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From Sets to Screens: Virtual Production, AI, and the Future of Filmmaking
00:38:44
A.J. Wedding of Orbital Studios breaks down virtual production, AI in filmmaking, and how it’s reshaping creative workflows.
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- [00:05]
A
Welcome to Reshaping Workflows with dell Pro Max PCs and Nvidia, where innovation meets real world impact in high performance computing.
- [00:20]
B
Welcome back to another episode of Reshaping Workflows with Dell promax and Nvidia RTX GPUs. I'm Logan Law, your host, and this episode scares me because there is no one I would rather talk to than AJ Shotgun Wedding. However, this episode might get really off the rails very quickly. I am unsure on how it's going to go. I also have my partner in crime, Cindy, here. No one cares about her. But let's focus on you, A.J. all about virtual production, all about orbital studios. Take one minute. Tell the audience a little bit about your background, what you do at Orbital, your role at Orbital, and what Orbital does.
- [00:58]
C
Well, hello, guys. So I'm the founder and CEO of Orbital Studios. It actually started in my garage in 2020 when everybody was making sourdough. I was working with LED panels and cameras in my garage and trying to figure out what was wrong with what people were doing with virtual production. And for those who don't know, virtual production is a combination of technologies where we're taking what are basically visual effects and having them run live on a LED wall or in some cases, a green screen, and actors can actually interact with them. It's made popular by the Mandalorian, but now it's becoming just kind of a part of every workflow for film and television. So, yeah, the biggest thing for us, why I started Orbital, I was just kind of looking for a place in our industry. I've been in this town for 25 years, and I noticed, having worked in production and in visual effects, that now you're going to have these computer nerds trying to tell a crotchety old DP what his job is. And that was not going to go well. So I thought this was a good spot for me. I kind of understand both of those parties. And from there, I just kind of started looking at the technology and seeing how we could improve it and just make it better for people who want to use it.
- [02:07]
A
Way to throw a dig at my Covid hobby, A.J.
- [02:10]
B
Yeah, I mean, that's all Cindy was doing, was making Sourdough, like, for real. She still does to this day. But, A.J. you have to realize a lot of people listening to this, you know, are AI enthusiasts. They might not know exactly what virtual production is. And I remember the one guy, not. Not Wilder, but the other guy that always hangs out with us when you bring me donuts. The other guy, I asked him what virtual production was. And he gave the example about the. The sunset scene and like, being able to get the golden hour, golden minute or whatever, like, give that example to let people who have never been in M and E, which by the way, is not everyone in the world according to. Unless we, you know, people in la. But what is. Explain how that works, like, what the advantages of that is.
- [02:52]
C
There's a ton of advantages to using virtual production. A lot of it is, you know, if you've ever seen a car scene, anytime you're shooting a car scene, if you can imagine having to put that car on a trailer, get the police and firefighters, close down the roads, put cameras on the truck, it's really unsafe, all of those kind of things. Just to get a couple of car scenes where you can drive a car into our stage, we have LED walls, much like the. The old school rear projection kind of thing that people were doing in the. In the 40s and 50s. And now you can actually do it. It looks really good and you're all safe and nobody has to close any roads. Similarly, like you were saying with the sunset thing, you know, sunset's a very difficult thing to get right. When they made a movie recently where they did a whole dance scene at sunset it in Los Angeles, it took I don't even know how many days. It was like seven or eight days to get it right. And then the sunset was different every time. So by having a virtual production stage, you can put the sunset wherever you want it, and you can have it stay there for 10 hours and get whatever you want.
- [03:56]
A
I was binge watching the studio, and there's that one episode where they're trying to do that sunset scene all in one shot. And you set up. Rogan keeps. Yeah. And one night, Seth Rogen keeps, like, interrupting it. And the whole time I'm watching that, I'm like, why did they just not do this, like, on a virtual production stage? It was. It was. It was really funny. But. So why virtual production and not traditional filmmaking? I know you started this in your garage, so what made you want to do this?
