Rob Bredow (3:42)
The opening shot of Star Wars Episode 4, the original one, it broke all new grounds and really redefined that era of filmmaking. Plus, it's just like perfectly designed now behind the scenes. You may or may not know the camera rig. This is the Dijkstra Flex. It's a computerized motion control camera rig. It was innovative. It could be moved from stage to stage. It enabled these new dynamic camera moves on models, on miniatures for the very first time. Again, redefining that era of filmmaking. Today we're entering a new era of technology. But instead of being introduced to it with a spectacular opening shot of a movie, we're reading about it in the press. And as someone who's been a visual effects artist for over 35 years, some of these headlines are pretty disappointing. They seem to say AI is coming. It's coming for our jobs. And the tools. They're getting pretty good too. I work on movies, I should be safe for a little while, right? It's going to take them. Well, you know where this is going. Google, Meta, OpenAI all showing sophisticated video generation systems. These appear to be doing some of the same things we are doing right now, frame by frame with multiple artists often working weeks at a time to make a single 3 to 5 second shot. In movies you love, it's going to be pretty intimidating. And we're not the only ones who are a little concerned about the future of AI. Okay, we've been here before and I believe this is an interesting collision of tech and art. And I believe what George Lucas created in Industrial Light and Magic, his visual effects company, ILM. He founded this 50 years ago to solve the visual storytelling challenges in his films. And what he did there is he put artists side by side with engineers. They were working together to be able to innovate and create the future. This is artist driven innovation. I'm passionate about this. So what we're going to do today is we're going to look at 50 years of history at ILM we're going to pull some of those cinematic game changers that have happened over this period of time. And then we're going to try to draw some universal themes out of that. And in the end, I'm going to premiere for you for the very first time, a short created by an artist using the latest generative AI tools. So we can see the trajectory we are on and the trajectory we want to be on. Next, let's turn the clock back to the Jurassic era. This is the Jurassic park era, my Jurassic era, 1993. On this film, they were going to use as many full scale dinos on set as possible. Just amazing, amazing movie. I mean, this film really ended up redefining the way visual effects were done in movies. But it wasn't planned that way from the beginning. They were going to do these huge full scale dinosaurs, which they did, and they were amazing. But for the shots where they couldn't have a full scale dinosaur run like a T. Rex, they were going to do stop motion animation. And all that changed one day when Kathy Kennedy, the show's producer, she was walking the halls of ILM and she noticed this test looping on a monitor. Now, the animators had actually positioned this monitor, hoping she would see it. This is the early days of CG computer graphics. And this looks promising enough to commission a test with skin and lighting. So they did that test just real quick. And Dennis Mirren, the film's visual effects supervisor, and famous stop motion animator, Phil Tippett, they took this down to Spielberg and Kathy Kennedy and they looped it a few times in their screening room. And as the lights came up, they knew cinema history had changed. It wasn't going to be the same. Spielberg caught Tippett's eye and he could see his expression on his face. He said, how are you feeling, Phil? Phil said, I feel like I'm going extinct. But I think artists right now, many of us are feeling that same threat of extinction. But there's good news. This is not what happened on Jurassic Park. Innovation thrives when the old and new technologies are blended together. Jurassic broke all new ground in computer graphics. All new techniques for the first time had been used at this scale. But many of the techniques were exactly the same as before. The animators taped themselves on video for reference. They drew these amazing storyboards of these shots that are now indelibly imprinted in all of our minds. Engineers at ILM even went so far as to make the dinosaur input device. It's a stop motion armature. Each of the joints it has a little encoder on it so it can send the data back to the computer. So the stop motion animator can do frame by frame animation like they normally would. The computer would record it. That animation could be sent across the bay from Phil Tippett's shop to the artists at ILM who could put the skin on and light it and render it. Even touch up the animation digitally to create the final shots in the film. Literally a combination of the oldest animation technique we know, stop motion, and the brand new computer graphics techniques back in 1993. This has been true recently with AI technology as well. Harrison Ford from Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny performing on set in that iconic role he created. But he's looking a little younger. For the opening of this film, our artist hand tuned generative AI models on past performances of Indiana Jones. Of course, with Harrison Ford's permission, in addition to that, our artist also created a full CG computer graphics version of his performance. So why did we do it two different ways? Well, it turns out the AI system is really, really good at getting that likeness. Pulling all the details out of Harrison's performance that he could do unencumbered on set, get that into a likeness and the correct age that we were looking for for this character, it wasn't as good at the details and the controls. That's when our CG model came to the rescue. And our artists created a blend of the two to create the opening 20 minutes of this movie. And I'd say some of the best work of this kind ever done. And it's not bad. If Harrison Ford says it's pretty good, it feels like me. So that's blending the old and new. Leaning on the experienced artist to drive even the brand new techniques. That takes us to how technology can actually work hand in hand with creative. I believe that we're designed to be creative beings. It's one of the most important things about us. That's one of the reasons we appreciate it. We just love it when we see technology and creativity working together. We see this on the motion control on the original Star wars or on Jurassic park with the CG dinosaurs for the first time. We just love it when we see creativity in action like this tech creative working together. If we Fast forward to 2020, we can see the latest real time virtual production techniques. This was another creative innovation driven by a filmmaker. In this case, it's Jon Favreau. And he had a vision for a giant Disney Star wars series. First time we ever were going to do a series of Star wars on tv. This is for the Mandalorian. And it was a big show, but we didn't have a normal film schedule. We had to shoot it all very, very fast. So rather than flying the cast around the world to try to find these exotic locations, we brought locations to them on a single soundstage in Manhattan beach, where we had configured this LED wall to act as a virtual production background so we could immerse our actors, our entire crew, all of the departments in these virtual worlds, and even some locations that weren't from our world. They're from outside of our world. Interestingly, Kathy Kennedy, the same producer who produced Jurassic park, she now runs Lucasfilm. She was one of the people who got behind this idea early, before any of us knew that it was going to work. The technology leading up to this had been created hand in hand with filmmakers over the years. So I was supervising Solo a Star wars story, and we thought, could we take what they had done before, and could we make the content high enough quality so you could point the camera directly at it? And we started making shots like this for the very first time. This is hyperspace in the cockpit of the Millennium Falcon. And you can see my friend, the dp, Bradford Young. And he invented this shot. We had shot hyperspace tons of times before, but in the moment he saw the light coming in, and he realized this was a moment of hope in the film. So as he pans over to Han Solo, you can see the reflection of hyperspace in Han's eyes. Just a beautiful collaboration between tech and art that elevates the storytelling and gives our artists new tools. That's what we love. So that catches us up to the Mandalorian, where, as always, it starts with words on a page, the script, and then our artists break it down. And I'll break it down for you how they add all the different elements computer graphics, ship added in post production. But the rest of the background, that was live on the day on that LED wall for all the departments to work together to create life in that scene and block these shots out. Walkers in the background, you'll never guess they were stop motion animated over a tippet shot. Yes, the same Phil Tippett, far from extinct all these years. So it's a combination of the oldest technique in the book with the latest real time computer graphics to bring an illusion together on the screen in front of the whole cast and crew. Our artists work really hard to make it a seamless blend between the two. And now we can pop these LED stages up anywhere in the world. When it's the right creative fit for a filmmaker. Okay, so that's blending the old and new. How tech and creativity working hand in hand, create things we just love. And last, maybe most importantly, our theme about artist driven innovation. So what happens when you put the latest AI tools in the hands of talented artists both to see how good these tools are these days and what does it do to our artists? Imagination? Where does it take their imagination? So I'm going to premiere for you a brand new short film.
