The Truth About the Sphere's Wizard of Oz. Plus Showrunner AI

0:00In this episode of the noise, we'll break down the Wizard of Oz, Planet of the Sphere, and why it's not all AI. Hi. Showrunner, the new Netflix of AI. And we'll take a look at some AI creators that are blending traditional VFX processes with AI. Let's get into it.

0:17All right. What's up, Addy? Hey, how was your weekend? It was good. So I love IMAX. You know, we've talked about IMAX a lot. We both love IMAX. I enjoyed watching Sinners and F1 and Superman and IMAX. But I saw The Naked Gun this weekend. And I have to say, I don't think I've had more fun at a movie theater in a long time. Awesome. Yeah. It reminded me of like the Judd Apatow era movies of the early 2000s. I have not laughed in a theater that much since like The Wedding Crashers. Right. So yeah, highly recommend if you have not seen it. And especially you should see it in a theater because seeing it with an audience and everyone laughing just made it way more funny.

0:53Also, it's like 80 minutes, which is like unheard of with the three hour superhero movies today. Yeah, right, right. And Liam Neeson as a comedy actor, I mean, who would have thought? He's so great for it. I mean, you know, he was perfect in it. Yeah. Yeah. I remember there was a funny joke where it was just like, oh, who knew? Like, all you had to do was find the guy with a similar name to Leslie Nielsen. That's right. Okay. No, I'm going to go see it. Yeah, I highly recommend. Okay. Speaking of immersive big theater experiences, got some brewing stuff happening with The Wizard of Oz and The Sphere.

1:27our viewers like to our viewers tell us that they hear about things for the first time on this show so for those of you who are just listening in on this and i've first heard about this from you apparently the wizard of oz tickets were selling for about a month now some of the first showings are being done over at the sphere in vegas i think it's i think it opens the end of this month but basically this was the first look so we've known about for a while if you follow vp land because we've covered this for months since they've announced it like back in april they announced yeah wizard of oz and the sphere or mgm that had a partnership to the newsletter exactly they had a partnership that they were gonna bring the wizard of oz to the sphere and use ai uh google had an announcement using google's ai to basically take a film that is a four by three film shot 100 years ago and blow it up into a something that works on a 16k immersive such a tough thing to do yes and And there's a lot of ways to go about that because you could go the Matrix route at Cosm, which from what we've seen, they kind of put the movie in a box on the screen and then built an environment around it.

2:36But you're basically watching the movie on a screen in an immersive environment. It's really like what I think is ambient backlighting on some TVs. Like, I don't know if they still do that, but it was basically like the green agent scenes in the Matrix. Oh, at the Cosm thing? At the Cosm. It was just like a green background. Like a desktop background. Yeah, it was like, or if you're watching on the rooftop, it was like the rooftop environment based on the scene. Yeah, but definitely. But they didn't really modify the movie from what I know. Yeah. We're going to go see it. In this case, we are going to see it.

3:05Yeah. So we're going to finally go to Cosm. Yeah. But for this, they were modifying the visuals of the movie. And so we've known about this for a while. But last Sunday, CBS Sunday Morning did a special that was sort of the first time that we've actually seen what they're doing. Yeah. Yeah. And they were playing some demo clips and stuff. Yeah. The internet has kind of was upset about some of the visuals. and took it and ran and it became a meme, which the meme format's actually kind of funny. When is the internet not upset? Come on, come on. All right, let's dig into - There's a lot of things we got to break down here.

3:34Yeah, let's dig into some of the examples of why people are upset. So the one that I'm going to start with is - Yeah, well, I'm going to show you some, let's show you some of the visuals first. Yeah, okay. So these were some of the visuals of the original, you know, Scarecrow, and then we got the big wide shot of Scarecrow sort of on the bottom of the frame of the sphere, and then this big saturated blue sky. Yeah, so it feels like a complete modification of the existing footage into what I would call inspired by footage. These are the memes that happened out of it, of basically joke enlarging classic movies like The Searchers, which I actually saw that for the first time at the American Cinematheque.

4:16Yeah, I don't know if like AI was used in every shot, probably wasn't because AI, quite frankly, is not that capable at that resolution yet right well yeah we can take that a second because we saw some posts from some people that said they worked on it yeah but it feels like outpainting right like so or generative filling or what name you have for it it's where you have a limited window and you want to expand that window out to just fill yeah you've got a small box yeah and you know you got to fill a big box and uh how what do you fill that with yes and what do you do that with an old format that it is old and it is 4x3.

