How AI Will Change Hollywood Forever: Tye Sheridan & Nikola Todorovic on AI, VFX, and the Future of Filmmaking

25:42If I had to explain or give an analogy for the state of the industry right now, I think it's an industry that's been waiting for a big change. I think AI could be the catalyst or one of the catalysts for that change. I mean, if you look back at our industry, just talking about theatrical distribution, for instance, you look at how films were made, how they were financed, even indie films, right? You would take a group of actors, you would take them out to foreign markets, you would go and do foreign pre-sales so that all these foreign territories all over the world could buy for the rights for that film, right?

26:14Then you'd take those to the bank, get a loan against those contracts. And now you're financing your film with foreign pre-sales, right? I think COVID really sped up the digital distribution process and streaming. you know people got really comfortable sitting in their homes watching films at home theatrical distribution has really changed so drastically so you have the entire landscape of distribution that has changed entirely but the way that we finance films the way that we make films hasn't changed right so you have an industry where all the economics and the models have changed so drastically and we're still reeling and trying to to catch up to speed right and then you have you know, AI coming and then we had the strikes with the writers and SAG and the actors.

27:04There's going to be a really big shift, I think, in the next four or five years. And I don't think anyone has put their finger on it just yet. I still think that we're, you know, it's only the tip of the iceberg. But I agree with Nikola that, you know, if you think about an audience and their mindset, you know, are they going to be that excited by going to watch the inception, quote unquote, that you make with AI in one week that's completely AI generated or AI assisted or however you want to frame it as they would be knowing that, hey, that film took 120 days to shoot and two and a half years in post-production.

27:44But let's say for me as a moviegoer, I've been reading the X-Men comics since I was a kid. Okay, here's now X-Men, whatever story they tell. I don't really know that there's been 100 days of shooting and I give up the ability to, oh, that's a special effect, that's real. When you're watching the movie, your brain tells you everything's real. So maybe the role of the studios is going to be just capturing all the best IP that you can't get elsewhere. But the movie itself, just thinking about your software that you guys developed and the direction that's going, take it five years out. how much of the cost of making Ready Player One or X-Men Apocalypse could be eliminated, the cost could be eliminated because of software like yours?

28:34It really depends. But you can get it down to a tenfold and more. It will drastically change. So how much in special effects? Let's say take either one of those two movies that I just mentioned. What was the special effects cost and what do you think the savings could be? In five years? Yeah. I think you can cut down a movie that costs$100 million down to$10 million, if not less. By the way, we have to distinguish between special effects and visual effects. So special effects are practical effects in camera. And then in visual effects, like you have a film like Ready Player One, which is mostly visual effects, right?

29:06They're inside of the Oasis. All that is done in post-production. Visual effects is what we're talking about, right? Yeah, just to go back a little bit, James. I think going back to, you know, you're not going to know if it took 150 days. But you will recognize if something's lazy. we do. Remember, you know, if you go in theater and you see a movie and it's poorly written, you get really upset. You're mad. You're like, why did I just waste two? Like, it's almost like you wasted more than two hours of your life. Like you're generally with art, we get upset like that, right? But that's because we recognize that something was either not the talent you expected, or maybe it was lazy.

29:42I think it's same with AI. And then the second question is, will we be okay with watching synthetic actors? I don't think so. That's a big part of the cost, AI is such a big category we're more focused on how do I speed up the process of capturing performance by an actor or lighting a CG character putting something on screen that doesn't exist in the real world but you're still shooting you're still doing production there's another piece of AI which is your text to video models that are generating everything and you're watching actors that don't exist in the real world you're watching synthetic actors so to me I don't think we will be dominating box office with all synthetic actors fully generated air phones.

30:27You could be right. I think we don't fully know the answer, but I'll believe you guys. I think that could be correct. Just like I think you're not going to be dominated. AI is not going to write the script of a really compelling movie, because ultimately it doesn't really have human experience. But the visual effects, that, just in general, as we've seen the evolution of visual effects and computer generated effects over time. It just gets better and better. So that, I think, has no plateau. And so it won't feel lazy to create a whole environment like Ready Player One, for instance. It won't feel lazy whether it's one year from now, five years from now, whatever.

