Within the entrepreneurial 2020 Next 36 program, Cooper Midroni, Milton Calderón Donefer and I founded an AI lip syncing technology company, Dubly Inc. Dispite 2020’s unexpected global pandemic and other world changes, the experience provided us all with the incredible hands-on opportunity to build a company from the ground up. Over the course of 6 months we developed a working prototype of our system and secured conditional offers for funding as we pitched Dubly to angel investors and high profile incubator programs like Acceleprise, BoostVC, and Y Combinator. With increasing complex development requirements and competition from companies such as CannyAI however, at the end of the Next 36 program we decided to discontinue this project’s development in order to pursue alternative opportunities.
Dubly leverages machine learning to synthesize localized versions of video content to appear originally filmed in new languages, visually and audibly. This unlocks video media from entertainment industries such as TV, film and short-form content to be equally enjoyed by international audiences, maximizing global content viewership.that had a single goal of synchronizing the lips of actors in all dubbed videos in film, tv and online media.
Dubly Inc
MVP After Effects Plugin
At Dubly, I designed and developed new approaches for interacting with our generative AI models, crafted company marketing and branding assets, helped pitch the company to potential investors, and managed a small development team. After 6 months of development, we developed an MVP After Effects plugin seen below to provide fine tuned control over the outputs of lip-synchronized video frames generated by our underlying AI system.
Future Application Design
While this After Effects plugin worked well for supporting our early adopters, our future vision of the project involved a custom video editing experience with even more fine tuned editing controls in a collaborative online environment. Below are some mockups I developed of such a system, which was later developed by visiting Software Developer Arsalan Fardi who received a grant from the Transformative Talent Internship program at the University of Calgary to work with us.
Branding + Logos
Below are some logo concepts I designed for the company. The logo itself is designed to encode the letters D U B.
