OpenAI’s new Sora video is a parody of a nature documentary, depicting an array of bizarre hybrid creatures that couldn’t exist in the real world.
The new video “Beyond Our Reality” was created by Don Allen III, a former DreamWorks Animation creative and now a multidisciplinary artist focused on AR and XR content.
It is the latest in a series of videos made using Sora but by professional artists, musicians and creatives including a rain-soaked music video.
Beyond Our Reality promotes a fictional new series that covers animals such as the fox crow, the giraffe flamingo and a flock of flying pigs.
“I feel like we are unlocking a new era of creative storytelling that we have never been able to imagine collectively before! Stay curious and creative,” Allen said of using Sora.
What is Beyond Our Reality?
The video is a trailer for a new fictional eight part nature series, going through what to expect from each episode and showing footage — made by Sora — of those weird creatures.
Some of these creations are incredibly disturbing including the bunny armadillo and the reptilian-roo. Sora created ultra realistic footage that looks like a real nature documentary.
Allen says Sora allowed for the “boundaries of imagination” to be extended “bringing to life a few creatures I have dreamed up.” He described the Sora footage as blurring the lines between reality & fantasy.
“I tried to ground my outputs in something kind of familiar like animals, but also something that was currently impossible in biology, these hybrid creatures,” he added.
A new kind of storytelling
These types of visual effects aren’t new. We’ve had documentaries on Netflix depicting what creatures on another world might look like, as well as others showing dinosaurs made by Sir David Attenborough himself.
The big change is in access to the effects. Creating visual effects on the scale of those shown in Beyond Our Reality isn’t cheap, especially getting them hyper realistic as we see in the video.
What Sora, and other tools coming along such as Higgsfield, or even those already available allow for is more people being able to add VFX flare.
For example, Sora could enable some of the very talented YouTube or TikTok creators to add a dose of unreality to their sketches, skits and creations — as long as they label it as AI.
With Sora I feel I can tell stories at a scale I didn’t think was possible before.
Don Allen III
Allen wrote: “As we step into this new era, I understand the apprehension surrounding the rapid evolution of our creative industries. I really think Sora offers a different kind of visual canvas, expanding my creative possibilities and complementing my different creative crafts.”
“I have always been a one-person creative studio, so there were inherent limits to what I could create alone,” he added. “With Sora I feel I can tell stories at a scale I didn’t think was possible before.”
