James Cameron: AI Could Help Cut VFX Costs in Half, Saving Blockbuster Cinema (variety.com) 67
Director James Cameron argues that blockbuster filmmaking can only survive if the industry finds ways to "cut the cost of [VFX] in half," with AI potentially offering solutions that don't eliminate jobs.
"If we want to continue to see the kinds of movies that I've always loved and that I like to make -- 'Dune,' 'Dune: Part Two,' or one of my films or big effects-heavy, CG-heavy films -- we've got to figure out how to cut the cost of that in half," Cameron said.
Rather than staff reductions, Cameron envisions AI accelerating VFX workflows: "That's about doubling their speed to completion on a given shot, so your cadence is faster and your throughput cycle is faster, and artists get to move on and do other cool things."
"If we want to continue to see the kinds of movies that I've always loved and that I like to make -- 'Dune,' 'Dune: Part Two,' or one of my films or big effects-heavy, CG-heavy films -- we've got to figure out how to cut the cost of that in half," Cameron said.
Rather than staff reductions, Cameron envisions AI accelerating VFX workflows: "That's about doubling their speed to completion on a given shot, so your cadence is faster and your throughput cycle is faster, and artists get to move on and do other cool things."
What could be vs what will be (Score:4, Insightful)
In theory, if you built an AI that could create whatever movie you told it to, you'd have an explosion of creativity as everyone currently on a movie set started making their own entire movies from start to finish, solo (with AI).
In reality, we still live in a world with an economy that requires people to work, and they have limited money and free time to spend on the output of other workers. What I expect will happen is the VFX will get less expensive and the savings will go into the pockets of the financers while a lot of VFX artists end up out of work.
It will also mean that the direct-to-streaming movies will look a little prettier, but they're still going to be pretty bad.
Re:What could be vs what will be (Score:4)
Quantity makes quality harder. Who would risk a massive capital investment on major projects if the chance of return was low and the risk factor high? How many people would put their heart and soul into something if there was a high risk it would just be one of many. It's like the quality of TV shows went down after cable TV. Sure we had more choices, and every niche of TV show type .. but at the expense of truly great TV shows and maybe even social cohesion. You know why we were stuck with incandescent light bulbs that would last about 6 months, for over 100 years. It's not because nobody could invent anything better, it's because incandescent light bulbs were extremely cheap and there was little incentive to invent and mass manufacture something better. Would you pump billions into materials science R&D with high risk and low reward (and compete with a 50 cent light bulb). Eventually we had to force them out by legislation. Same thing with new medical treatments btw, you can't get funding to research radical ideas because it costs $2 billion to get a new drug through the approval process where it can fail at the very end. My point -- with more movies, you get a bunch of low quality crap .. and very few will invest in making great movies anymore. You know, pay for and finding the best writer, the best story concepts, best artists, etc. to work on something would be nearly impossible. And people with that sort of talent will do other things.
Re: (Score:1)
No offense to James Cameron, but that hardware is 1/100th the cost today. The time spent by artists creating those visuals we were told was a small fraction of the cost of the render farms. Why has it not already plummeted? Clearl
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Oh yeah, those special effects totally hold up today [youtu.be] *eyeroll*
Also, Jurassic Park cost $63M to produce, which is $136M today. Only a small fraction of that was computing hardware.
What's weird about these conversations is that everyone polarizes into all-or-nothing. Either AI is going to make movies entirely from scratch, or not a single frame is going to be touched by AI at all. That's not what people like James Cameron are getting at. They want high-quality tweeting. You can provide specific frames, an
Re: (Score:2)
(That said, I do expect that early on, we'll see Star Wars Prequels-Disease, where some director obsesses over a new tech that's not yet very advanced - such as Lucas with CGI - and overuses it, badly, with little care for quality, and gets audiences sick of it for a while and hypersensitive to when it's badly done. "No no, we can't just suspect that force-lifted apple with a string - we need to use a *CGI apple*!" Substitute in AI for CGI here...)
Re: (Score:2)
** high-quality tweeNing
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
The greater effect will be that the money people will have more and more creative control over the end product. That's the people with the least amount of actual talent. They'll rely on the marketing people (who have even less talent) to tell them what the movie should be, and we'll go from the current big blockbuster mass market pap that sucks to big blockbuster mass market pap that sucks even more.