4:50At 32K resolution. Yeah, the old part doesn't matter. But I mean, it is a 4x3 square format they're trying to blow up onto a big screen. And also, I mean, the screen is basically a headset that thousands of people are in the same VR headset. Yeah. So you also have different considerations with movement, with motion sickness, with the types of shots that can translate over. You can't just like magnify the frame to fill because then you're looking at Dorothy, who's like 100 foot tall and you're doing this, right? Yeah, so that obviously won't work and they know it. So you still have to keep the center of frame into somewhat of a movie theater size thing, right?

5:28Like an IMAX screen size and then got to figure out what to do with the peripherals. Sort of, right. But if we're looking at some of the demo clips that they did and I think what, I don't know, people weirded people out is, oh, here's one of the examples. This was one of the big AI examples and they demoed it in the Sunday morning clip. But this is before Dorothy goes to Oz. This is when she's still in Kansas because it's the sepia tone. Yeah. And they're still in the house. And so the original film, it's four by three. And one of the uncle or one of the characters was in the shot, walks out of the shot, and then comes back into the shot.

5:59But when they blew this up, their take was they were going to blow up the entire living room and fill the entire sphere with the living room scene. And so when the uncle goes out of frame, they need to AI generate the uncle so that he doesn't just disappear. Yes. And then when he comes back in a frame, it goes back to the original footage. So that was one of the examples that they gave of like how AI came into use. But then what I think annoyed or upset people a lot was how they handled. Oh, I see Glenn Derry in that video. Nice. Shout out to Glenn. This stuff with the Scarecrow, with the Rhodes, with Dorothy, like on the very bottom of screen with the framing here just looks like it looks weird from this angle that they shot the CBS special with.

6:38Right. Because everything's so bottom frame. there's like huge blue saturated skies derrick crow looks kind of weird but i think i think cbs just shot this at a weird angle like i'm going to give the benefit of the doubt i think we're looking at this from a very high a very wide angle and look there are a lot of smart people on this project like i don't think they're gonna be trying to like make a like weird looking let me just put it this way the people that are on this project have made movies before yeah i'm really capable people on this production yeah it's like oh just just blow it up okay uh yeah okay generate so i think i think cvs did not do them any favors and so like i mean if you think about okay if you're actually lower and your field of view a normal person's field of view is much more narrower yeah what is the experience for the viewer who's paying to go in the theater we don't know what that is yet cbs didn't really do a good job of displaying that sure um so i'm gonna give the benefit of the doubt and think that like this is just a horrible angle to shoot something that is not meant to be displayed this way also in that video if you go back to where you see oz like the green uh yeah yeah i mean that shot at the sphere is money like that the any oh yeah seeing the oz blown up and floating and the sea yeah that's what this is for this fear is for right they're also making this like interactive so like when it's the hurricane they're bringing in giant hurricane fans to blow around they're bringing interactive stuff to this so it's not just the movie but it is wind sound effects yeah there was a separate video came out a month ago too about how they're redoing the entire score for the sphere is like massive audio system because the original recording is like a mono um i forgot the company they acquired the audio company basically there's 160 speaker elements within the sphere and each one is fine-tuned all right so that kind of no matter where you're sitting you get a similar audio yeah like the experience oral experience is as equally stunning as the visual experience yeah And on top of that, the seats, I think, have interactivity to them as well.

8:28Oh, yeah. So, like, I think on some of the other stuff they've done, you can vote for things or you can press buttons on the seats and things like that. Yeah. So, look, end of the day, this is good. You're not thinking of the Steve Ballmer Stadium? The Intuit Dome? The new one that he opened? Yeah, that has it as well. Because that definitely had interactive. That has it as well. Yeah, but I think the Sphere has it. too yeah there's a whole department within the sphere that handles interactivity and immersive yeah so that makes sense i mean there's a department that just builds cameras at that resolution right big sky yeah exactly so it's it's a giant science project and to be honest the other side of it is uh and you saw on some of the tweets is there is a ton of vfx work that went into this and quite frankly at a time when we needed more vfx work in the industry the sphere has provided yeah i mean yeah so like there's a reddit thread on the uh vfx reddit and uh yeah basically people posting and then other people commented who worked on it or said they worked on we can't actually don't have for sure but yeah wizard of osphere experience was made by real vfx artists and they are being discredited like always i would say that the actual ai touch i'm just an outsider looking in is probably so little right because then you have to go in and you have to upscale and figure out the all the errors that ai makes at that resolution and it The sensitivity, I think the sphere didn't quite foresee, and quite honestly, I didn't foresee, is like, if you have a sacred IP and a sacred film like Wizard of Oz, like Ben-Hur, like Gone with the Wind, and then you want to modernize it, bringing to a complete 21st century experience with AI, you're going to run into some trouble.