- [04:25]
C
I did start in traditional filmmaking, and I think that we're limited in some ways as independent filmmakers. You know, there's only so much you can get away with. And that initially drew me to visual effects because I said, well, I probably can't afford to shoot in Dodger Stadium or on a spaceship, but I could probably build it later. And so that kind of got me into visual effects. And then from there, seeing this develop into what it's become. It's like going back to traditional filmmaking, except now your set is virtual. And if you were going to shoot at Dodger Stadium, for example, it would take you two or three days to light it because. Because of how much space you have that you have to physically light. And then you've got your. Your shoot that you're going to do. So imagine the cost of that. Whereas I can just put Dodger Stadium on the wall and I can shoot it all day if I want, and it doesn't change it. So it's really democratizing what's possible with filmmaking and traditional filmmaking. It's a lot more like that than, you know, a Marvel movie where half the movie is them standing in front of a big green screen staring at a tennis ball.
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A
I'm sure you could have convinced someone to give you Dodger Stadium for free. AJ with the partnership with Dell, you know, how did this start? Let's, let's talk about that, because I think it was the beginning of something great.
- [05:42]
C
Well, I think you were stalking me. That's how it started.
- [05:47]
A
I just wanted to hear you say it, actually.
- [05:49]
C
I think you were stalking a friend of mine, Neville Page. And I think from there he. He was scared of you, so he pushed you to me. And it's been a happy marriage ever since, I think. I don't know, it's just been great. You know, we. We've used several different vendors over the years for computers and, you know, didn't really get a ton of support that we really needed. And you kind of right off the bat were saying, look, what are you trying to accomplish? What do you need? How can I get it to you? And that was, you know, just amazing. And it's been amazing ever since.
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A
And so what have been the big differences? I mean, so you are, you know, slowly replacing, you know, the equipment that you guys are working on, on the Dells. And what have you noticed as far as the workflow goes, as far as the speed of the PCs, like, what's been the big difference?
- [06:36]
C
I mean, speed is the biggest one, I think, you know, and also some of the things that we just didn't really have a good solution for. You know, with storage and networking and all those kind of things, it's now sort of becoming a Dell ecosystem, you know, and it really has changed. You know, normally we would be like, how come we can't get five more frames per second out of our. Out of our computers? And it would be this constant thing of, you know, trying to figure out how, you know, where is the block. And we just don't have those blocks anymore. Now it's. The question is never okay, what else can we do to optimize it? Because now we don't have to.
- [07:12]
B
I want to ask a question. I got a couple questions. First question is that Cindy might have started this relationship, but how has it been since Logan Lawler's entered the fold? And I'd like that answered on air in front of 20,000 doubts. So go ahead, AJ this episode might continue for another 30 minutes or it might end right now. Let's just see what your answer is. Boss.
- [07:32]
C
I can never get enough of you. Logan, definitely love working with you. And especially, you know, we are really getting deeper into AI And I know that's really your focus. And so, you know, we'll probably have a lot more to talk about as these things develop.
- [07:46]
B
Agreed. Well, you know, from the cost and we've been to your studio, we've seen. We can't name names of things we've seen shot, but like, we've seen it like from a traditional. I got two part question. From a traditional actor standpoint versus traditional filmmaking versus virtual production, and then a director's, you know, opinion. From traditional filmmaking to virtual production, do they have a preference? You know, is there a learning curve for them? Is there things that like, are just so vastly different? Like you can't have a, A list actor come in and do virtual production because they don't know how to pretend to be in front of a wall. Do you know what I mean? I like, what are, what are some of those things that are different from just traditional filmmaking?