31:07Even for short films now, it doesn't feel lazy. It feels amazing. I think it ultimately comes down to the story. I think we in the industry sometimes get a bit deflated because we think, oh, people, you know, there's no, um, there's not a good box office performance. None of the films that are coming out or releasing or having any kind of good performance in the box office. And then all of a sudden one film comes along and it becomes part of the social zeitgeist and it does a billion dollars, you know? And so I do think ultimately, if you're lazy with story, regardless of whether you have a fully AI, you know, production or not at all.

31:48I think if the story is not there, then people don't care. And I think that's really where I think we are in terms of some of the films that are going out theatrically, that are being released theatrically. I think the stories aren't that original. Occasionally, something comes along and blows people away. But I think that's ultimately, we're going to go full circle and realize AI assisted or not, we still have to have a great story that moves people, that compels people. And I think that the industry in general is so focused on a general overarching idea of AI replacing artists or actors or directors or writers, etc., and replacing the production process.

32:35But I think you have to distill it down and look at what aspects of filmmaking because it's a really complex mechanism, a system, to go and make a film like a Ready Player One. I mean, how many thousands of people work on those, thousands of people work on these films, you know, and there may be, you know, 15 different, you know, channels and aspect pillars that are necessary, you know, to support these films. And I think if you can take 10 of those pillars and reduce the cost 90%, that's really where, you know, we can start to win as an industry the box office not only that but that's where we can potentially pay our artists more right because we're spending less on the film on production you know so we have more bandwidth we have more upside potential as well for returns for studios i think that's where it's all really exciting for me and it always has been i guess that's always been the point which is why we started this company and why we built platform that we built so it's interesting so it's sort of like, this is somewhere in the middle between the big budget studio films and the indie films.

33:46Like when I think of like, let's just go back to the nineties when everything was like super expensive for, for everything, any kind of effect at all. So you, the, the indie films would be like, okay, two people in a room having dinner and you film it and that's an indie film. And cause there's no cost, right? Basically. And the big budget films, of course, are too expensive for an indie filmmaker to make. And now, because of the visual effects are so expensive and so on, the studios still have their place. But you're basically saying, listen, even if that's one tenth the cost, it's still more money than to make Ready Player One or X-Men Apocalypse.

34:23It's still more money for the indie filmmaker to really do it justice. So there's still a role for the studios. Meanwhile, their profit margins will go up. They'll be able to pay people more and the industry will continue to thrive because of these types of software. And at the same time, the indie filmmaker, though, now has more options, too. They can make a science fiction movie with some visual effects. And, you know, and okay, we're not going to make Ready Player One or, you know, we can make Mud, but like on another world with visual effects. Yeah, 100%. And that's, I think, and I spoke about this, and I mentioned that probably too many times is the studios sometimes cannot take big risks, especially with big sci-fi films and make too creative a film because they need to, you know, if you make a film for 200 million, you put 100 million in marketing, that's 300 million.

35:15So you got to make about 600 to break even, right? Or 500 million to break even. So you can't really make too big of a risk because you got to attract an 80-year-old and a 60-year-old to like the movie, right? You got to go for the masses. So that's where I think the beauty of, as you say, making mud in the other world is if you enable indie filmmakers to do it, you're always, James, you're always sacrificing something from script to the screen. Always. You write something and then you realize this is not possible, technically or financially, and then you're cutting down and you're editing your script as you're going.

35:47So to me, that's really... If you zoom out, the ultimate point is how do you discover more voices, tell more stories without sacrificing those stories because of either socioeconomic status or some opportunities or technical challenges. So, okay, so you started this company. It's based on your backgrounds in visual effects and acting and the movie experience and so on. What happens next? You build up, you build some software. Are you hiring programmers? Are you going to the office every day? Like, Ty also, are you going from the set of X-Men Apocalypse to the office and managing developers? What's happening?

36:25We are poor boys. We had a poor boy mentality always. So we never really had an office until we had a lot of employees. But yeah, I mean, you know, we... Yeah, I guess we... Yeah, just whenever I wasn't working on a film, you know, we were kind of grinding on the startup. And there were so many different phases, you know. By the time the company was acquired, we were about 70 employees. Most of our team, you know, we had some team. I mean, we were kind of spread out everywhere. We had a team in people in the US, Argentina, Eastern Europe, predominantly Eastern Europe where Nikola is from. And so we had a couple offices there.