10:11I mean, people hear the word AI, and we've talked about this before, no matter, without zero context, and just like, oh, AI. oh my god yeah you remember the whole re-speecher thing with the brutalist yes so yeah i mean in here in this in this post uh on the the vfx i'm a vfx artist and i've been working on this for months i'm pissed at these news articles we've had a team of very human artists meticulously rebuilding all the pieces of the set there's barely any eye being used for the backgrounds yet reading those articles it's like a machine did it all no real people have been given work real people have been working late nights and weekends to get it done and then yeah absolutely Yeah, I mean, we both probably have friends that work at the Sphere.

10:49They're like, I don't know, 10 miles from here, right? They're very, this is like a Burbank, Glendale area company. And if you live in the area, you know that Disney is there, DreamWorks is there, Warner Brothers. Like all the major studios are in this 10 mile radius. So a lot of friends of our industry are in there. And from the last six months, all we heard was like, yeah, it's a mad sprint in there to get Wizard of Oz done. it's really complex a lot of hands are involved and they did it i think for the most part yeah and look i mean it's built for the sphere and i don't think you could judge it from footage and angles that don't are not the waves intended to be experienced yeah having said that like i'm sure that there's a few ai folks within that company and they're just like probably sweating right now like oh my god i'm also i'm thinking too what have i done the idea of the you know ai you know like i would and like type it and done is there even any ai that is trained on 16k like we've talked about alone 32k or 32 is that what we talked about like generations and stuff and like image resolution you're lucky to get 1080p yeah so i like maybe you know they've composited elements maybe they just use it to upscale i mean i would be curious what the extent of the ai was uh someone else commented too that um they worked on this for about five months there were multiple large vfx houses worldwide working on this but they kept adding work because the ai couldn't do what they needed it to do not yet yeah yeah i mean yeah yeah i mean you're talking about maybe getting you to like 2k perhaps 4k and then from 4k up to 16k filling in all the detail insertion like filling in skin tone wood wood beam details everything and then from 16k going to 32 right to just make everything work there's no way yeah one thing also that i'm kind of curious about or like your thoughts like the experiment itself of taking an old movie kind of retooling it oh yeah one thing though that is sort of a bummer and like probably the most upset upsetting thing about the whole story is they did cut 30 minutes out of the original movie yeah that's not too i don't know if it's because the shots were too complex like we talked about like that wouldn't translate over to the sphere would make people too sick or i saw one through that it was for so they could fit more screenings in the day i don't really know about that that part that part I am what are your thoughts on that I'm more upset about the cutting the part because it's like well you know you're going there to see the Wizard of Oz experience I want to see the full movie that you know I have it certainly doesn't help if you combine it with all this other stuff right like it's just like okay you took this intact original IP and now you've chipped away 30 minutes of it and now you've added outpainting elements and now you've done new shots that never have existed at new novel camera views so it all adds up to like is it even wizard of auth anymore that kind of a question that quite right so yeah what are your thoughts of just like this experiment of taking something a classic and remixing it retooling it for a different experience for a modern experience i would say at that point you are better off just rebooting the entire thing with new actors and reshooting it.

13:57Like, don't touch the film from the original. Really? You think they should just like recast it and shoot a whole? They should have just used those fancy cameras they have and maybe reshoot them. I mean, they certainly have the budget and the capability to do so. And my guess is it probably would have been cheaper than what they're doing. Than what they're doing. I don't know. I mean, look, I mean, if it gets people interested in something that's old, if it's a reimagining of the thing, also if you're not into it, don't watch it. You don't have to go. You don't have to pay. Also, it's not cheap too.