- [08:27]
C
I mean, I think the actors love it because they can actually see what their environment is that they're acting in. And in some cases, we'll have, you know, the creature that they're fighting against is on the screen and everybody sees it and not. Not seeing something different in their brain. In some cases, it's a lot simpler. Like we were talking about sunset. It's sunset out the window. And it's a romantic scene between a couple and they're like, wow, this actually is romantic. It's not, you know, it's not fake. So from the actor standpoint, we've. We've heard nothing but good things. And we've had, you know, we've worked on seven television series. We've had Tom Hanks in here and, you know, a bunch of big names. So everybody seems to love it. I think that when you start getting into directors and DPs, it's a little bit Harder because they don't understand it enough and they really do need to, to practice it. You know, it's like you don't want to show up on your first day of being on a baseball team having never hit a ball. And if you imagine now we're asking a DP to put 40% of their frame on this LED wall, you know, and the first question is, well, how do I control that? How do I even know if I like what's going to be there? So there's a lot of a learning curve that happens where we'll do a lot of things where we'll bring people in and just have them play. Just get used to it. You know, every time we've been on a show with a new dp, they will show up. And the first shot's always as far away from the LED wall as possible. And as soon as they realize it's actually pretty good, they keep getting closer and closer. And then eventually they, they really start to lean into it.
- [10:02]
B
I love it. Well, what we're going to do here is we're not going to show it now, but we're going to add in. I want Wilder to do a three, six, if you don't mind, a 360 of the studio, because I don't think people realize how big it is. Like, you know, the Logan Lawler wall, as I, as I call it, it's pretty big. Like, it is massive. Like, it's not a tiny, like green screen that you see like at a pop up, like in a high school acting play or something. I mean, this screen is massive. Do you happen to know the dimensions of it on the main one?
- [10:31]
C
There's a lot to unpack there because, you know, one of, one of the things that is great about what we do is that we're mobile. So basically the screen is like Lego blocks and we can build it to whatever size and shape we want. And currently in our studio we have, I think it's about 52 foot wide, half circle. And I want to say it's 16ft tall. And then there's an LED ceiling as well, which is, you know, it's on motor so we can move it to get proper reflections on cars, things like that. You know, one of the other things that, that's different about what we do is we really looked at the LED again while Cindy was making bread. We, we were really looking at these LEDs and trying to figure out how do we make these better for filmmakers? Because there were so many problems that people were experiencing where you'd get Moire on the screen if you use the wrong kind of lens or the focus is in the wrong place. And it really started to drag down what all the amazing possibilities seemed like they could be. So it seemed to me like those were just easily solvable technology problems. And everybody's answer was always, oh, it's going to take a lot more compute power to have a tighter pixel pitch or to wire them at 120 hertz or, you know, some of the little things that we do differently. And you're like, yeah, but compute power doubles every month. You know, it's like, it's pretty easy to get more compute power. And so we've never really liked hearing no when it comes to, oh, that's not possible. It's like, no, it is possible. And we'll show you. So one of the bigger things that we've done and you have seen, I know you've seen the bigger screens we had. We had a 60 foot by 20 foot in the back. That one currently is at Disney right now for a show called 91 1. So we just started on that show this week. But, you know, we'll build a volume that's, that's just massive. And nowadays they don't have to be circular. You know, the reason for them being circular in the past was more of a light thing. You know, if you looked off axis of an led, you started to see the color shift, but we fixed that. So now you can have any shape or size you want. So a lot of times we'll do like that big flat one that you saw. And for DPs, in a lot of cases, that's a better thing because you're going to get straight lines as opposed to seeing the horizon curve on you.
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A
So, aj, tell everyone what's actually running the Cindy Olivo wall at Orbital Studios.
- [12:54]
B
Please call it the Logan Lawler wall or this episode's ending.
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A
And why and how is it different from the other stages? And I want to get into that because I think what you guys doing is really unique.
- [13:06]
C
With the towers, the biggest thing is just our ability to be mobile, you know, and to build it fast, you know, we had to help develop a faster system for putting up walls and also, you know, driving, driving the walls with media servers. And so, you know, when we're talking about our Dell Pro Max media servers, we can actually get Unreal running five times faster than our previous computers. And that is a huge difference. If it only takes us a minute to get a scene running up on the wall, people don't understand how expensive it is to be making something. You know, you think about, oh, a movie cost $250 million. When you start to divide that out by. By time, you know, it's $6,000aminute. So every minute that you waste of production's time, you're costing them six grand. So when somebody says, hey, where's that scene? And you say, oh, it'll be up in five minutes. Well, that's $30,000. It's very important in filmmaking to have things that you know are not going to crash, systems you can depend on. And in every way, we overkill every single aspect of what we do for that reason.
