I'm afraid the official stance in the US is that works created with AI are not eligible for copyright. "The U.S. Copyright Office (USCO) stance In a series of decisions and guidance issued in 2023, the USCO has clarified that works created with substantial AI input are not eligible for copyright protection in the United States. Since 1973, it has been the official position off the USCO that in order to benefit from copyright protection, works must be attributable to a “human agent”. Under the new guidance, “AI-generated content that is more than de minimis” should be explicitly identified and excluded from registration. In other words, the human-made aspects of AI-generated works, such as “prompt instructions”’, are eligible for copyright protection, while any output from, such as images in a text-to-image model like Midjourney, are not." This has been tested a number of times in court and the copyright claims have failed so a precedent has been set. In the UK it's a little more forgiving but if the majority of work e.g. the percentage of an image is AI produced, I understand copyright does not apply. I don't believe this has yet been tested in the UK courts but assume you don't have a lot of rights over "your" work.

@Timothy Masters Yeah we'd already worked out some of those bits between us so they're just here as part of an end solution. The model got a bit better in the meantime and then the Open AI implementation where they mention how they improved it with post processing gave me an end goal. Can't always trust the marketing though! I do think they're pretty honest those two though, it goes a long way when they take the trouble to point out limitations. I'm now finally in a place where I can actually do my storyboards with more expressive camera positioning in the knowledge that I can fix them up afterwards when needed.

@Mark Diaz OK, no problem, I will fill in some details of where I'm coming from. 😁 I didn't respond about the story because I did not feel it was relevant to the issue I was having. I joined the course to solve the technical problems, primarily backgrounds (surprise!) - not just consistency, but as replacement for the vast amount of time manually building one in blender for 3D animation which I have done previously. I could already do character consistency by training character LoRAs - though for Nano Banana I have switched to character sheets, but I'd done that before it came up in module 3. So reliable and usable backgrounds were the problem I needed to solve if I was looking at using AI for animation. I'm reasonably comfortable with the rest of the processes and workflow as I think this is my 5th or 6th animation course over the last 20 ish years covering different software and mediums. That said, I've been thorough and gone through all the videos and steps following the course fully and it's good content and a nice refresher since I'd decided to stop animating in 3D a couple of years ago due to time constraints. I also did your Cinematography for 2D animation course a few? years ago which is where you got my contact details from but I feel it must have been on a different platform then as it's showing 0% on here. The little story is really just a proof of concept. It's one I started in 3D a few years ago but I had my computer and lots of other tech stolen from my house about 2 years ago, including backups of work etc. - What is the story you want to tell? - What do you want your audience to feel when they're in that bar? As for the story itself, it's actually a short comedy skit. It starts menacing but should hopefully end with laugh or at least some amusement. But it could be anything, I could be animating someone else's story and being asked to deliver a specific shot. So this is why I'm so focussed on the background. It's the missing piece of the puzzle I bought the course for and without being able to solve it to a high enough standard within a viable amount of time, the course doesn't get me to where I need to be to consider AI animation a viable alternative. I do feel this ties in to your teachings on the role of the director rejecting the poor quality/jank/AI slop, to deliver a better standard.

@Mark Diaz Thanks Mark. I understand all that process, though I was probably setting the quality level too early and at the storyboard stage 🤦‍♂️ I should have used the output as-is so good tip there. 👌 The question I was asking all along was in relation to this bit; "Then you jump in and fix only the panels that you are showing." I was asking you to show us all the fixing process. I have now built my own system/workflow for doing the fixing part which I've posted about, but that doesn't really help others as it requires running some models locally or building stuff in the cloud. So I think many of the others on the course could benefit from a comprehensive video on fixing the panels for consistency. I'd still like to see that myself to see what your particular approach is, it's all good knowledge to see how people approach the same task. Often you'll see something that you've never thought of before but seems obvious afterwards.

Well I think this is the final look. I decided to join up the bench seating and finally got rid of the table, not before it put it back in another 10 times even though there was nothing in the prompt or original image to say there was a table in the middle. 🤣 I think I can upscale this and actually do the storyboard now. 🤞

I tried another a couple of approaches over the weekend, this one was taking the basic untextured 3D model, taking the camera view in room there and using the 360 panorama of that same scene in NB2 to see if would pick up that it was just a view inside the same space and put everything where it was supposed to be. Didn't work, it moved the signs and recreated the bench elsewhere... worth a try!

I don't think you're being too critical, just critical enough. Good overall theming, matched the music very well. I'm not really into rock these days but thought the song was good too. 👍 I did notice the segments near the end being slightly out of sync as you mentioned but it is slight. I think the only other thing that did stick out for me was the over the shoulder view from inside the car driving up the road where the angle of the car would actually have it veering off to the right instead of going straight ahead, not sure how you fix that though.