14:24I think it's like 200 bucks a ticket. I mean, look, we're at a position, we're at a time and a place in our industry where we're experimenting and trying new things out. And kudos to the sphere for taking this momentous big step into this territory of taking old IP, putting it on a 21st century screen, right? This experiment, let's see how it goes over the next six months. And if it does cause an enormous, you know, pop culture moment. If it doesn't, I don't think we'll see one of those ever again. you know i've been talking about the pop culture moment it's like it's probably going to be when you're like scrolling on tiktok and then you see like someone who looks like they're in oz yeah and then you're like what where are they and then they pan and you realize oh they're in the sphere and then it's like one of those other crazy sphere moment sphere reveal moments or like cosm moments where it's like they're on the side of the football game and then it's like they're not really there what they're like watching it in the cause every every like uh like viewer capture of a Sphere concert like I saw some from obviously U2 when it came out.

15:23The one I was watching last night was Backstreet Boys. Yeah, with the spaceship. I was like, dude, that's awesome! So I was like, the Sphere knows what they're doing. It's pretty freaking awesome. I think a lot of this goes to just what CBS Sunday Morning did. I'd be more upset with them. They should have had a YouTuber cover it instead of traditional media. Like VP Land. i was thinking we get to the bottom like mr beast somebody excuse me not but your boy mr beast no i think mkbhb would probably be more yeah exactly they should have had like cleo abrams or mkbhc somebody like that cover it uh who really understands tech and knows how to storytell the cbs sunday morning i think the audience is what is is if that is who's into the wizard of oz you're right boomers i think yeah look cbs sunday morning is a very nice show i don't think they were the best outlet to try to explain or distill this yeah exactly or capture the experience cbs any morning audience wizard of oz overlap not the uh tech literate um audience yeah and the audience that you want is the creator economy consumers right it's it's the folks that are growing up on youtube that want to experience something that can't experience anywhere else on the planet yeah i think that's for like anyone that wants to go to this it's like oh hey that movie you've like grown up with and just like has existed forever um you can now experience it in some trippy way also wizard of oz has had some momentum in the last few years right wicked just came out and before that on pantages and broadway like the whole play was on for like a good decade wicked yeah yeah so it's like never really went away no no especially i mean mainly thanks to wicked yeah for being around forever between the book and the play and the movies the last the last thing i'll bring up on this topic is the broader issue with las vegas as a city that is winding down or just slow right now yeah and and would this bring the traffic back in or would this be hurt from the fact that not a lot of people are going to vegas at the moment oh that just the market's not yeah like would this actually tourists pull vegas into right i mean i'm guessing the selling point of this too is it's like you're a tourist in vegas you got the you know uh cirque de soleil options like what are you doing the evening you go watch cirque de soleil or do you go watch the wizard of oz and this trippy experience yeah does that hurt them overall yeah i don't know the the from what i could tell and from all the articles and i'm kind of obsessed with this because like i used to go to vegas all the time for trade shows and it didn't matter what the economy of Vegas was.

18:03We just need to go there for work. I met you there for the first time, right? Yeah. I mean, yeah. Even in the times that we post COVID with NAB, NAB has been smaller than pre-COVID. Yeah. And so the question is like the international visitors to Vegas are the ones that are really spending and they'll come in for like a week. And within that week itinerary, the sphere is this one thing they probably will pay for. And with less and less international visitors, you're going to see like a glow we're already seeing a global decline on all vegas revenue but is that just temporary yeah i'm curious i don't know what the terms are of like if this is a couple month engagement or if this is going to be sort of in the permanent rotation because i mean they've i think the the conversion process like eight million dollars like they invested a lot of money into this so like they own it right like they this is not sent to somebody else to do it the sphere did it themselves yeah but i mean they still had to license the movie and the ip from mpm so like i don't know a limited i don't know right and so um because i'm wondering like does this replace or augment the darren aronofsky postcards from earth film which was sort of their always on like when they didn't have an event or something but they still you know wanted if people wanted to experience the sphere and see something that was like you buy a ticket to that you can go watch that yeah uh does this replace that we're just going to be something that's sort of like always programmed where if they don't have an event and you're like i want to go watch experience the sphere i can go watch the wizard of oz you know in this experience i hope so So I hope their catalog only grows with strong projects like this.