- [14:17]
A
So what you're saying is you're using the towers as media servers and it's the portability of being able to take those to a site as opposed to having something in a data center.
- [14:29]
C
Exactly. And, you know, we have that too, but it really does help, you know, because we're actually. We're shipping gear overseas where it's not just cross town. You know, in some cases, we're actually going to London for a movie coming up here.
- [14:45]
A
And an ibc.
- [14:47]
C
Oh, an ibc. Yeah. Luckily, you're shipping those computers, so.
- [14:50]
B
Yeah. And I'm managing the budget. Yeah. Expensive.
- [14:54]
C
Speaking of, I. I need. I need a bigger budget.
- [14:57]
B
Yeah. Well, A.J. you know, just get in line, buddy. I didn't hear. It was the Logan Lawler stage. So good to want things.
- [15:04]
C
Jay, if I could walk over, I could show you the plaque, but I. It's. It's a ways down there.
- [15:09]
A
You've got a plaque on the donut table.
- [15:12]
B
And you know what? I want to say something that's so funny is that I don't know how many people I've never. Until working with AJ Via Cindy, who. Who. Who found AJ and where. I'd never been to, like, a movie set, and I think people have kind of a weird impression, but one thing is true about a movie set is the food is just laying out for the taking. And I absolutely raged. It was the best. It was awesome.
- [15:42]
A
I mean, each one of those, like, Swim jims probably like 20k. So, AJ what about other softwares? Like, talk to us about what the pipeline is. What softwares are you guys using on the towers? And I want to get a little bit more into some of the AI stuff that you guys are working on.
- [15:58]
C
For what we do, we have, you know, Unreal Engine is. Is still kind of the main thing that we use on the wall. Also Pixera. Pixera is Like a media playback server. It can also run other softwares, but we just use it for media playback. There are some new ones coming online, like Nuke Stage, which we're testing, which is very promising. And Chaos Arena, I think it's called, is a real time ray tracing setup for virtual production as well. So there are other players coming into the mix and we're constantly having to test everything that's coming because, you know, undoubtedly someone's going to come to me and say, hey, can we use Unity this week? And it's like, I don't know, can we? So those are the main ones. And then Obviously there's other 3D software. We use a lot of Adobe Creative Cloud, you know, Blender, ton of Blender work, Embergen, Liquid Gen, all of those things sort of support what we do. Anything that's sort of visual effects related is also something that fits in our box.
- [16:55]
B
So, A.J. we'll talk about A.I. in a second, but tell me a little bit about, you know, for those that don't have never use kind of Unreal, right? It is a. It's a game engine. But what is made that you feed into Unreal, that allows the scene to be ultimately created or replicated on the screen, how does that actually, what does that process look like?
- [17:18]
C
I think that the most amazing thing about Unreal Engine or any game engine really, is that it's live, it's rendering live. I used to do visual effects in the past and I would use Maya and V Ray and if you wanted to see one frame of what you were doing, you'd have to go to lunch and come back, wait for it to render. And now you can work so fast because you see everything as you're working and you can literally move the sun or any light that you want and immediately see the results of that. Now there are a lot of things that you can get that are stock that you can start with so that you're not starting from scratch. A lot of people will build things outside of the engine and then put them in the engine because they're more used to working in say Maya or Blender. It's so flexible in that way as well. And now we're seeing with five, six, that they've really put a lot of work into path tracing. So when you think about rendering, what makes something look real is how light reacts. And when you use something called Lumen, which is something inside of Unreal Engine, it's pretty good at making light bounce properly and make things look realistic. But ray tracing is really where we're trying to get to, because ray tracing is how you do all visual effects in post. They're the things that take, you know, thousands and thousands of hours of render time. And path tracing is Unreal Engine's version of ray tracing. And up until recently, you could get a look at path tracing, and it's sort of constantly trying to resolve itself and. And see a frame every couple of minutes. And in 5.6, we're seeing almost real time path tracing. So. And I think that's. That's ultimately the goal. And once we have that, you know, we won't have to do all these weird things that we do to. To have final version of visual effects up on the wall.
