Whisk itself (https://labs.google/fx/tools/whisk) was released a few months ago under the radar as a demo for Imagen 3 and it's actually fun to play with and surprisingly robust given its particular implementation.

It uses a prompt transmutation trick (convert the uploaded images into a textual description; can verify by viewing the description of the uploaded image) and the strength of Imagen 3's actually modern text encoder to be able to adhere to those long transmuted descriptions for Subject/Scene/Style.

I think I would buy "yes" shares in a Polymarket event that predicts a motion picture created by a single person grossing more than $100M by 2027.

This is amazing. I wouldn't think that something as computationally expensive as generating 8 second videos would be available outside of paid API anytime soon.

I am not really technical in this domain, but why is everything text-to-X?

Wouldn't it be possible to draw a rough sketch of a terrain, drop a picture of the character, draw a 3D spline for the walk path, while having a traditional keyframe style editor, and give certain points some keyframe actions (like character A turns on his flashlight at frame 60) - in short, something that allows minute creative control just like current tools do?

Brave to make ads with the Ghibli style. Would have thought that's burned by now.