It used to be that if you wanted to make a half-decent Bigfoot video, you needed to spend a lot of time making a suit, and then walk around the local forests while your friend films you, hoping that no hunters mistake you for a bear.
These days, with AI video, you can make your own Bigfoot videos—or anything else! Which is why we’re seeing an explosion in creative ideas, including a new AI video trend that has finally made me laugh: Bigfoot vlogs.
AI Video Generation Has Reached New Heights
While AI-generated video has been around for some time now, it’s only recently with the release of Google’s Veo 3 that it’s really become truly useful. This cutting-edge video generator isn’t just notable for having really impressive visual results, but also for generating the audio for the video.
That includes music, foley, and the voices of characters. Perfectly synced to lip movement. The characters don’t have to be human either, which is good news if you want to generate an image of a Bigfoot talking into his GoPro.
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We’re in for some wild times.
People Are Experimenting With Ideas Like Never Before
While it’s not exactly cheap to generate these videos, it seems many people have dug out their credit cards to experiment with Veo 3. If you’re a Gemini Pro subscriber, you can now create three Veo 3 videos with sound every day using the Veo 3 (Fast) model in Gemini Pro. You can also use the Google Flow tool to generate and edit videos using either the fast or regular model, at a cost of 20 or 100 AI credits per video, depending on whether you use the fast or more intensive model. The video I generated above was made using the fast model, which doesn’t have the same visual quality, but we still get the sound generation.
This has certainly led to a flood of videos with sounds and other audio on the internet. One of the things that sets Veo 3 apart is that you can provide source material using the Flow editor. This means you can have a consistent character, or a consistent look and feel to your clips. It also means you can trim clips and regenerate just the parts that didn’t come out right. That’s a powerful improvement over how AI video generation worked before.
Critics Think AI Video Can Never Be Funny or Creative
Comedy is hard, and so much relies on the timing and delivery to be funny. It’s true that the “acting” we see from characters generated by Veo 3 is pretty stilted, especially when something’s meant to be dramatic or heartfelt. It feels very phoned-in right now.
However, some people have figured out that you can work around that. By using the right context or through clever editing, it’s possible to make these videos genuinely funny. Add to that, the current way people consume very short video clips like YouTube Shorts or Instagram Reels is perfect for these shorter AI-generated
Sometimes these videos are funny because of the AI-generated weirdness that creeps in, but it takes a human being with a real human sense of humor to shape the AI output into something that will get a chuckle from an audience.
Which brings us to the whole Bigfoot vlog phenomenon. The idea of making AI videos showing what it would be like if Bigfoot (or a yeti) got a hold of some camera equipment and made little vlog-style recordings is simple on paper. However, whoever is making these is really putting some thought into it, which is a huge part of why it works.
There’s a distinct personality to these cryptids. The best example are Bigfoot Vlog and perhaps best of all—Big Yowie. Just be warned, some of the videos can be mildly-graphic. Like PG-13 at worst.
It’s not perfect, but it’s already viable as a way to create entertaining content. Perhaps most importantly, if you read the comments on these videos, people are saying how this is the first time that an AI-generated video has actually made them laugh. The channels are doing well, and it’s obvious the creator is getting more dialed in as you go from the oldest to the latest clips.
The downside of this new technology in the hands of anyone with a working credit card, is that we’re seeing lots of not-so-good content. Because, of course, no matter how good the AI-generation technology is, that doesn’t help someone with no sense of humor or creativity to make something anyone else would want to watch, let alone laugh at.