37:09And so we would go and spend a month or two with the team. In the early stages, I mean, before we released our platform, I think we were developing for, what, two years, two and a half years? More. I mean, before we launched, we were in stealth mode. almost four years. But yeah, so what we did is we ran lean for a long time. Until we did a complete pivot, we ran lean. It was a much smaller team. We were not rushing out to race too much. I think we were big believers in running lean because the market doesn't follow the hype of Twitter or LinkedIn. Because you always see these cycles that happen and most of your customers don't care what valuation you are or what round that you see round series.

37:54They don't know what that means. So we really ran lean and we were very fortunate to have some great backing from some amazing VCs. Who are some of the VCs? I don't know. Yeah, so Founders Fund led our seed round alongside Mac Ventures, which is Charles King and Mike Pallant, LA-based VC, which we really liked. We had backing from Epic and Samsung. And then our Series A was led by Horizons Ventures, which we really, really liked. They have an amazing track record. So we were very fortunate to have backing of VCs that really gave us some freedom, and especially around the pivot when we did the first pivot.

38:32But I think for us, we were lean until we really saw the product market fit. And as far as recruiting, we started early. So gen and TBI wasn't even a term back then. We called it visual AI. And we knew we couldn't really find engineers that knew everything we needed. So we went out and tried to kind of go to these universities. I'm originally from Serbia. So I went around a bunch of universities here and spoke to a professor and said, who's your best student in the past 10 years? And so that's how I would meet our CTO, Alexander. He was one of the professors, recommended him, said our best 20 years.

39:05So we went around kind of really trying to find people similar to us that they were very curious, that didn't claim they know everything, but they knew enough either of computer vision or machine learning or visual effects, which was really important for us. And then obviously our soft dev. So we had sort of four departments. we had to always find someone who knows at least two, but they're willing to learn the other two. So I think that really helped us a lot. And it took a long time. I think it took almost nine months to find first two, three people because we knew they were crucial. Who were some of your first customers?

39:36Like, okay, so you're building this visual effects software and it's going to change the whole industry. Who were some of your first customers or willing to try it out? Yeah, so when we launched, we had a waiting list of about half a million people on it. So that was 2023. and we saw this split of storytellers, individuals, content creators, YouTubers, and on the flip side, their studios. So then we made kind of tier programs. You have your self-serving customers, which is, we had light and pro tiers, and then enterprise tier. And enterprise tier, Netflix was one of the first customers. On the kind of self-serving smaller teams, we had, besides individuals, we had, I remember, production companies out of Japan with a team of five.

40:20they'll write to us and say, you know, we could never do this before. So happy that this software exists, etc. So if we're being completely honest, for us, that was the exciting part. Those small production companies, small VFX houses, individuals, two, three teams, they're doing something that they couldn't do before. And what are some of their success stories using your software? Like in terms of the smaller production companies, did they make movies? Did they make YouTube videos? Like what were they successful with? Yeah, we had everything from TV shows down to advertising, down to just people making short-form content on their own.

40:56For us, the big focus on our product was how do I get the performance out from an actor and then drive a CG character and put it in a live action, right? Compose it, animate it, lit it. Something that usually takes weeks that you could get to that first pass, but then edit it. Really, there was a big separation of it. But the interesting part, we saw this kind of thing being used on some format that traditionally we wouldn't see. Like even something silly as Masked Singer was using it for an episode down to like advertising like Red Bull and some of the other ones. But for instance, there's a studio, Boxo Studio, use it for a Superman Lewis TV show.

41:34And they told us they cut it down from three weeks down to one week of their career. Wow. Because what's going on in visual effects is that budgets are getting smaller, but the quality of demand is higher. So expectations are higher, you're getting less time, less budget. So these VFX services are also dealing with a lot of pressure and they have to figure out what tools to use because they're not getting the same amount of time as they used to. But now everybody recognizes bad VFX, so you can't really get away with bad visual effects, right? The demand is kind of... The customer's eyes has evolved quite a bit.