- [19:14]
B
I love it. And you didn't really technically get your start in VFX or filmmaking. I'd like for you to tell everyone about your time as Captain Morgan, because this is actually a, you know, we got to have a comedic break. Like, we have been very serious. I want you to tell me the story about Captain Morgan.
- [19:31]
C
Okay, I'll. I'll tell you two stories.
- [19:32]
B
Okay.
- [19:33]
C
The first one is Captain Morgan. I got a Captain Morgan commercial in 2003, and it was like, my third audition. I said to my. I had no idea. I said to my agent, well, you know, what does that mean? Like, my, how much money am I going to make? She's like, well, you can at least pay off your car. And I was like, what? I'm going to work for two days and pay off my car. And so I went in and I thought, well, the reason they wanted me was because I had danced at this audition and they were laughing at me, surprisingly, and they. So I thought, okay, well, they want me here because I'm. Cause I was funny, because I was dancing funny. And then they started putting. I was very fresh face. I didn't have this before. They started putting things like this on my face and, like, really long sideburns and tattoos. And I'm like, why did they want me? Like, oh, yeah, it's the dancing. The dancing. I go in to do the dancing part after I do the Captain Morgan part, and they have these two girls who are just ramming their butts into me the whole time. So I'm not dancing. I'm just kind of like, okay. But whatever. That was what they wanted. And I got paid enough that I actually paid off my first condo. So it was even better than. Than that. Second Story is my final audition as an actor. This is when I decided I'm not acting anymore. It was A commercial. I can't remember what company it was, but I walked in and there's a full size replica plastic cow. And the casting director says, I'm gonna play some music and you're gonna shake the cow. Cause it's about, it's about a milkshake and whatever you do, it can't look sexual. So I'm shaking this cow and I had like an out of body experience seeing myself doing it potentially very awkwardly, trying not to look awkward. And myself told myself, what really sucks for you is that if you get this, you have to take it because you need the money. And that's when I realized that as an actor, you don't really have any control over a career. So I said, yeah, that's it for me.
- [21:39]
A
One of the things I've noticed that really sets Orbital apart is you guys do so much to support other virtual production studios. You do tours, you help other studios kind of get set up. Why do you do that? You know, for me, I'd be like, oh, I wouldn't want the competition kind of knowing what I do. But you guys are so open about your workflows and your pipeline. So what? Why?
- [22:00]
C
I think that we believe in virtual production as a tool, as a thing that people should be using. And if you close yourself off and you don't communicate and you don't share knowledge, the tool is not going to get better in just your hands. We always want to collaborate with others. You can see that, that being true when you look at something like ILM and Stagecraft, where they're obviously ILM so they can do anything, but at some point it was costing them too much to try to keep up with the developments that Unreal was putting out with their own version of Stagecraft. So they're now back to using Unreal Engine. And, you know, being more collaborative is always better in our industry than trying to close off. You know, I know if I look at our competitors, you know, to be honest, we're not even competitive with them. You know, it's. You look at, you know, people like ILM and Pixamondo, they're so big, we're not even on their radar. So for us to share with everyone around who's doing this, we benefit from it quite a bit.
- [23:09]
B
So noble. I didn't know you had it in your shotgun wedding. Let's talk about AI, right? In virtual production. So in M and E, obviously there's a bit of a fear of AI, obviously. And we're talking to people not necessarily on like a large Virtual production, movie production, scale for AI, Right. But in certain TV shows, you know, I have a couple partners who, instead of mocking up, they'll use AI if there's like not a person, but it's like a still. I can't tell you which show, but I'll give you enough to probably direct it. They're redoing a show that used to be on the History Channel that talked about. Think of a way to say this so I won't give it away, is that talked about what would happen? And that show was done and basically, you know, it was kind of some really bad mockups, like. But they're now using AI kind of image and you know, video generation because there's no people in it, there's no nothing like that to be able to use that to give like a replica, a replication of the scene of what would happen. So, and that's on a small scale, but like on a bigger scale, like virtual production. How have you seen AI kind of enter your workflows and like some of the use cases? And if it hasn't, why do you think it's not?