19:33Yeah. And like a steady recurring revenue for the sphere will then make the case for having spheres all over the planet. Exactly. You need stuff like this too to augment not having a UFC fight or a big massive concert all the time. One of the things that they're really smart to do, and I think Cosm is doing as well at a smaller scale, is hosting private events. You see that Delta one? Yeah, the Delta keynote. Yeah, that one's crazy. I saw the footage coming out of that big ball or Delta yeah how much did that to pay for that yeah so for those of you who missed it during CES the sphere was closed because Delta held their annual conference there for all their employees yeah but have you seen the like keynote footage of the keynote speech it was like was it it was like an airplane or it just had like all this crazy like custom-built Delta airplane graphics and did you also see that rave thing the animal?

20:30I think I've seen clips of that where it's like digital Oh, the robot coming through the ceiling. Yeah, that was dope. Yeah, that's very Vegas. Yeah. Just imagine being on substances and that happens. Nobody's ever on substances in Vegas. What are you talking about? I think we've talked about this fear enough, but even though we can keep talking about that. Look, if you have comments, let us know. Either way, if you feel like this is a super egregious thing to do with... let it yeah or if you support vfx and our artist community either way let us know yeah okay yeah i mean because there's a whole other just like you know do they have permission do they have other things like even uh no film school had an essay about it about uh that's why because that's one that sort of bothered me but this is just because the person wrote the essay the last thing they said but this is just a computer changing a movie to make money that's not art that's just unfettered capitalism that's not true that's not true i mean this is like a silly take that like Like, oh, they just put it in a computer and like, hey, spit out the AI version of.

21:27I wish it was that easy. I know. Exactly. It's like, before you comment about this stuff, like actually try to make something even for like two seconds on one of these tools. They're not that easy to control. Yeah. And then. A lot of times no film school nails it. A lot of times. And then capitalism running out. Because it's also like, this is the film business. Like, we're in this to make money. Yeah. We're not here for charity. Yeah. For sure. All right. Let's move on. Okay. what's next showrunner ai the netflix of ai the netflix of ai which i don't know about that title but i can play it into that title because that's what we called it too and that's what everyone called it and we called it when we wrote about it okay so it is basically so it also got some they sort of teased what their product's going to be and amazon has invested in them so can you just give us a rundown of what i would give you what it is yes but that's why they like got some notoriety lately but basically they're saying it is like a generate your own tv show animated show platform and their vision is that anyone can log on to the platform and you kind of can give it some images of you your friends your environment the stories you want to tell and it'll make animated episodes starring you and your friends and your real life in the style because it's so interesting i mean maybe to you in the style of like south park or family guy like that animated style they're just doing animation because that's the easiest to like automate or replicate um the people behind this did the south park ai experiment like a year or two ago where they kind of built the machine that would just keep generating south park episodes i've heard about that yeah and then it got like shut down i did not watch any of it okay uh the only south park episode i've seen recently is from last week but there i don't know i mean i think people were watching it and it got like kind of popular and then it got shut down because of you know ip copy um but uh that they took that same idea and that is now this product showrunner and so the vision and running through some of their thread highlights um or whatever x tweet it is an x thread there's a cool video yeah he's saying the toy story this toy story of ai moment isn't just going to be a cheap animated film it's going to be playable movies and shows remixable multiplayer personalized interactive all right do we do opinions yet yeah i mean let me give a let me give more of a briefing and then we can do opinions uh their first show is called exit valley it's a riff on silicon valley the show which was uh amazing um on like the current players amazing come you're underselling silicon it was one of the best shows ever i wish silicon valley still existed today because there's so much good material there with like the wire uh barry it's one of hbo's greatest shows barry i need to watch barry oh dude you gotta watch barry no ho hank um uh so the exit valley is set in sim francisco you can upload yourself as a character create your home and tell your story among the maddening gurus of ai so this sort of idea is like they have i guess maybe a hero version of the show in this world and then you can make your own spin-off side versions of the show in this world and multiply that by like any infinite possibilities yeah any ip show worlds that's on i don't know how the ip works if you can can i I don't want to be in the Simpsons.

24:40I don't know if that works. Yeah, like AI is writing the show. I believe AI is writing the show. AI is rendering and generating the show. AI is making the dialogue. I think it is like you can give it as much or as little direction as you want. And then like with images of the characters and the location and maybe story points. And then it generates. It generates the show. I don't know if that qualifies as the Netflix of AI, man. Maybe it's the Netflix in the sense of like there will be a lot of volume of content. Yeah, but Netflix is not. Is it good? I don't know. I mean. I'm curious. Look, I'm curious.

