This week’s new tools, tutorials, and resources 👇
Pixar & Disney: Ex-Disney and Pixar creative reveals the secret to super smooth animation (Tutorial).
Public Domain: These notable works are officially in the public domain as 2026 arrives.
Ratatouille: Academy-winning animator who animated scenes in the Ratatouille movie hosted a Q&A session.
Blender: A 2025 community survey of 5,102 Blender users.
In partnership with
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TOP STORY
🤝 Adobe partners with “Runway”
Using Runway Gen-4.5
This week, Adobe announced a multi-year strategic partnership with Runway, bringing Runway's AI video generation technology directly into Adobe's creative tools.
As part of the deal, Adobe becomes Runway's "preferred API creativity partner," giving Adobe customers exclusive early access to Runway's latest models before they're released to the public.
Runway is an AI research company known for its generative video models. Its tools are used by filmmakers, studios, and content creators to generate video clips from text prompts or images.
The partnership kicks off with Runway's "Gen-4.5" model, which is now available in the Adobe Firefly app. Gen-4.5 delivers improved motion quality, better prompt adherence, and the ability to stage complex multi-element scenes with realistic physics and expressive character performances.
Here's what this partnership enables:
Generate video in Firefly: Create video clips from text prompts using Gen-4.5, then move into Firefly's video editor to assemble and polish.
Seamless Creative Cloud integration: Take generations directly into Premiere Pro, After Effects, and other Adobe apps for further refinement.
Exclusive AI development: Adobe and Runway will co-develop specialized video capabilities that will be available exclusively in Adobe applications.
Industry collaboration: The companies will work directly with filmmakers, studios, streaming platforms, and brands to shape professional video workflows.
The partnership positions Adobe's Firefly app as the only place where creators can access top generative models from Runway, OpenAI, Google, Luma AI, ElevenLabs, and others, all in one workspace.
Gen-4.5 is available now in the Adobe Firefly app.
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ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
🤖 Meta acquires “Manus”
This week, Meta announced the acquisition of Manus, a Singapore-based AI startup that automates (creative tasks) like building websites, generating presentations, and editing images — all from simple text prompts. The deal is reportedly worth $2 billion.
The acquisition is notable because Manus is one of the few AI products that are actually generating revenue at scale. The company announced earlier this month that it has millions of paying subscribers and is generating over $100 million in annual recurring revenue.
Since launching in March 2025, Manus has been used to spin up over 80 million projects for users worldwide.
With Manus, you can:
Build portfolio websites: Describe your work and style, and Manus creates a full personal site ready to publish.
Design pitch decks and presentations: Generate project proposals or portfolio presentations from a simple brief.
Edit and enhance images: Remove backgrounds, improve quality, or apply effects without needing Photoshop.
Draft professional copy: Create landing pages, emails, or course announcements tailored to your audience.
Translate and localize content: Convert documents into other languages while preserving the original format and tone.
Organize messy data: Turn unstructured information into clean, export-ready tables.
And more 👇
Here's what the acquisition means:
Manus remains independent: The product will continue operating as a standalone subscription service through its app and website.
Integration with Meta platforms: Over time, Manus will be woven into Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, where Meta AI is already available.
No disruption for existing users: Current subscribers can continue using the service as normal.
The deal represents Meta's largest AI acquisition to date and signals Zuckerberg's bet that the future of AI isn't just chatbots that answer questions, it's AI that can actually do the work for you.
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SOCIAL MEDIA
📱 Instagram CEO talks “AI Slop”
This week, Instagram head Adam Mosseri published a year-end memo acknowledging that AI-generated content has fundamentally changed the platform, and suggesting it's now up to creators to prove their work is real.
In a 20-slide post, Mosseri wrote that "authenticity is becoming infinitely reproducible" and that "the feeds are starting to fill up with synthetic everything."
Rather than continuing to chase and label AI-generated media, Mosseri believes it will be "more practical to fingerprint real media than fake media."
His proposed solution: camera manufacturers should "cryptographically sign images at capture," embedding proof that content was taken by a real device, at a real time, in a real place. Many camera manufacturers have already begun integrating this through the Content Authenticity Initiative (C2PA).
AI editing in Instagram Stories
Critics note the irony that Meta itself is giving users AI tools while simultaneously asking creators to adapt to the flood of synthetic content. Meta has aggressively rolled out AI features across Instagram, including:
"Imagine with Meta AI": Meta's image generator, trained on 1.1 billion Instagram and Facebook photos, lets users generate images from text prompts directly in DMs, feeds, and Stories.
AI editing in Stories: Users can now modify images and generate new content using Meta AI directly in Instagram Stories.
AI-generated feed content: Meta is testing AI images created for users based on interests and trends, displayed directly in Facebook and Instagram feeds.
AI Studio: A tool that lets creators build AI extensions of themselves to engage with audiences on Messenger, Instagram, and WhatsApp.
AI character accounts: Meta launched AI-generated profiles on Instagram in early January, though they were quickly removed after user backlash.
For illustrators and digital artists who don't shoot photos, existing solutions like Adobe's Content Credentials could help verify authenticity (if Instagram chooses to read that data).
OTHER STORIES
Everything else in creative news 🗞
Blender turned 32 years old.
Riverside now allows you to separate video uploads into individual audio and video tracks per speaker.
Jitter released “Gradient Templates,” a set of templates featuring animated gradients on fills, strokes, and text.
Cap released version 0.4.0, releasing: Screenshot Mode (with a dedicated editor), Auto captions, new editor track types (Text, Mask, and Highlight), a new recording picker, and more.
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