- [24:20]
C
I can start by saying that no matter what the outward facing opinions are from movie companies or studios, they're all looking into it. They're all doing something to try to figure out how it's going to help them. And that includes us. You know, we very often will have clients, you know, commercial clients, who they have to do things a lot faster than television and film. You know, we'll get a job and they have to turn it around in two weeks. So, like, it's easier to get from A to Z with virtual production if you have a very clear version of what you want. So for example, you know, the director might say, okay, I built this image in AI. This is what I want this, you know, space bar to look like. And we can take that and go, great. That's really well, well thought out. And we can easily and quickly mock that up and put it into three dimensions for them. So I think in that case where it's sort of previz, it's definitely being adopted by our clientele. I think that the. I will say this about AI. I think that there have been a few times in the past, especially in the film industry, where something has come along and changed the game. You know, when we went from film to digital, I was here for that. And watching people say, it doesn't look the same, it's not going to be as good, it's going to take jobs away. All of Those kind of things. You can be in that camp or you can be in the camp that says, okay, well then how do we make digital cameras better? How do we make it more like film? Because they're not going away, you know, And AI is the same thing. AI is basically a really good assistant, but it's only good if you can properly tell it what you want from it. And even then, sometimes it acts like a 13 year old. So you have to be on top of it. You cannot let it do your job. That's not how it works. So I think that's important thing for people to understand is, is it going to take jobs? Yeah. Should you be afraid of it? Yeah, but you should be so afraid that you start figuring out how to control it or how it's going to affect your job so that you can figure out what's next.
- [26:33]
B
That was a good answer. Okay, so you mentioned like the Mandalorian, right? Give a couple. It doesn't have to be anything that you produce, but that you know of. Give a couple of examples of shows, you know, over the last, say four to five years that you feel like a general populace has watched, that's been mostly virtual production or a scene that people might know. Just so people know, because I remember when we were sitting down when I was eating all the donuts at the, at your office. Well, you didn't provide them. This, whoever you would contract with provide them. And I ate so many.
- [27:05]
A
And let's piggyback off that question too.
- [27:07]
B
Like, I haven't even finished my question.
- [27:09]
A
I know, but you're. I'm. I want to just throw this in there. Tell us also how we can tell.
- [27:14]
B
Like if I want to, that's where I was going.
- [27:16]
A
Disney plus. How. What can we look for? What are the tells if something is virtual production versus, you know, something on location?
- [27:24]
C
Well, my goal is for you not to be able to tell. I always say, you know, we'll never win an Oscar because you should never know we were there. I think you could tell kind of the early Mandalorian stuff. You know, when you're outside and the background is very out of focus. You know, that, that's a, that's a pretty good tell. I think, you know, they had the problem of, you know, LEDs that were pretty wide pixel pitch. So it limited them to, you know, where they could have the focus. One thing I would say, so if you, if you look at Star Trek, Strange New Worlds that show on television, their engineering department is virtual production. And you know, sometimes when they go to a planet. It's also virtual production. You can usually tell if the room is circular. You start seeing a lot of circular rooms happening. And that's like, oh, yeah, that was virtual production. In some cases. They've done so much to clean it up in post, if they did have any problems, that it's hard to tell because one of the great things about using a game engine is that you're tracking the camera data of where the camera's moving, what lens it's using, where the focus is. And all of that can be handed to visual effects, who can then take the game engine file, render it again, and then paste it on top of the shot. So it's a very helpful setup for that. You know, what we try to do is take things that are physically on the set, because when you think about virtual production, it's not just virtual stuff. You have physical things on the set as well that blend into the background. The best way to blend is to have something that is physical that an actor could touch, and then a digital version of that that goes back into the virtual version. Because your eye just says, oh, that one's real. Those ones must be real. So that's kind of like the little. One of the little tricks of the trade, I guess. But, yeah, I mean, it's. If it's done right, it's hard to tell. If it's done badly, it's real easy to tell.