Which is the say, the same trend that Hollywood has been on for the last 100 years.
Re: (Score:2)
I honestly do not think it can get any worse. The Minecraft movie being a massive success shows how low the bar has fallen. It just has to be not-obnoxious and audience-hostile to be notable for it's stand-out quality.
While I certainly sympathize with your point, yes, it could be worse. Imagine Rubber [imdb.com] with a $100 million budget.
Re: (Score:2)
The greater effect will be that the money people will have more and more creative control over the end product.
Traditionally the amount of control the money people have over the product is proportional to the amount of money needed to create the product. E.g. anyone who can pick up a pen can draw a comic strip, but if you want to create a Marvel-style blockbuster, you're going to have to convince someone with $100M to fund you, and thus they get a significant say in what the product will be.
Given that, if AI could reduce the costs of making a movie, it could allow more "indie"-budgeted movies to get made, as fewer
Re: (Score:2)
Given that, if AI could reduce the costs of making a movie, it could allow more "indie"-budgeted movies to get made, as fewer funds would need to be raised to make them.
The proposal is that it would cut costs in half. $50 million instead of $100 million still isn't "indie" territory.
No guarantees that AI will actually reduce costs, though. It's pretty expensive, itself.
Even if it succeeds in making the technology to everybody, that just means that everybody can make movies, and since very few people have any creative talent, we'll go from 99% of all movies sucking throbbing purple donkey dick to 99.99999999999% of all movies sucking throbbing purple donkey dick, and no possible way to filter for the ones that don't. This will also destroy theaters as a busine
Re: (Score:2)
The proposal is that it would cut costs in half. $50 million instead of $100 million still isn't "indie" territory.
Pick whatever number you feel marks the upper limit of "indie" budget territory. For any film that currently would cost less than twice that amount, cutting costs by half would bring that film's production into indie terrority when currently it is not.
And to the extent that Moore's Law is still in effect, one would expect costs to come down further over time as the technologies are refined. It's not as if AI is likely to provide exactly a 50% cost reduction and then never change at all after that; either
Re: (Score:2)
Pick whatever number you feel marks the upper limit of "indie" budget territory.
That would be a completely different conversation. This one is about reducing the cost of cgi by half, which will still put cgi heavy movie production an order or magnitude, or two, out of "indie" budgets.
and no possible way to filter for the ones that don't.
This I disagree with; there are always ways to filter good content from bad; word-of-mouth, online reviews, etc. And I suppose eventually someone will make an AI that watches a movie for you and tells you if it's any good :)
Y'all are new to the internet, aren't you?
Re: (Score:2)
Y'all are new to the internet, aren't you?
Yeah, I've only been using it since 1993 or so. Nevertheless, I don't seem to have much trouble finding good movies to watch.
Re: (Score:2)
In theory, if you built an AI that could create whatever movie you told it to, you'd have an explosion of creativity as everyone currently on a movie set started making their own entire movies from start to finish, solo (with AI).
If you read the summary, Cameron is not advocating for AI to generate the entire film. He is advocating for AI to help speed up the workflow of VFX. VFX artists will still be needed. For example, currently AI can generate code if requested. The code most of the time does not work if the request is too broad. Specific and narrow requests are far easier to do with AI. Not "Generate a new game . . ." but "Generate a function to find a pattern in a linked list".
In reality, we still live in a world with an economy that requires people to work, and they have limited money and free time to spend on the output of other workers. What I expect will happen is the VFX will get less expensive and the savings will go into the pockets of the financers while a lot of VFX artists end up out of work.
The number reason I see that VFX are terrible is t
Re: (Score:2)
And then you have movies which, despite having a huge VFX budget, don't look great and are poorly written. Such as Transformers.
Re: (Score:2)
In reality, we still live in a world with an economy that requires people to work, and they have limited money and free time to spend on the output of other workers.
And that often (usually?) makes people think harder about the work and how to achieve their desired results more efficiently as they are bound by various limits, like time, money, or computing power, etc...
There are a number of mistakes here (Score:2)
Firstly, speeding up the blockbuster process by a factor of two means reducing the paychecks by a factor of two which functions as staff reductions on a take-home-pay basis. Whether the process goes faster or takes the same time with less people is immaterial.
