Name: A.I. is changing how Hollywood makes films
Uploaded: 2023-02-14
Duration: 7 min 14 s
Description: Proponents say artificial intelligence allows the industry to tell stories in new ways.

Proponents say artificial intelligence allows the industry to tell stories in new ways.

A.I. is changing how Hollywood makes films

Tech

There really has been a dramatic evolution in the technology that are used to create visual effects for films. This is really the future of more or less everything. Content on the internet, entertainment, gaming, how we do zooms work school will all involve content that's deeply personalized. That experience is going to be driven by generator ai models trained on data from the real world. We're creating a technology that can output something creative but it could be used for good or for bad or it could be strange or uncomfortable for more people understand about that process. The more we can smooth out some of the potential harm, the worries, the anxiety and get faster to kind of regulatory outcomes and um standards across technology companies government that's that's really important from the first cave painting, you know where they put their hand on the wall there saying I'm here, I'm representing something I'm representing myself and visual effects are the same thing. And so the film's representation ceilings of imagery of communication. So now ai comes along and it's a different way of representing these images faster way. Perhaps a better way, definitely a different way. When I started computer graphics was used for things that were shiny or things that could be used that could be rendered in the computer with enough detail and it was really I L m with Jurassic park that first brought these living breathing characters to life that wasn't the first time C. G. Was used in the movie. It was the first time that you saw something as realistic and alive as a dinosaur on the big screen and that truly did change everything. And today we are starting to see the beginning of some of the machine learning algorithms be able to compete with and sometimes out compete some of the hand coded algorithms that we've used take those algorithms and put them to use in a narrative form. So some of it is a bit traditional like making someone younger, bringing someone back from the dead. Then there are foundational tools that surround it, ai mo cap. Currently, when you're doing motion capture, a lot of cameras, uh and you are wearing often those dots even on your face, these are markers so that the computer system can understand what's going on with AI. You can start losing the markers and all the things that restrict you, you eliminate all those barriers. You're getting more into the art, you're allowing yourself real access to acting and the interaction between the director and the actor. We create content generated by Ai that looks exactly like the real world. So you can't tell the difference really, over. So we can actually do things with AI that are impossible with traditional methods to get that really hyper realistic look that doesn't look uncanny. Doesn't look weird. Doesn't look C. G. I. You really need AI in order to do that. The other big advantage is that it's much much cheaper to do AI um than traditional three D or VfX CG. I I would say there's probably not a project that I am not leveraging some amount of Ai and machine learning in one way or the other. It might be as straightforward as using an Ai based noise or which would be like analyzing the image of getting rid of noise in a very fast way. So the artists can generate might be as complicated as doing an entire face swapping and using many Ai algorithms to recreate that based on a different performers on book above effect. We were doing the young Skywalker one, one of the ideas that john Fabbro had and we were able to execute for him based on some of these new technologies was our artists were actually able to take the casting tapes when we were trying to find the best um Luca like for young Mark Hamill, we could actually take the casting tapes and put Mark Hamill onto the potential candidate. Being able to more quickly run these iterations even at medium quality was to really validate the casting process when you can streamline the very time consuming processes that the computer used to have to turn on for hours and hours and sometimes that can be accelerated dramatically with some of these new machine learning tools. When you can streamline that down, you can actually think about the creative process in a different way. You can be more experimental. You can take more risks because you know, you're going to get more creative opportunities brought in all these cameras motion control, all the ways to tell a story. Ai is part of that continually for an artist, it opens up all these possibilities. If you can cross the uncanny valley with AI and you have the audience buying into this and believing it, then you can take them on another path. I mean it just opens up the narrative and the artistic expression. Sometimes people think that by using these algorithms, words, we might be reducing the number of people that are involved in the process. But when you see something like the young luke skywalker and that is using some of the latest machine learning based algorithms as part of the overall solution. But it's really important to note there's still hundreds and sometimes thousands of hours of work that's going in into those shots that you see one shot after another in that show each one of those has an artist who's working thousands of hours or artists who are working hundreds of hours to create that final illusion. Using all sorts of different techniques, three D models and keep current animation animation driven by either the actual actors or stand in on set. All the lighting and all the other things are going to get that final quality results that equality that our filmmaking partners are really looking for. There is a lot of tension between human creativity and this idea that machines or Ai can do some of the heavy lifting previously done by people. Um, ultimately, I think that if we're in an economy where we can create more content, more creative challenges, um, it will ultimately feature more real people. There will be more jobs. What I hope for is for the Ai tools to allow greater risk taking and greater opportunities for innovation. Um, if we can help people tell authentic stories in an authentic way, at a high degree of quality that will definitely be doing our job as visual effects artist, which is supporting that storytelling and taking all of these tools and harnessing them with artists to be able to tell those stories on the screen.