NAB
AI will have a profound impact on
film and TV production and as its use increases what everyone in town wants to
know is: Is my job safe?
article here
The market for AI in video production is expected
to grow from $362 million in 2021 to around $1.5 billion by 2028 as
tools are adopted across the board to speed workflows and cut production costs.
Owen Harris, the director of Peacock’s AI-focused comedy-drama Mrs. Davis, told TheWrap that Hollywood desperately wants AI to be a “force for good.”
“Certainly, the attraction and the
amount of investment we put into technology financially, but also in terms of
our own time, reflects that we get something out of it,” he added. “But the
question is how much of ourselves are we giving away to get that and is
trade-off worth it? At the moment, it feels very much like we’re at the
crossroads.”
TheWrap has
canvassed the opinion of artists working in various industry roles and of those
developing Gen-AI applications and broadly concludes that AI will be widely
adopted as a tool, but with humans still in charge of the creative process.
Using AI for previs and storyboarding
is widely anticipated to be a benefit to getting productions greenlit and then
into photography.
Dan Cobb, CMO at OneDoor, which is developing an
AI-generated storyboarding and previsualization tool, told TheWrap,
“Instead of making a storyboard that looks like sketches and pen and ink, now
we’re going to have storyboards that literally look like the scene from the
movie. And they’re going to be so close that once you’re on set, you’re going
to try to match it because the quality of that image is the vision of the
artist.”
He emphasized that storyboard artists
who “stick with the same old marker boards” could risk becoming “irrelevant.”
At the same time, he doesn’t believe
that AI will take storyboard artists’ jobs away outright and instead sees the
technological advancement as an opportunity to help them do their jobs better.
The argument is that AI will enable
storyboard artists to co-conceive movie collaboratively and in real time,
“whereas in the past, the artist would have to go back to their closed door,
spend a few days drawing, come back and show you another iteration.”
Digital makeup can also be
supercharged by AI. VFX studio and AI technology startup Monsters Alien Robots
Zombies, for example, has an tool called Vanity AI that it claims enables the
delivery of cosmetic VFX 300 times faster than traditional pipelines. It’s
apparently been used on 27 major Hollywood productions, shaving 100 weeks off
schedules and saving nearly $8 million in costs.
CEO Matt Panousis told TheWrap that
far from sucking up manual jobs, Vanity AI will enable better working
conditions for VFX artists by slashing the time it takes to complete work.
“So from the artist’s perspective,
it’s fantastic because you are increasing their output by orders of magnitude.
Like the same artist that could do one shot to maybe only half a shot a day is
now pumping out 20, 30 shots a day.”
What about makeup artists? Panousis
doesn’t think they’ll be put out of business either.
“There’s always a creative component
to makeup and that’s not something our solution handles today. Our solution is
there to make cosmetic fixes really, really fast and on a really affordable
scale.”
But, in the future, he added, “do you
need a world where makeup artists are doing the very simple stuff like getting
rid of eye bags, crow’s feet, laugh lines and acne? Maybe not.”
Shows with particularly heavy shot
ratios — like reality TV series requiring rapid turnaround — could benefit from
AI that gives the editor a jump start in tagging, filtering and even rough
assembling rushes.
Although not in use yet for feature
film or high-end TV drama, there’s no reason to suppose AI tools won’t become
sophisticated enough to the same job. An editor, though, would still use their
experience and skill to craft the final work in accordance to script and
directorial intent.
Other AI tools at an editor’s
disposal today include those for microtasks like matching style and color and
auto-tagging.
For sound editing, AI can help quickly scan through
large sound effects libraries to create soundscapes, Robert Harari, a music
professor at Stevens Institute of Technology, told TheWrap.
“You used to sit there and have to go
through thousands and thousands of banks of sounds to try and identify
something that’s going to have a certain sonic texture like a harsh sound for a
storm versus a quiet rain,” he noted. “It’s helping speed up processes, but at
the end of the day, it always comes back to the human curation of what’s
right.”
Although films are a collaborative
medium many are also “authored” by a director. Is their role under threat?
Director Owen Harris probably speaks
for many — perhaps in hope against hope — that films made entirely by AI won’t
be films that he or anyone else will want to watch for the simple reason that
they will lack humanity.
While AI can be used to help break
and communicate ideas visually, he argues that storytelling is still a “very
human interaction” that’s going to be “very difficult” for AI to replicate.
“I’d always hope that there will be a
human intelligence that can then interact with that and be the bridge back into
the creative discussion… but it’s all happening so quickly that it’s really
difficult to sort of gauge,” he said. “I’d be amazed if there’s a piece of AI
that could tell a story that is absolutely unique to you in a tone of voice
that’s absolutely unique to you. Maybe you could mimic a bit of Quentin
Tarantino but that’s not the storytelling that I want to make.”
Once thing is for sure; it won’t be just
Hollywood’s writers that will be severely impacted by AI. The International
Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees, which has more than 168,000 members
from all sides of the entertainment industry, is launching a new study of AI
technologies, with a particular focus on how they might reshape jobs
under IATSE’s jurisdiction.
It will also consider how contract
provisions, legislation, and training programs can be adapted to ensure the
fruits of increased productivity through AI are shared equitably among all
stakeholders.
No comments:
Post a Comment