- [29:16]
B
So with Orbital, you can obviously tell.
- [29:18]
C
Clearly all the time.
- [29:20]
B
All the time. So what is the biggest thing that. Or a couple of the biggest productions or anything that you've worked on that you can share, like, impress us?
- [29:29]
C
For the most part. We've been doing TV since we started. We did two seasons of Snowfall. We did the show Justified City Primeval with Timothy Oliphant, and then we did History's Greatest Heists. We do all the history things now. We're doing a Tom hanks World War II history thing right now.
- [29:46]
B
Little Saving Private Ryan. I like it.
- [29:48]
C
Yeah. The Danny Trejo one. Mysteries Unearthed.
- [29:50]
B
We.
- [29:51]
C
We've become History Channel's guys. So. And for us, it. It. That's helpful because we can say to bigger clients who say, we don't. We don't have money for this. I said History Channel has money for this. You can do it. You know, we're. We just wrapped a Netflix series. I'm not sure if I'm allowed to say what that one's called. And then we're. We're just starting on. On 91 1.
- [30:10]
B
That's awesome.
- [30:11]
A
AJ I also want to do a shout out to your team because I mean, your ability to attract like talent. Next level, like talk to us about the team. Love everybody we've worked with, we have.
- [30:22]
C
A fairly small team, but everybody does the work of five people, you know, and, and they're all incredibly creative and self starters. And when you talk about AI taking people's jobs, AI couldn't take any of these people's jobs. If anything, it's just going to make them work harder, you know, and get more done. They're really incredible. I mean, when I, when I started this and we started turning it into a company, it's really hard to figure out one, like, what do you need? Like what do you need people to do? And then you find out pretty fast when you end up in a hospital with a panic attack. So getting to that point where you have that group of people that are really good at what they do, that you can trust and that you can hand things over to. That was a big moment for me about a year ago when I finally kind of felt like, oh, I don't, I'm actually more of a problem when I poke my head into this than being helpful. So yeah, they're, they're incredible. They, they run this place. Absolutely.
- [31:19]
B
They're good. They are so good. Last question for you is that, you know, you've been so open about, you know, the workflows, what you do, you know, sharing stories from the industry like, you know, staring your crystal ball for a second. What is something that's on that you can potentially see that's not maybe not available, but is on the horizon, whether it's one, three years out that you think is going to make a big change in virtual production or just movie production, TV production, TV show production, like in the future. And don't say AI.
- [31:51]
C
Well, I think that is the answer because, you know, when I look at Wilder, who really starts, started going after AI, his title is going to change to something AI because he basically took it on himself and has almost changed our whole business with it. I think that what it is is our industry figuring out how to use it properly, where it's legal, where it's copyrightable, and where it doesn't take the artist out of it. And I know a lot of companies are working on that. You know, we're working on that. Wilder has built us a agentic AI system and comfy UI where the current version of it is. We can upload a script, they'll break it down into locations, characters, props, then it gets Fed into other language models where we can create those characters, make adjustments to them. Same thing with the environments, same thing with the props, and then create storyboards and change the camera angles. The next step will be giving those environments depth passes and creating 3D geometry with them. And then eventually that ability to go straight from your computer and figuring out from the script what the location is to putting it up on the stage and working on it that moment. We're not far from that. And I think that the more everyone in our industry starts to figure that out and figure out how, hey, you know what would be great is if AI would just run unreal for me so that I don't have to do the 80% of the job that I hate and I can just do the. The art at the end. That's. That stuff is super possible right now. And the more that everyone decides, oh, okay, I can be a lot more productive if I take this on. I think that's gonna change everything in our industry. And it's not just like, oh, you're gonna type in a prompt to get a new episode of 91 1. You know, you're still having to craft things. You're still writing it and producing it and all that. And it's just. You're a lot more capable with. With less busy work.