25:12So this idea of you can generate your own show and, you know, like, you know, starring your own movie of your own adventure never quite made the most sense to me. They've tried this before with VRAR in the past. What, like generate your own movie or show? Yeah. Well, not necessarily generate it, but choose your own adventure. Choose your own adventure. Yeah. Right. I mean, it was pre-recorded. Yeah. There was a Bandersnatch. Bandersnatch. Yeah. Even before that. Yeah. I mean, the Choose Your Own Adventure books have been around for a while. Sure. Yeah, this is more like, we'll make a thing for you and you can watch it.

25:45As you go on the fly. Who is that interesting to besides the audience of like you and your friends? Yeah. I don't know. Well, what I don't... Probably no one. Yeah, like I always try to think outside of my brain, if that makes sense. Like I am at certain demographic, a certain age, you know, we're men. But also, what about Gen Alpha? Especially the older Gen Alpha and younger Gen Z. they're in a completely different context their mind wants different types of entertainment yeah you and i do so does this make sense for them i don't i mean do your kids like to make things or see things with them starring i can i can make is roblox like roblox is exactly the type of entertainment that i think this is trying to roblox is a game it's interactive it's a game but it's also a hang and where your friends hang and then they can make stuff they could dress themselves up however they want yeah but you're still i mean that's where that's where i'm getting that's where i'm sort of like okay where's the line or i mean well not that there needs to be a line but like in the types of entertainment this is something that even like netflix talks about where there's like the lean back entertainment where it's like okay i just want to go chill on my couch and like watch something netflix hbo whatever and lean back and watch something and not have to make decisions or gaming where you're like okay i'm actually involved in playing a game yeah and then this where it's like i want to watch something but i also want to be involved in how it's made or what's making it so you're making decisions but it's like so but it's not a game i'm not gonna dismiss it entirely because i do think that there is probably a low percentage that this could actually be big like in in the unlikeliest of scenarios that this could be something exactly what everybody wants certainly the younger demographic but the the film loving, uh, scripted entertainment side of me is like the whole point of watching something on a screen is that you are consuming somebody else's art.

27:46Yeah. I mean, the thing that, I mean, even the, the less of the art you take, but my initial take of this was like, who are you going to talk about the thing with if like, it's a TV show that's just for you. Like so much of the collective experience of like watching the show on tv and then seeing the podcast takes or talking to your friend about it like we just talked about uh the naked gun yeah who do you talk about that to or that shared experience yeah that's like the collective experience thing and i think brin brought that up when we interviewed him is like the reason film is film is because we can all talk about it and share in it especially it's true back in the day when a film came out and there was no other way to watch it you couldn't stream it or anything you had to wait in line watch it with your friends and then come out of the theater and you guys all giggled right it's like oh that was amazing yeah like this is that that was the best part about uh what we thought of as uh entertainment as a society as a whole and now it's become just more and more fragmented we're watching netflix at our home the entire season drops you're on episode three of the studio i'm just starting it out we still can't fully talk about it yeah i mean it's like i i some things i think hopefully we're going back to you know weekly drops or something where it's like oh we could all talk about this thing at the same time yeah um but even on and also we're sort of tangenty but like um theatrical releases you know and it's like oh these are like part of the zeitgeist and like kind of make a name for itself and like sort of stick around and linger versus yeah you know netflix dropping movies and then it's like a thing for three days and then you completely forget it exists not saying every i mean you know not saying every movie makes sense for theatrical but like have you seen 28 uh years later i have not but i've never i haven't seen any of them okay but just for context like it just hit Amazon or Prime video like a couple like a couple days ago and I saw it this weekend it was freaking amazing yeah and of course I should have gone to the movie theater to see it but you know me I just watched I watch stuff at home but then I can't really share that experience with you yet because you haven't seen it right and then who do I like I'm still having my own personal experience but it really isn't collective even though it's meant to be I know honestly the most like outside of like if i haven't had friends or someone who's seen the same thing the like collective experience i get sometimes is um like tiktok commentary or spoofs where it's like i'm scrolling and then someone's like making fun of the uh latest like gilded age episode or something and it's like oh yeah we all get the joke we're all in on the same joke because we all watch the same thing some meme somewhere yeah yeah blows up if you know you know and it's like i'll be in the same wizard laws we'll get to that territory real soon come back to it so i did put in each newsletter we put out a poll And so we covered the story last week and I put out a poll.