42:07So first off, my entire family made fun of me for binge watching the Superman and Lois series. So glad to know that somebody credible was involved in it. I'll have to tell everybody.

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44:28But now for you, second question is, is Sora now a competitor to you? Like, are you worried about text-to-effect type of AI? Yeah, text-to-video. It's different. We are more focused on the 3D space, right? We're more focused not getting you kind of final pixels. We're more focused on, can I extract my shot that I actually shot live, not generated, and extract all the information I would need in 3D space, right? So it's very different. We've seen people use both tools together. But for us, I think the big differentiator is a lot of these text to video, that's why we stayed away from 2D space. A lot of these generative tools in 2D space give you kind of a black box that you can't edit to the finest detail.

45:11A lot of professionals, they really do need full control of lighting, full control of camera, full control of performances. And that's really something you cannot prompt completely. it. So that's why we stayed in a 3D space of it. So I'd say it's more complementary than competitive in that aspect. I'm curious, just as an interesting thing, Ty, when you would go on the movie sets while you were developing this company and building this company, it's kind of cool to be part of two different subcultures. Probably people on the movie sets knew you as, oh, he's an actor, he's been in these movies, now we're all working together.

45:45And then they find out you're also this tech entrepreneur, mogul, whatever. Was that an interesting thing for you? I don't know if I can go that far, James. I was just throwing it in there. But was that something that was an interesting experience of you added this extra dimension to who you are on the set? Oh, no, it was absolutely. I love learning anything. And I'm a super curious guy, just like Nikola. That's why we have become really close friends over these years. And I think when I was on film sets, it was exciting talking to the DPs, the cinematographers, and asking them, oh, when you did that film, how did you guys do this and how did you do that?

46:29And I think people take pride and obviously take pride in what they do. And I don't think it's like every day that the actor is asking the cinematographer specifics about how they did something in post-production. So some people were a little bit like, why are you asking? And then I would explain to them, well, I started this company and blah, blah, blah. I'm curious about this and that. And they said, oh, wow, that's so cool. And then some people in the film industry, they could care less. They pride themselves on being story people. And they're almost, quote unquote, anti-technology, which is quite ironic considering that the entire industry is built on the advent of a camera.

47:10in technology. And technology has constantly driven it forward. And so you have people like Steven Spielberg, for instance, who see the benefit of technology in film, who see that it's pushing us forward, who see that with this technology that we're going to have in five years, we're going to be able to do this thing that I've always wanted to do that's never been done in our industry. And so I think you have two buckets in the industry. You have people that are open to technology, people that are kind of technology enthusiasts, and then people who are more maybe cut from a different cloth and they're more story people and driven by the story and they care less about the technology.

47:53And then on the tech side, when we go and pitch to investors and stuff like that, I think there was a little bit of pushback. Investors would sometimes ask, well, you have this career. Why do you need to do this? Why are you doing this? Because I'm interested. I'm curious. And we want to build the future. We want to be part of that. Or at least, even if we fail, we'll at least know a little bit about where the future is going. Maybe what mistakes we made along the way. That was really the big kind of pivot for us when we were deciding to make a pivot in 2018 from that interactive kind of conversational thing into what Flow Studio is today.

48:32I remember Ty and I had a conversation. We said, all right, what's the worst thing that could happen? And we said, worst thing that could happen, we'll learn the future of filmmaking before anybody else. Because keep in mind, we were making this selfishly to make our own film that we wrote. And then we realized about six months in, all right, this is bigger than us. Let's make it a platform. But that was kind of the... It kind of gave you this freedom of, all right, we're going in a direction. We're going to learn so much more ahead of the industry. And that's a plus, even if it fails. And by the way, did you ever finish making your own movie that you initially started?

49:04We got too busy. We got too busy. Yeah, I think we were, I was just going to say, I think we were pretty naive and not understanding just how much it takes to build technology and to run a software company and all those things. Because we thought, well, we'll build the software and then we'll start a studio. And we'll basically be like the Blumhouse, but for sci-fi films. And we'll be making these films on a budget using our own technology. and I think it just, you know, the bandwidth to do all of those things, you know, it's pretty challenging. Honestly, I think if we didn't, we wouldn't probably dare to do it.

