Icelandic director Thorhallur Saevarsson, professionally known as Thor, has joined Madheart, Los Angeles, for exclusive representation stateside. It’s the first affiliation with a U.S. company for Thor, who is well established in Europe with credits spanning such clients as Philips, McDonald’s, Vodafone, Fuji, T-Mobile, Peugeot, GE, Coca-Cola, Deichmann and Skoda.
Thor, who got his start as a teenager working on American commercial shoots in Iceland, burst onto the scene in 2002 when his short film Autograph took Silver and Audience awards at the Nike Young Directors Awards. A year later, he was included in Saatchi & Saatchi’s New Directors Showcase at Cannes. Since then, he has helmed scores of spots in affiliation with such production companies as London’s Stink, Denmark’s Moland Film, Germany’s Tempo Media and Slovenia’s Super 16.
Thor’s work defies simple categorization in terms of style and genre but much of it involves character-driven stories, sometimes told through fast paced action. A case in point is a recent commercial for German sports retailer Deichmann in which a man leads police on a harrowing chase across urban rooftops. The scene has the feel of a Hollywood action film. Following a series of narrow escapes, the man is cornered by a SWAT team–who’s after his shoes.
Thor’s directing credits also include a number of car spots, including a recent effects-driven campaign for Czech automaker Skoda. In it, a couple driving through a city suddenly finds themselves in an African landscape, filled with giant waterfalls, tropical birds and a ghostly herd of elephants.
Thor was introduced to Madheart executive producer Lisa Phillips through his Scandinavian agent Martin Bartdrum. “I was immediately taken by her meticulous approach to marketing and sales,” Thor recalled. “I also heard great things about her way of producing from other directors.”
Madheart is represented on the West Coast by Lisa Gimenez Toliver, Catherine DeAngelis of Hot Betty in the Midwest, and Dana Dubay on the East Coast.
AI-Assisted Works Can Get Copyright With Enough Human Creativity, According To U.S. Copyright Office
Artists can copyright works they made with the help of artificial intelligence, according to a new report by the U.S. Copyright Office that could further clear the way for the use of AI tools in Hollywood, the music industry and other creative fields.
The nation's copyright office, which sits in the Library of Congress and is not part of the executive branch, receives about half a million copyright applications per year covering millions of individual works. It has increasingly been asked to register works that are AI-generated.
And while many of those decisions are made on a case-by-case basis, the report issued Wednesday clarifies the office's approach as one based on what the top U.S. copyright official describes as the "centrality of human creativity" in authoring a work that warrants copyright protections.
"Where that creativity is expressed through the use of AI systems, it continues to enjoy protection," said a statement from Register of Copyrights Shira Perlmutter, who directs the office.
An AI-assisted work could be copyrightable if an artist's handiwork is perceptible. A human adapting an AI-generated output with "creative arrangements or modifications" could also make it fall under copyright protections.
The report follows a review that began in 2023 and fielded opinions from thousands of people that ranged from AI developers, to actors and country singers.
It shows the copyright office will continue to reject copyright claims for fully machine-generated content. A person simply prompting a chatbot or AI image generator to produce a work doesn't give that person the ability to copyright that work, according to the report. "Extending protection to material whose expressive elements are determined by a machine ...... Read More