30:23Do audiences truly want to create their own shows or just sit back and watch? So actually there were more votes since the last time I checked this. The polling did change, but the second most popular response was, yes, active creators are the future. But then that was... As in like choose your own adventure. As in showrunner AI is like, yeah, that's the future. See, that's... That was the second most popular. Initially when I checked this, that was the most popular and I was really surprised. But then the most popular was more what we're talking about, maybe for niche content, personal projects yeah it's the number one response which is now i feel about it like cool could be a fun thing yeah i mean i don't know if the model for like why amazon would be interested in investing in this is oh hey maybe we make are you kidding me it's aws oh it's such a big aws play that yeah well that they can just generate that definitely makes sense yeah i'm thinking more on the amazon studios amazon like oh entertain i don't know i mean it was just i think this is just all a big cloud compute play to just churn those gpus forever i have a theory of maybe why there could also be useful potential in this for like the amazon studio arm okay tell me so you know their thing is like because they have this exit valley sort of hero show and then everyone can make their own little like side quest side world things inside this universe sure so maybe with amazon on IP or something like what original animated shows are on like fallout like lord of the rings show or whatever you everyone could like they have the hero version but then everyone could make their personal version in middle earth animated middle earth with them and their friends or something okay so like a licensed version of a choose your own adventure so right you could like you have the hero main show that everyone talks about but then if you like really want to dig into it more like kind of in the fan fiction realm like fan fiction is a really big industry and so then maybe you could spin off and go make a fun show for you and your friends at the the yes i agree with you i think that's that's an interesting take second interesting take i think speculating here yeah let's say uh hit show takes off on showrunner and then there's like a thousand variants of that show that people have generated the top three skim to the top they've been viewed a million times or whatever they'll just go to the very top thing just take that storyline and now put it into live action or put it into oh like there's somebody's head vet to just figure out this is rapid prototyping remember that was amazon that was the the very first thing they did when they were first getting into original content do you remember this was like you know 10 years really like amazon prime when they were like we're gonna make you know our own tv shows too they made a pilot of like five shows and then they had people yes yes that one of the shows was the patriot yes which never made it it was really good yeah and they had people vote like what do you like the most and one was like on the blue the blue superhero guy uh the uh the flick the tick flick tick tick yeah yeah yeah that was yeah it was like vote for your pick and that was how they determined how to this is that shows this is that yeah or it's a combination of everything it's an aws play it's a rise to the top play and then it's also a licensed model play all right okay we'll see how it goes or it could just totally you know not work like a lot of things in the past like magic leap you know yeah and just or maybe there are some elements of interesting ideas here this works this doesn't work but some of the ideas are good and get adapted into something else get and then the ip gets sold in pieces like showrunner technology yeah yeah i mean whatever they're using to auto generate a family guy level animated episode it's got to be good technology right yeah valuable exactly for sure all right and then last stuff uh kind of a roundup of been seeing some interesting demos workflows of traditional filmmakers slash traditional vfx artists who are adapting ai into their workflow loving this and i think we've talked about this a lot where it's like this is the future of like hey just a good vfx art is like leveling the power of generative ai but combining the two techniques to create something really cool on a low budget yeah i think the example here is the pirate vfx breakdown um let's give a shout out to the guy that actually made it go oh it was albert boz boz's and boz because i see it on the i see it watermarked on the thing albert boz is in that's that's the same guy that a hand wrote that uh shot grid like thing yeah catch yes that's right i'm like that sounds familiar albert poses it oh that's probably why he made the thing for this project because yeah he's making a project with the ai yeah well it's even more complicated but um okay cool also shout out again shout out again albert yeah you're gonna yeah two for two on on denoised but yeah i mean looking at the original footage it's like they shot this you know cutesy pirate film um campy pirate film yeah but it's like literally the guys dressed as pirates in their attic and And then they're replacing the background with generated backgrounds and compositing.