Secondly, it is far, far cheaper to make good films than blockbusters. The blockbuster system is a horribly broken one -- you can make a good film people will love if they bother to watch it for $5m dollars, or make the same film with higher producti
Re:There are a number of mistakes here (Score:5, Interesting)
The blockbuster system is a horribly broken one -- you can make a good film people will love if they bother to watch it for $5m dollars, or make the same film with higher production values so you can get a larger watching audience (lots of people will turn off a film with low production values) for $30m.
Most modern films cost way more than that.
Lloyd Kaufman of Troma Studios (while bragging about 30 years without a single hit movie) explained Hollywood's obsession with big blockbusters very simply:
"You can't embezzle $10 million out of $5 million budget."
Re: (Score:2)
The counterpoint is that blockbusters tend to be more efficient. Yes, you can make a good movie for under $50M, but there are fixed costs involved in distribution, publicity, etc. They may be lower for movies you only want to make 2X{under $50M} vs 2x{over $200M} but there's a floor to them too. You're not showing them in 10% of the cinemas you'd normally show them in. And even with the move towards comfort in modern cinemas, there's still a point at which showing an unpopular movie to a barely populated sc
Re: (Score:2)
Pretty spot on and this is really why we've seen the death of the "mid-budget" film, your ensemble cast dramas and such that were all over the 80's and 90's, that's all moved to streaming TV. What's left is $100M+ blockbusters and sub $20M indie and horror films, the rise of studios like A24, Blumhouse, NEON and such. Terrifier 3 made $90M on a $2M budget, Longlegs $130M on a $10M budget (and how much of that was just for Nic Cage)
Re: (Score:2)
Firstly, speeding up the blockbuster process by a factor of two means reducing the paychecks by a factor of two which functions as staff reductions on a take-home-pay basis. Whether the process goes faster or takes the same time with less people is immaterial.
But you are assuming that companies hire and/or pay more rather than just load salaried exempt staff with ridiculous amounts of work. My experience is companies do the latter than the former.
The blue smurf guy? (Score:2)
He was a pioneer who realized you could deploy a battlefield with exoskeletons. But hiring disgruntled broken down veterans to remote control those exoskeletons, well when faced with the ethics of war they tend to desert or worse switch sides and join the enemy.
Much better to just develop a robot army. No human salaries to pay. AI has no conscience or morals when it comes to plundering foreign worlds and murdering or enslaving their indigenous populations.
^^^ (spoilers) The Avatar franchise in a nutshell.
It's not a production value problem (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
A well written gimmick isn't a gimmick to the audience, that's what makes it good writing.
The reason Hollywood is in this mess is that we spent several years purging writing rooms of all the experienced writers simply because they were white, male, and old.
I keep hearing this but where is the evidence? I mean the Oscar's were just like weeks ago, who was nominated for best screenplays? The winner, Sean Baker, white male. The Brutalist, a white male and a woman. A Real Pain, last i checked Jesse Eisenberg was male and white. September 5? Not one, not two but three white males. The only sole woman was Caroline Fargeat and she's a white woman.
Even everyone's favorite "de
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re: (Score:3)
Well #1, I ain't watching all that, if you watched it you can summarize the key points for the rest of us and show us you understand the material. "Go read this book" is not an argument.
If this is so much a smoking gun where is it showing up in the credit lines as it should? Did the video show why they made that consideration? I can easily think of jobs and situations I could make and justify that statement, the intentions matter here. Also this is one guy in fuckin' Disney, the entertainment giant of the
Re: (Score:2)
oh no! Somebody said they don't want to hire white males? BFD. People are still more commonly saying shit about women or minorities and when things truly are equal, you'll have it going on with every demographic. Plus stuff about old facebook users, soccer vs football, golfing (best way to get in with management) , and whatever subculture tribal biases. Hell, if you donate to Democrats or not can be looked up and used (legally allowed too.) People always do this shit. It's just that we had a huge syst
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
I mean you could be right but then at that point as you've said the entire thing is irrelevant, nothing of malice is happening so why are we bringing it up and talking about it. There is no purge, this entire thing is predicated on bad premises and misplaced intentions
I appreciate your perspective but you are giving them a lot more good faith than I am. This lens of media analysis is pervasive, rotten and cyclical and it's driven not by organic critique of art but for political means by bad actors with an
Re: (Score:2)
That's fine for an art festival, but general audiences are tired of it. They just want straightforward storytelling that makes you feel good when you come out of the theatre.
