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It’s cheaper, but also a job killer. Expect disruption in VFX, fiercer labor fights and, possibly, an invigoration of the production landscape.
By Winston Cho
Almost every time Robert Zemeckis called cut on a scene in Here, Tom Hanks would run back to the playback monitors. The veteran actor had been on dozens of sets through his 40-year career but nothing like this.
On Here, he plays a character whose arc is traced from high school to senior citizen with the help of a generative AI tool from VFX studio Metaphysic. For every shot he was going to be de-aged, there were two monitors. One showed what the cameras were capturing. The other showed him in the scenes at various ages in real time, as if he came straight from shoots on Splash or Saving Private Ryan. After seeing the takes, he would adjust his physicality to walk with a bit more spring in his step or appear stiffer getting up off the couch, depending on his age in the scene.
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Rewind just a couple of years, and a movie like Here would not get greenlit. Without advancements in aging technology made possible AI, it would be forced to go the route of Brad Pitt-starrer The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, which likely earmarked twice Here‘s entire budget just for VFX, killing any upside for potential buyers along the way. Instead, Miramax fully financed the movie on a tight $45 million budget.
“This wouldn’t have been able to get done,” says Here virtual production supervisor Jim Geduldick, a VFX veteran with credits on Masters of the Air, Robert Zemeckis’ live-action/CG Pinocchio and Avatar: The Last Airbender. “It would’ve been too cost prohibitive to do that amount of VFX.”
Since the filming of Here last year, production of movies and TV shows of all sizes has approached historic lows. Gone is the era of so-called Peak TV, when studios were viciously competing for subscribers to grow their streaming endeavors with new content. Profitability and responsible spending matter now more than ever before.
The rosiest outlook on AI deployment envisions an invigoration of the production landscape by bringing down costs in areas related to conceptualization, visual effects and animation, just to name a few. The trade-off? Chunks of the Hollywood workforce gone, mostly those in postproduction who are staring down the barrel of potential automation due to labor protections and legal and technological constraints surrounding AI use that protect actors, writers and directors from but not other crew.
The dynamic has not gone unnoticed. In November, Ben Affleck set off a firestorm among the rank-and-file in Hollywood with his predictions on how AI will ripple across the industry. “I wouldn’t want to be in the VFX business,” said the Artists Equity chief executive. “They’re in trouble.”
His comments weren’t all doom and gloom though. The A-lister was largely optimistic that the technology will help talent and revitalize production by slashing costs — as long as you’re not engaged in the “more laborious, less creative and more costly aspects of filmmaking.” He stressed, “That will make it easier for the people who want to make Good Will Hunting’s to go out and make it.”
Like Affleck, other Hollywood execs are bullish that the technology will be a boon as the industry settles on a new paradigm on the economics of filmmaking and distribution.
“We’re looking at how AI can save money in areas like special effects and landscapes,” says Lionsgate vice chairman Michael Burns. “If we can utilize those tools with filmmakers, that will allow movies that might not have otherwise been greenlit to be made.”
In September, the studio announced a first-of-its-kind partnership with Runway that will see the New York-based AI startup train a new generative AI model on Lionsgate content, which will be used to assist with behind-the-scenes production processes. Under the no-cash deal, Runway will have access to a portion of the studio’s titles to create a model designed exclusively for Lionsgate’s use, with the hope that it can plugged into different parts of the production pipeline, such as the storyboarding process and in helping with the design of VFX work, according to a person familiar with the deal. This was followed by Blumhouse partnering with Meta on a series of short films produced with the help of Movie Gen, which creates video and corresponding audio, as it tests the AI waters.
The deals signal further mainstream adoption of the technology as studios look for proof of concept and tech companies look for a foothold into the industry.
“They’re gaining legitimacy,” says Meeka Bondy, chair of Perkins Coie’s entertainment practice and HBO’s former senior vice president for legal affairs. “This is going to change how films and TV shows are produced. Just like when I draft a contract in the future, I might not start with a blank piece of paper. I might start with a first draft created by AI or ten drafts created by AI. The same thing will happen in film.”
Like other industries reckoning with the technology, Hollywood is very much in the business of cost-cutting. However, labor deals struck by the Writers Guild of America and Screen Actors Guild nabbed some protections for their members. For writers, AI is not completely prohibited, but there are restrictions on how it can be credited and utilized such that it doesn’t affect pay and credit. This intersects with provisions in U.S. intellectual property law barring the copyrightability of AI-generated material, severely hampering the commercial viability of productions that utilize the technology since they would enter the public domain. Several studios forbid the use of AI in writers’ room and have some scribes sign certificates of authenticity attesting that they wrote scripts themselves.
“Contracts say you need to ask permission of studios, and a lot of studios’ policies is that it’s simply not allowed,” said showrunner and writer Mark Goffman (Bull, Limitless, The West Wing) at AI on the Lot, a conference AI in the entertainment industry, in May.
And for actors, their labor contract requires consent to create digital clones of them using AI. In two other films where Metaphysics’ handiwork appears, Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga and Alien: Romulus, characters from the sequel’s predecessors are resurrected. In both cases, the productions had to get consent from and pay the estates of the dead actors. And if a studio that’s not a signatory to the labor agreements were to go around actors and use their appearance in a production without permission, they could sue for violating their rights to control the commercial use of their image (right of publicity), like Scarlett Johansson threatened to do when OpenAI allegedly copied her voice after she refused to license it to the company.
Unlike writers and actors, certain industry workers don’t have the same protections. After the Animation Guild reached a tentative deal with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers last month, two negotiating committee members on Dec. 10 urged others to vote against ratifying the new contract due to a lack of protections around AI. Under the proposed agreement, AI usage can be required if there’s advance notice. Compared to deals struck by WGA and SAG-AFTRA, the guardrails on AI implementation are noticeably lower.
“Studios can replace workers with AI,” wrote Mike Riana, director of The Mitchells vs. the Machines, in a post on Instagram. “We didn’t get staffing minimums to protect crew sizes from AI job losses.”
AI has found its way into several parts of the preproduction pipeline, including storyboarding, character design and concepts and background art. Their VFX counterparts aren’t positioned to fare any better. The majority of VFX houses aren’t unionized (though IATSE has leveraged the specter of AI to do so) and most work is already outsourced to third party shops, like Weta FX, DNEG and MPC, in part to take advantage of postproduction tax credits overseas.
Among the reasons why Hollywood execs have pointed to VFX as an area AI can be adopted revolves around the laborious nature of the work. Quality VFX requires a long lead time and a lot of money. There are nearly 200,000 frames in a two-hour movie shot at 24 frames per second. Workers often treat every frame in a shot, not to mention manipulation to match motion, lighting and color.
Like at the advent of CGI in the 1990s, when the technology entered the mainstream after the popularity of Terminator 2: Judgment Day and Jurassic Park, some VFX artists are leaning into AI. While there are legal constraints on how the technology can be used, they can get around them by training open source AI systems on their own works. Still, there has to be a person manipulating the tools.
“You won’t need a 300 person VFX team; that may be true,” Geduldick says. “But you’ll need a dedicated set of artists to wield the AI.”
This story first appeared in the Dec. 13 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. To receive the magazine, click here to subscribe.
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