- [33:46]
B
Yeah. I mean, and it makes total sense. It's kind of like this. I love being on the episode. I love hosting. I love talking to people. But you know what I hate? And we didn't do this because we. We already know each other, but it's the prep. The prep call, the prep questions, the prep planning. Like, oh, dude, it eats me up. But with AI, it's pretty easy. Or I'm just like, ask some compelling questions for. And then it's like, here you go, and you send them out. And it's pretty simple. Right? So. And not that I do that all the time, but you know what I mean? Yes, I do. But it makes life pretty easy. Right? Like, that's the part of the job I don't hate. So allows me to do more episodes, have more time to record. It's not getting rid of me. It's making me more efficient. Exactly. So, Cindy, I will let you ask the last question, and then that. Anything you want. And then I'll do. We'll start closing out the episode.
- [34:37]
A
Where's my statue? I mean, that's really the only question I have.
- [34:41]
C
You got to talk to Neville. You talk to. He's been texting me through this whole thing. So I'LL I'll mention it to him again.
- [34:47]
A
A.J. actually want to, you know, obviously get people really excited about all the work that you're doing with Dell. Talk to us about what you're showing at IBC coming up.
- [34:56]
C
Yeah, so this one's a really interesting one for me because, you know, I used to work in visual effects and when I did a lot of it was miniature work, you know, for making miniature Batmobiles or, you know, things like that that people don't realize are not all CG models. In fact, the new Fantastic Four movie, the ship that they go into space in is. Is a miniature. It's like an 18 foot miniature. So maxiature, I guess. And I think that we kind of moved over to cgi, I think kind of too fast when it came to that stuff because that miniatures still look better than cgi. CGI hasn't really caught up yet. In some cases, maybe the artists are good enough. But the reason that they went away from it was the camera system they were using was, you know, only able to do certain things. But now we have, you know, cinema robot arms that can do anything. So if you take that, you couple it with tracking information that can go into it game engine or even into Maya or whatever you want. You could do a lot with miniatures. And we've done some testing with that in the past. And this is a project that we've been working on that's really going to showcase what's possible with miniatures. Which feels like, you know, old school, but it's using the new tech to make the old school more relevant. And it's pretty awesome.
- [36:12]
B
So what I like to do at the end of the episode, AJ is for you to take 30 seconds and pretend someone hadn't watched any of the episode. What's the 30 seconds that they need to take away and remember about virtual production in Orbital Studios?
- [36:24]
C
So if you can imagine, they have always said in the past that if you can make a movie that takes place in one room, then you can probably get enough money to make it. Well, now your room is a virtual production stage and it can be anything. So it opens up all kinds of possibilities. Instead of just, oh, yeah, it takes place in my apartment. Well, now it takes place at Dodger Stadium. It takes place on a spaceship. It takes place wherever you want. At sunset, in the rain. You get to make all those decisions. So that's what the greatest thing about virtual production is. And at Orbital, we're always looking for more creative ways to use it.
- [37:02]
B
I hate to give you a compliment, but that was pretty good. That was pretty good. That was pretty good. All right, well, we'll wrap it up. So with that ibc, hopefully this episode will release before ibc. You'll have to see. But if you're at IBC and it releases before and you're listening to this, please come by the Dell booth to check out the Orbital demo. And overall, I think this was a great episode. Being able to talk about, you know, virtual production, how it's kind of changing the face of, you know, film production, TV production, studio production. And while it is new and people are still coming to adopt it, there's a huge advantage in the ability to be able to control scenes, you know, reduce cost and ultimately allow yourself to be very creative. And if you want to switch a scene from, hey, I want to be in a desert versus, you know, I want to be by the ocean, you don't have to pack up thousands of people, the actors, the actresses, all the equipment, all the lights, ship it to somewhere else. You can literally just have Wilder in the back room go. And then you're done. It's like one minute later because the scene will load.
- [38:00]
C
So with that, check out orbital studios orbitalvs.com with that.
- [38:05]
B
This is reshaping workflows with Delpro Max Nvidia RTX GPUs. Until next time, keep all of your virtual production workflows running locally and we'll see you on the next one.
- [38:33]
C
Do what you want. Do what you want.
- [38:36]
B
This podcast was produced in partnership with Amaze Media Labs.