Runpod is proud to sponsor Season 2 of Project Odyssey 2024 from CivitAI, the world's largest AI filmmaking competition. We've written in the past about prominent open source packages like LTX, Mochi, and Hunyuan Video – here's your chance to show off your skills and maybe just learn a few new things about AI in the process! As a Gold sponsor for the project, Runpod is providing part of the infrastructure behind making this competition possible as well as helping to judge the competition.

Competition Basics

The goal of the competition is to create a compelling visual narrative that uses generative AI as the foundation of the work, with a submission deadline of January 16th, 2025. You are free to use whatever methods you wish while adhering to the competition's rules — which includes spinning up a ComfyUI pod on Runpod, if you so choose. However, there is a free trial of OpenV available to Project Odyssey contestants which gives you quick and easy access to open source video options such as Mochi. In addition, Runpod judges will be able to select the best movie in the "Sponsored Tools" category for any tools created with OpenV. If you are interested in pursuing this particularly prize, we would highly recommend using OpenV to generate your submission.

Generating videos with OpenV couldn't be simpler; it's just a matter of logging into the platform, prompting what you want to see, and off you go. It also provides an Inspiration tab for some of the most immersive examples of video that have been created using the platform.

We are thrilled to be working with the OpenV team in this venture — OpenV is a community-focused, open-source project designed to inspire developers to build their own AI startups using Runpod as their platform of choice for inference. Rather than replicating the feature completeness of other platforms, OpenV focuses on providing a solid foundation for developers. By crehaating the bare minimum of a platform, we emphasize simplicity and offer a starting point for innovation. OpenV enables us to gather real-world data from a consumer-facing product, helping us improve the overall developer experience.

There are a number of prizes up for grabs, including cash, platform credits, and subscriptions - so we're looking forward to what you can create!

Conclusion

The second half of 2024 has been a bumper crop for amazing open source video packages, and we agree that it is high time for a second contest to help demonstrate the strides that the field has made over the last year. If you need any advice on how to begin, feel free to check in with our Discord which has a whole community of AI artists ready and willing to help you out. We're looking forward to seeing what you make.

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Author profile: Brendan McKeag