No one knows blockbusters like James Cameron. It feels like every movie he touches crosses the two-billion-dollar mark. But with those box office results comes a huge upfront bet.
Recently, Cameron appeared on the “Boz to the Future” podcast. While talking about his career, he asserted that the entire a future of blockbuster movies relies on them being able to “cut the cost of [VFX] in half.”
In order to do that, and to make sure they don’t lose jobs, Cameron is looking at AI. Now, it helps that he’s on the board of Stability AI, which does text-to-image stuff right now.
Now, Cameron is using his board position to help answer these looming Hollywood questions.
He said of being on the board, “In the old days, I would have founded a company to figure it out. I’ve learned maybe that’s not the best way to do it. So I thought, all right, I’ll join the board of a good, competitive company that’s got a good track record.”
Cameron continued, “My goal was not necessarily make a shit pile of money. The goal was to understand the space, to understand what’s on the minds of the developers. What are they targeting? What’s their development cycle? How much resources you have to throw at it to create a new model that does a purpose-built thing, and my goal was to try to integrate it into a VFX workflow.”
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“And it’s not just hypothetical,” he continued. “If we want to continue to see the kinds of movies that I’ve always loved and that I like to make and that I will go to see — 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. Now that’s not about laying off half the staff and at the effects company. 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 and then other cool things, right? That’s my sort of vision for that.”
These issues need to be solved because Hollywood loves big movies because when they hit, they’re up in big paychecks. Ideally, these leaps forward with AI would be done by artists and keep other artists employed.
Cameron is the kind of visionary who wouldn’t accept a version of it that is not up to his standards, so I am optimistic that he can work something out.
These big movies have intense price tags, and studios risk a lot to make them. If we can bring them down, there would be a lot more rewards to go around.
Let me know what you think in the comments.
Author: Jason Hellerman
This article comes from No Film School and can be read on the original site.
