Project Odyssey Season 2
Project Odyssey
One Last Wish
Edmond Yang, Simon Valentine & Alex Holm
1st Place, Narrative
An elderly inmate's final wish, made in 48 hours at a Norwegian workshop with a script by novelist Erlend Loe.
Billed as the world's largest AI film competition. After a first season in June 2024, Project Odyssey announced Season 2 on November 30 with nine categories, from Narrative and Music Video to Trailers, Rendering & VFX and Behind-the-Scenes, plus sponsor awards from Civitai, ElevenLabs, Kling, Lambda and Viggle and gold sponsors including Runway, HeyGen and Hedra. The pitch was support rather than exposure: about $800,000 in free tool trials and $78,000 in cash from 47 sponsors and community partners.
More than 30,000 people signed up and over 2,000 teams submitted 4,500+ films, nearly 190 hours in all, by the January 19, 2025 deadline. Twenty-two judges, including Jason Zada, Eric Shamlin and ElevenLabs' Mati Staniszewski, picked the winners at an online ceremony on February 17. One Last Wish took Narrative, KITSUNE came second and was a favorite of three judges, and NALVORA and Memory Maker each won two awards.
For Season 3 the team partnered with the Chroma Awards, an AI film, music video and games competition backed by ElevenLabs, Google Cloud, fal, Freepik, Dreamina and CapCut, with $175,000 in prizes.