35:15Yeah. The thing that I love about this is one of the things that I have kind of a personal issue with is anytime I see AI generated humans. And as you know, I come from the world of digital humans and it's still deep in the uncanny valley. And I don't get why you're trying to tell a story with a digital human that's not quite ready. Like it's off-putting. It's going to take you out of the story immediately. so when i see people use real people shoot on green shoot on environment whatever and then just swap out props swap out backgrounds i think that's the way at least for now until ai generated humans are fully ready yeah for sure and i mean i think this is a really good blend because i've talked to like with some workflows or i mean we were talking with cave on the kid when i interviewed and he did the fully generated but with sag actors uh the um wolf hunt the wolf night the yeah there's good sci-fi film yeah it was good yeah but yeah everything was generated when i asked him about the sort of hybrid approach he was like well you know sometimes the backgrounds don't really look it looks too weird with real people but they have a good blend with how they because they have like practical effects and doors like he's touching an actual door that opens a lot of the hand registration yeah worked really well yeah and it's like he's touching a real door and then they just they painted over the door replace the door yes uh and so the interaction with the foreground and background works really well yeah like uh i'm showing this here by off the yeah like his elbow is missing the uh shadow that you would get but like it's making contact with that bow that's not even there that's the final composite i think so for that they showed yeah yeah i mean for you know i'm sure you could find issues and stuff before like i'm sure the budget and what they did um you know exactly and it shows where it's going yeah and it's it's already at a level where like a youtube creator can run with it yeah you know it's definitely not going to be on imac screen anytime soon but this is good enough for a lot of things already yeah and i'm you know just shooting it in a house or the living room and making it look like they're pirates of the caribbean it just reminds me of some of the creative stuff that john finger and those guys do all the time it's like okay tie all that into a movie exactly tie it into like a workflow with a story and a full thing yeah yeah and that's what probably what happen here other creator that i keep seeing stuff pop up and he does these really kind of clever short um vfx things but with like a lot of open source tools or with luma is a enigmatic e and so he's got this one that he did where he was like super mario kind of pumping iron and then levels up and turns into like a jacked super mario this looks good yeah and he just you he breaks down his process and kind of just uses a combination of um image video workflows and compositing and just does a really good job yeah he's like masking out his himself and then filling it with the generative stuff yeah no this is exactly the type of experiments that we should all kind of follow and watch closely because the next generation of vfx tools i think is in this direction yeah it is all iterative and small pieces that ties into a big massive and existing pipelines that have already worked for we know work for a while yeah like what would take this over the top is if somebody actually built a nuke plugin for this and you could just like drop the all of the outputs into nuke in your existing composite interesting yeah so like i'm sure you can chat gpt or cloud code write that plugin that's true yeah yeah i would check out his whole feed because he's got a lot of good stuff and does really clever he did this one other one too that I think used a lot of Luma stuff for you.

38:49Built a gun on his arm. That's the full clip. Gun, turns, blast, blows up a house. Yeah, the gun has accurate lighting on it. You know, it's pulling from the environment. Yeah, and he just does this in his backyard. Yeah, he's missing that shockwave air that hits it in the back. Yeah, like he needs a VFX soup for sure. But he's doing his thing. Super clever stuff, yeah. And then last one, I just saw this one pop up from Rory Flynn. uh, making of a Coliseum ship battle. So pulled Google earth images from, uh, yeah, just regular Google earth stuff of the Coliseum, uh, we V, which I hadn't heard of.

39:27It looks like it's similar to like Flora, like another kind of, yeah, we V is a competitor to like invoke or LTX or Flora. Okay. Yeah. Just like a pipeline built out with connecting multiple tools. Right. And then VO three and, um, built out this aerial shot of a naval battle in modern, modern, modern day Coliseum. Yeah. It's cool. You know, I just hope like some of these guys end up working on real shows and insert you know AI shots into real movies that's the only way we're going to get the adoption yeah and something that's more like beyond a one shot where it's like hey let's do it on a scene where it's like consistent consistent like you have to do angles and keep everything consistent that's like the next step for seeing this stuff come out yeah it's like what came on the kid did is like just put out a 13 minute movie or whatever yeah you know all right I think we think we're good here talked about this fear and a bunch of stuff a lot but yeah let us know what you think uh you know let's know in the comments on youtube or over on apple podcast or spotify and links for everything we talk about as usual at denoisedpodcast.com yep and we are taking the second episode taping of the week which would drop typically on a friday uh to be the ai this week in ai review yes we're doing fridays yeah review roundup let us know if you like it roundup yeah if that's the format that you're after and um you know we're gonna to make the show that you want us to make.

40:43Thanks, everyone. Catch you in the next episode.