The success of the recent Deadpool film vs the rest of the "straight forward" by the numbers comic book hero stuff is a good counter point to your post. I don't think people are as dumb as you think. Bad writing is a problem, but not for the reasons you mention. Mainly for really fundamental stuff, like the kind of stuff you learn in 5th grade english *not to do* when writing a story.
Re: (Score:2)
Clever avoidance of directly using right-wing catchphrase of "go woke, go broke" by just focusing on your opinion of quality and not on the market results. Disney is the most "woke" and they're making money hand over fist and likely will continue to in relation to peers... In fiscal year 2024, they reported a 21% increase in total segment operating income and a 32% rise in adjusted earnings per share (EPS) compared to the previous year... and the company overall raised its annual dividend by 33%. How the wo
Re: (Score:2)
Naah, the "modern movies/books/games are crap" is really just your typical generational thing. What you are watching/reading/listening/playing when you are in your teens are the Best Thing Ever for the rest of your life. This has been true forever.
I remember when the Star Wars prequels first came out 25 years ago. All of us old SW fans hated Jar Jar. But what do you know, the kids who saw them then thing they are the best things ever.
Same applies everywhere. I played Elite on my 8-bit and was hooked for 2-3
Cutting Costs = Heads. (Score:3)
”..and artists get to move on and do other cool things."
(Translation) ”Our AI workflows have been optimized for our pockets. Your services are no longer needed here. You are now free to move on and do other cool things.”
Not sure what he means by budget-heavy these days. Take note as to just how much is being churned out these days starring less than half a dozen actors filming inside a single building for most/all of the movie. It’s quite surreal once you notice it. You can probably have a hell of an FX budget when you don’t physically go anywhere to make a film.
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
Sometimes. Cameron's stuff, objectively not. The stuff Cameron is talking about, objectively not. One interesting thing to note, next time you see a movie where you are disappointed at the quality, rewind and see if the CGI is as bad everywhere. You'll likely find it's not.
Quite often the issue with bad CGI is that something went wrong in production planning - they get to the end and run out of money and suddenly need to crank the 3rd act out of the door on 1/6th of the total budget. Or worse, they needed t
Re: (Score:2)
Take note as to just how much is being churned out these days starring less than half a dozen actors filming inside a single building for most/all of the movie.
Except that is objectively the high budget stuff. Shooting on location is often cheaper than throwing someone in front of The Volume https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] and paying a VFX studio a mountain of money to generate a world.
Saving cinema? Look who's talking (Score:4, Interesting)
James Cameron ushered in 3D in cinema with Avatar. I know it wasn't technically the first with the new technology, but it was the one that make it break through.
Then every movie studio had to make only 3D movies. Ticket prices increased. Screens were replaced with less bright screens that were compatible with the polarised-light technology used for 3D. The picture was dim. A large portion of the audience couldn't see the 3D, or only got headaches from it.
It was the beginning of the end. People stopped going to the movies. Theatres turned to crap. People went to the theatres even less. The movie industry realised their errors too late, when the audience had already gone over to streaming. Now there are much fewer movies being shows in theatres, and it is increasingly difficult to find a theatre that is well kept that you'd actually want to visit.
I'll never forgive James Cameron for it.
Re: (Score:2)
It's an easily parroted catchphrase, but is there any actual support for the assertion of "go woke, go broke" in bottom line results? Pretty much ever instance I've seen right wing boycotts are blips, and shafting progressives leaves a company on the shit list for much longer, if not forever. Interested in actual data, not anecdotes. Every analysis I've come across in the past says, on a long-term time scale, progressivism on the part of a company is usually beneficial and at the worst neutral... and if har
That's what the money is for (Score:2)
What does he think the money is for? Does he think that studios will keep the same amount f artists who all just happen to work faster? They'll cut staff to where they can still meet the same deadlines. Not keep all the same staff and meet deadlines earlier.
Know what else might save it? (Score:2)
Here's a few ideas: stop lecturing me about your politics, stop relying on VFX to sell an otherwise boring movie, start writing decent characters that I actually give a shit about.
In short, make movies worth going to.
A truly tragic outcome (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
I'm surprised this isn't done already, where someone just types in, "give me another sequel in the Vomitron series with the Bring-Me-the-Bucket guy surviving", letting some AI do the work from there, rendering the video in 8k, then shipping it to theaters.