49:45And I speak with the team a lot on it. When we first started, you know, a lot of our engineers also didn't realize how difficult it's going to be. We had advantage of the timing. We started early. We were in a space early. We were building a stealth mode for about four years, which really gives us a big advantage. But looking back, I remember speaking to my engineers and we're saying, it's really good that we did not understand how difficult some of these research problems were because we probably wouldn't start it. And that's sometimes good. You just jump and go for it versus overanalyzing it and then you're scared of it.

50:17Well, particularly since, like you said, you even pivoted, but that's because the entire world pivoted. Generative AI became a thing. The idea of doing text-to-video or text-to-anything became a new thing. So you were kind of on the ground floor because you were already looking heavily into the space. You already had technologists working with you. And so you probably benefited a lot from this switch to AI because everybody was starting fresh. 100%, yeah. And we were early, 2019, as I said, none of this was talked about at that time. So that really gave us a big benefit. because if we started, if we pivoted when it became a buzzword, it would be way too late because what we needed to, some of the research problems we had to solve took two, three years and that wouldn't be able to, you know, if we started that when ChatGPT came out, that would be way too late, right?

51:10So that helped us a lot. And so then you sold to Autodesk, right? Like, can you say how much you sold to Autodesk for? Was that public? No, not public, unfortunately. Can you just tell me anyway? I won't tell anybody. Yeah. We have a strong idea, unfortunately, on that one. But, you know, obviously, life-changing for both of us. But I think for us, we had a partnership with Autodesk for about a year before the acquisition. We were not planning to sell. We were raising our Series B at the time. But it helped us. We've spent a year working with them, and the vision's really aligned. We present them what the five-year, ten-year vision is.

51:49And obviously, Autodesk is a leading company in 3D, especially. It's been for decades. So for us, that really aligned. And Diana Colella, who runs VDM Statement, really saw eye to eye with her and what her kind of strategy was on the side. So obviously we're part of Autodesk, I'm part of Autodesk now. It's a good combo of the 3D knowledge that we had, but we didn't have it at the level we needed it versus our AI knowledge that we brought in. And do you think Autodesk, as a company, is able to keep up with the Googles and Open AIs and these big AI companies that are raising tens of billions of dollars to develop this, among other things, text-to-video software, do you think Autodesk is able to keep pace with them in terms of the needs of the movie industry?

52:33Yeah, I think because of the understanding. First of all, I wouldn't be in this company if I didn't believe it. But second of all, I think a lot of companies we're seeing in text-to-video, they're not really making tools for filmmakers, they're making tools for social media users. And we had this early with VCs. VCs, they're looking for scale, right? You want scales. That's how social media plays such a... It's a video tool, right? And video tool is very different than cinema tool. So that's, I think, I would make a big distinction. Because if you're making a film, you need that adaptability. You need that understanding of what makes a shot.

53:08Understanding how the director operates. Understanding what the demand is of a VFX supervisor. Versus if you're making something quickly for social media, you don't have to care so much about adaptability because you're producing something that you're releasing the same day, most likely, especially around the viral content. This is where I think all of this has advantage, is that they come from the space. They understand the filmmaking process. And this process is not going to change overnight. That's why people make a mistake a lot. They're thinking, if you go to Twitter, because of AI, Hollywood's been dead for five years now, if you read the titles.

53:39Every day, Hollywood's dead, Hollywood's dead. It doesn't happen overnight. It's not going to happen overnight. I think there's going to be adjustments for everybody. But yes, for me, the exciting part with Autodesk is the knowledge and decades of knowledge they have working, you know, and not just on a 3D tool, on, you know, production management tool, etc. So there's a lot of inside knowledge in a strategy. And I think for us, I'm a big believer, we have to be in 3D space for these tools to work. You can't just do it in 2D space. The knowledge, but also kind of the legacy roots that they have within the industry, you know, as, you know, kind of the number one 3D software for how many decades in the industry.

54:18the tools that the industry relies on. I trusted kind of brand and partner for us, as Nikola said. Really, it was a support of our vision and the future that we both saw that kind of made it the perfect fit. Yeah, no, that makes sense because ultimately, Steven Spielberg or James Cameron, they're not going to just let a bunch of kids do all their visual effects. Even if they're using AI, they're going to call someone they know, like Autodesk to say, hey, help us figure this out. In terms of quote-unquote Hollywood is dead, what about Hollywood is being replaced might be the wrong word, but think about studios like Dharmon Studios that make these micro-dramas.

