executive Elías Moreno, a former 10-year YouTube executive for Southern Europe. Dubme’s ambitious goal is to “eliminate language barriers in skilled audiovisual content using artificial intelligence and human professionals” by streamlining and drastically lowering the price of dubbing.

Fellow Spanish startup Current Anima received a special mention. The software suite allows users to create 3D virtual videos using text prompts. Emotional Movies – from Spain’s Professor Octopus AI Lab – is a brand new audiovisual format between video games and movies that monitors users’ emotions to adapt to what happens on screen. Hulahoop is an investment platform that enables any user to speculate in film projects and might offer a return on investment by cataloging everyone’s stake via blockchain. The day’s final pitch got here from Vocality, which creates cloned voices with generative AI.