As others have mentioned, the blockbuster is what Hollywood is about. They can't survive on movies that do well or cult classics. They have to have something that goes well in theaters around the world.
The problem is that those days are gone. Hollywood
Stop obsessing over saving Blockbusters. (Score:2)
I think the biggest problem in Hollywood right now is the absolute obsession with saving the blockbuster. The blockbuster was always a quality wash. Sometimes you got lucky and a blockbuster was great, but for decades now they've been pandering slop, generated by focus groups and feedback loops of people obsessed with endlessly repeating tropes and story telling cliches and absolutely not at all interested in any form of character outside of the cardboard cutout definition of $blockbuster_trope_character.
Th
In times of uncertainty... (Score:2)
James Cameron is an idiot (Score:2)
Blockbuster cinema does not require any such thing to be successful. It requires better scripts, and less reliance on megastars. Studios need to go back to cultivating stars, rather than waiting for them to blow up organically, then paying them ludicrous amounts of money.
Blockbuster Cinema shouldn't be saved (Score:2)
It should be taken out back and shot. Yes, blockbusters are at least pretty to look at, but frankly they are all so samey anymore that it's not worth going to see them. Hollywood has almost given up on new things, instead putting all the money and marketing behind retreads of things we've already seen. Spending hundreds of millions to make the retread, and expecting it to rake in billions instead of spending way less on original properties and expecting reasonable returns.
not films he made (Score:2)
Dune, Dune 2, Blade Runner 2049 didn't look fantastic because of all the CGI. It looked great because most of what's on screen is real - miniatures, props, sets, lighting, camera, practical effects, wardrobe, etc. Practical effects require human ingenuity.
Paul Lambert, on Dune:
"we found the highest hill outside of Budapest and put our ornithopter on a gimbal on top of that hill, surrounded by a sand-colored wrap. On a sunny day, the light would bounce off the sand into the cabin"
There's a gigantic butt-ton
Re: (Score:2)
cool (Score:2)
With the money you save on expensive VFX, you could focus on story, dialog, and character development.
Why are effects so expensive? (Score:3)
Can someone explain why modern VFX is so expensive? I honestly don't understand it. What exactly are they spending so much money on?
LotR had amazing effects. That was 25 years ago. Since then computers have gotten so much faster, which should save a ton of money. A single computer today is probably as powerful as their entire render farm. The tools have gotten so much better, which should save a lot of human time. Why hasn't the cost come down?
A few years ago we heard about the new technology being used for filming The Mandalorian. Film in front of a wraparound screen that renders the environment in real time from the viewpoint of the camera. No travel for filming on location, not much sets to build, quick transitions between sets, much less need to add effects in postprocessing. It ought to save a ton of money. Why do effects heavy shows still cost $25+ million per episode?
Meanwhile, Flow was made on a total budget of $3.7 million. It's clearly possible to do amazing things with very little money. Why don't the big studios do it?
Re: (Score:2)
Remember when shooting on video (Score:2)
"Half the money is going towards stock and lab costs! We can now make movies for half as much, and have all the money ON THE SCREEN"
In reality: "Hey, we don't have to pay for stock or lab costs anymore! I can now get my third beach house and that Ferrari I always wanted!"
Re: (Score:3)
Yes and nothing changes. The most money possible is always spent. The tech gets better so they just use MORE of it. Whatever they are allowed to gamble with; plus corrupt accounting so they shift around failures and profits. If they run out of production money to lose they will just go more into advertising than the 1/3 of the budget they blow on that already. If they are not going more heavily into that already.
The stars are often little more than marketing. Look at animation. You can get equal or better v
What about the salaries of stars? (Score:2)
Well that's penny pincher thinking (Score:2)
Rather than cut in half, why not double the quality?
What I want from AI regarding movies (Score:2)
Movies need plots with dialogue (Score:2)
Once the BS hype dies AI will be a useful tool (Score:2)
What it can do is reduce the burden on artists. If someone is animating a scene and needs a crowd of people, it can generate a crowed of people. If an action movie needs an explosion it can make one. Artists can then touch up the results and focus on more important things.
Another point to note is that cheap generative AI is going away. Generative AI performance is linked to raw GPU performance and that is stagnatin
Cut VFX (Score:2)
Why can't we just cut VFX in half, CGI is way over used.