55:05I'm assuming you're familiar with them, I don't know if you are. They're starting to have more viewing time on YouTube than movies have. What's the role of these micro-dramas in the new landscape of Hollywood? It's interesting. I think people are trying to... If you look at James... Katzenberg tried to do this with Quibi, right? That's what he basically was trying to do. But he was trying to spend millions... He was almost using the old movie mindset. Dharmon Studios is paying like$2 ,500 per video. Different quality. Yes, the acting quality is different. The production quality is very, very different.

55:42I think different devices are forcing us to consume some of this storytelling differently. I think the market is only going to expand, but I'm not a believer that where I think the studios will actually have big advantage is the marketing spend. Because it will potentially follow what happened with the music industry, which is it was really hard to make a record. Now everybody can just make their own record and put themselves on Spotify. But how do you discover them? Very hard to discover them. You either are doing guerrilla marketing on social media as an artist, and you break through the noise somehow by some miracle.

56:18One in a million, right? I think if we do start producing more with AI-generated content, there's going to be different pockets in social media, micro dramas that are going to be more generative. Studios will use it more for visual effects. But I think if we start seeing this influx of AI-generated content, really what's going to break it through is the marketing spend on some of this. And I think that's where studios will end up leading. Alongside what I said earlier, which is they're just going to figure out how to make things bigger. We just don't know what that is yet, but they will. Yeah, no, it's all interesting to see what's happening.

56:51So I guess, what's next in everything? So Ty, what's the next movie you're in? What are we looking forward to? The next movie is going to be a movie called The Housewife with Naomi Watts. And it's a small movie, you know, small indie film. And yeah, that's probably the next. I mean, we shot this movie back in, what, earlier this year in spring, April, May. So looking forward to that. And then, yeah, just keeping an eye out for those special miracle projects. For me, at this point in my career, I really want to strive to work with amazing people. I want to push amazing stories out there and into the world that really compel people.

57:38And I don't think it's every, it's not every project, you know, so I'm looking for that. one in a thousand or one in 10 ,000 maybe that could be those miracle projects. And, and so, yeah, that's, that's where I, I'm setting the bar these days and, you know, lots of people out there that are super talented and amazing people I'd love to work with. So we'll see the future is exciting. And I'm, I'm just curious to like, given, you know, now we have for the past many years, you know, Netflix, Amazon studios, Apple TV plus, Hulu making original shows all these companies are making hundreds of new they're spending tens of billions of dollars a year on making new TV shows, movies and so on what I wonder is how come there's people who don't have jobs who are writers or actors there must be like 20 ,000 new openings for writers and actors why do people still go to Hollywood and remain unemployed remain waitresses or waiters yeah I mean that's a really good point and I was actually speaking with George Clooney about this same thing.

58:44And he said, look, I mean, people - I feel like that was a little bit of a flex you just did there. Oh, I was just talking about - We did a film together that he directed me. And he's a really smart guy and has interesting thoughts on the industry. And we were just kind of talking about, I think he said, well, young actors come to me sometimes and they feel like the future is dismal. you know they feel like oh you know um you know budgets are getting smaller we're not getting paid as much and you know the films aren't performing well theatrically and i said no but look look at the other side you know so many people are out there making shows they're out there making films there's so much content being produced therefore there's way more opportunities right and i will say play devil's advocate and this is me talking about that cluny you know Maybe not all those projects will be super high quality, you know, Chris Nolan-like movies.

59:43But there's a lot of opportunities out there. So I don't know. How are people still staying unemployed? Yeah. Maybe I think... Sorry to interrupt. But I think the big problem is that a lot of this employment was centralized in LA. And what happened, especially with TV shows now, it's really spread out to Europe and other countries. I have so many friends, especially after strike, that had to move out of LA. They couldn't afford because they're just not getting hired. There's not that production, not many productions. So there is a really big challenge right now with the crews. There's less work, especially in California, that it's ever been.

