Wētā FX and Amazon Web Services (AWS), an Amazon.com company (NASDAQ: AMZN), have agreed to explore development of artificial intelligence (AI) tools that empower artists with efficiencies to foster and enhance their creativity throughout the visual effects production process.
“AI represents an opportunity to shift how high-end entertainment is crafted, with custom agents to assist with mechanical tasks,” said Kimball Thurston, CTO at Wētā FX. “We are collaborating with AWS to build tools that provide a new interface for artists, not with chatbots or text prompts, but providing artists the ability to orchestrate intelligent systems with a natural interface and manage a complexity and sophistication not yet possible. With the artist in full control, they are then enabled to collaborate with the rest of the team, crafting the next-generation of premier storytelling to entertain the world.”
Wētā FX and AWS plan to explore three areas where AI can meaningfully improve efficiency and creative iteration:
–Intelligent Assistance for Complex Visual Effects: Today, creating a fantastical story within a photorealistic world requires artists to spend many weeks per shot on highly technical tasks. This work includes everything from better capturing the exact performance of an actor, creating and animating exotic creatures and environments, and ensuring a flawless final look. These processes often require deep expertise and skill, yet include repetitive and time-consuming steps to manage the inherent complexity. Wētā FX and AWS aim to explore developing AI-enabled workflows within artist-driven tools that expand the ability to focus on creative direction and intent, while preserving full artist control. For example, there are current ML tools which focus on human motion, translating an artist’s brush strokes to curves describing how muscles move, but by training an AI model to generalize the translation of physics and motion to other creatures, a new suite of artist interactive tools can be created with the potential to enable artists to work more efficiently, while retaining the realism which keeps audiences engaged.
–Purpose-Built AI for VFX Challenges:Traditional AI models use public datasets that often lack the specificity required for professional VFX work. Wētā FX and AWS plan to explore developing AI models specifically to meet the unique challenges of VFX production. By leveraging Wētā FX’s decades of production expertise and legacy tools and AWS’ infrastructure capabilities, the collaboration aims to investigate creating AI models that understand the language and requirements of visual effects artists rather than needing artists to adapt to general-purpose tools. Additionally, training can leverage legacy tools to generate synthetic data. For example, teams may be able to train an AI model to understand mythical creature movement by rendering thousands of variations with ground-truth skeletal data, or teach a system to extrapolate damaged architecture by simulating destruction across multiple architectural styles with perfect before-and-after pairs.
–Accessible and Sustainable Production: As VFX projects grow more ambitious, Wētā FX will explore ways to leverage AWS’ infrastructure for elastic compute to optimize compute approaches and efficient workflows that make sophisticated AI-assisted capabilities accessible to productions of all sizes yet reducing overall resource requirements. This could include developing smaller, more efficient AI models that retain strong generalization capabilities. With AI supporting technical execution, this can accelerate the creative iteration cycles from days to hours.
“World-class filmmakers turn to Wētā FX to deliver iconic, awe-inspiring visual effects, from the battlefields of Middle-earth in The Lord of the Rings to the bioluminescent forests of Pandora in Avatar,” said Daniel Seah, Wētā FX CEO. “We’ve done this for three decades by ensuring our artists have the most innovative tools as they craft the best path forward for every creative challenge. Together with AWS, we’re approaching AI with the goal of enhancing our artists’ work, enabling them to be more creative. We strongly believe AI technology should amplify human creativity and intent, and together with AWS we are committed to exploring and developing this.”
“AWS has been powering media and entertainment innovation for nearly two decades, and this agreement represents an exciting milestone to explore and develop AI workflows and services that will transform the visual effects industry,” said Nina Walsh, AWS global leader, industry business development for media, entertainment, games and sport. “Wētā FX’s vision is about enabling exceptional artists to be more exceptional by creating purpose-built AI to fit their creative workflow. That’s exactly the kind of innovation we want to enable with AWS infrastructure and our AI services.”
