Sort of, yes. Here's why it might be and why that's absolutely fine.
The first jobs in film that I ever did were working on VFX for Harry Potter and V for Vendetta. Exciting as that was, I couldn't shake the feeling "This is insane!". SO many people with hyper-specialised skillsets.
Around the same time, Ray Harryhausen spoke about the same thing. He said "I had to learn to do everything because I couldn't find another kindred soul. Now you see 80 people listed doing the same things I was doing by myself." Robert Rodriguez documented his journey in his must-read diary "
Rebel Without a Crew", on the making of his hit "
El Mariachi", and came to the same conclusion. As soon as he went from being a solo operator to working inside of Hollywood, he just couldn't understand how or why everything went so slow.
As a younger artist I thought "Well yeah, but our stuff looks so good, that takes time". But that peaked, didn't it? Today's films don't look better, on average, than those from 20 years ago, although technology has improved, and team sizes continue to swell.
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Over time, that thought, "This is insane!" morphed into "This is really unhealthy, and I think it would be better if we burned it down and started again", because when you distribute the creative process over hundreds, at times thousands of people, it isn't a creative process anymore, it's just a factory pipeline.
In starting my own company, I vowed to keep it as small and creative as possible, developing an approach that allows us to compete against much bigger studios.
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AI fits perfectly into this approach. It doesn't steal your creativity, unless you surrender it willingly yourself. Working in Hollywood sure as hell does, but no one's talking about that now that there's a new bogeyman in town!
If the industry downscales and people lose work, that's a painful downside, albeit one that professionals are accustomed to, as film work is so unstable.
But from a creative workflow perspective, it's all upside. I have yet to find one area of film or VFX that it replaces. Literally every skill that I've learned can be used as a tool to tame and control this generative beast.
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This week's live workshop
That's what this week's live workshop was all about, revisiting a shot that we filmed ourselves, and previously finished off with VFX, and redoing it with AI. The end result is much better and took a fraction of the time, but would be impossible to control in the way that we do without the necessary VFX skills.
Final result from the live workshop - all project files uploaded to platform if you want to recreate it!
I think that's the future. In-camera will always be better if you have the capability and budget. AI will replace traditional VFX for post production, but VFX will be the facilitator, the bridge between the real world and the generated one. Hollywood won't change much, but independent creators will be able to close the gap much more effectively.
As we go forwards, me and the team will be continuing to develop bridging techniques to swallow up that gap and put as much power as we can into the hands of the next generation of Ray Harryhausens.
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