1:00:20And that's a big issue. And I think, yes, there's so much more content, but the majority of this, especially TV content, is not being filmed anywhere we're used to. It's mostly moving to some other countries. And I think that's where we're seeing a lot of issues with people struggling. That's with crews, maybe. And maybe with writers, you know, when you have writer rooms, you know, focused in one area. But, you know, even on small films, like, yeah, especially, Nico, you bring up a good point. If you're going to shoot a film in Europe and it's an independent film, the producers really don't have enough budget.

1:00:54I mean, yes, they can fly like maybe that, you know, one or two actors from the US or LA or New York or whatever. but you can't get everyone from the U.S. I mean, you know, that's a lot of round-trip tickets, you know, U.S. to Europe. You got to get people in London, you know? So I think that does have an impact, but I think more so on the cruise than it does, I'd say, the artist, you know, because you can, I mean, you really, you can write from anywhere and send a script in to somebody. They could then, you know, be, you know, someone could acquire the rights to and package and put it together and go make the film.

1:01:33So TV is a little different. And I don't have much experience in TV, so I'm not going to comment on that. But yeah, I don't know. That's a good question. Well, what you guys are kind of saying is maybe though, because it's now opened up to the whole world, maybe while the demand has increased because there's so many more shows and movies being made, maybe the supply also exists because now it's opened up to the whole world for, oh, let's just, if we're shooting this TV series in Canada, let's just find actors right here in Canada as opposed to bringing them from LA. So maybe the supply has kind of met the demand, which is why there's still that feeling of, oh, it's hard to get a break.

1:02:09It's hard to get an opportunity. Yeah, there's the problem. There's a problem. I was just going to comment on that quickly, James. You bring up a really good point in Canada. For certain films to get a rebate or to get a tax credit, you have to have a certain amount of crew and cats. Canadian, right? They have to be Canadian residents. So I tried a film in Canada, when was this? Maybe two or three years ago. And most of our cast was Canadian, but the producer on the film was telling me, yeah, we had to cast. All of these roles had to be Canadian so that we could get this rebate. So you have a limitation there.

1:02:48You can't just get all of your cast from LA or New York. There's also such a, during COVID, there was such a spike in demand and everybody thought that's just going to remain at that level, which it didn't, right? And then you had to, there was a shortage of crew, there was a shortage of VFX artists, right? It went crazy spike up. And then obviously, you know, after COVID, people not spending as much time watching TV or watching shows as they used to. So now you have a lot of, you know, crew members without a job. Well, you know, you guys have had such an interesting background. I think it's very interesting when you take multiple disciplines and are able to participate at the highest level in each of these disciplines, particularly when they're interacting with each other.

1:03:35What's next for you at Autodesk? You guys are entrepreneurs. Are you going to stay at Autodesk forever? Nikola, is there a next project that you're both going to work on? For me, obviously, we have a vision and a goal. the products are baby and I'm not leaving it until it's finished and we have some big announcements coming up some new features like text to 3D and image to 3D that is coming up but as far as the film side still writing Ty and I are still looking at projects to produce and make together so that dream didn't go away the tech kind of cuts in the middle of it but I think that's just something that we always want to do It's funny, you built and sold all company just to make movies cheaply for yourselves.

1:04:27Now that you've done that, now you can eventually make the movie. So I look forward to watching that movie. You know, it's funny. We're talking about a fear of writing a script and creating a film. Sometimes, you know, we as artists tend to be such perfectionists that you kind of have this freeze of making something. And I always say, starting a company and selling a company, potentially a little easier than creating a film, in my mind. Really? That's interesting. Now, it's obviously extremely difficult. But I think sometimes you find yourself in this position where from an artist standpoint, you tend to find excuses on why you can't do something and then you find something else and then you put all your effort in that.

1:05:13So you're saying starting and selling an entire company was just procrastination on writing your film. Yeah, there you go. Exactly. Perfect translation. A 10-year procrastination. Yes. Well, thanks so much for coming on the show. I really appreciate it and learning more. Thanks for having us. And it gave me a lot of insights and you helped me formulate my opinion or even change my opinion on how Hollywood's going to expand in the coming years given all this AI and new technologies. so I appreciate that and yeah thank you for coming on the show thank you James thanks for having us thanks for having us

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