\u201cSome are still resisting, but many are recognizing that, for better or worse, AI is here and not going anywhere and it is important to reimagine what film creation can look like in light of the new possibilities AI creates,\u201d said Victoria Schwartz, director of the entertainment, media, and sports law program at Pepperdine Caruso School of Law.<\/p>\n
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A screen of LED panels called \u201cthe Volume\u201d is used to film scenes for director Jon Erwin\u2019s series \u201cThe Old Stories: Moses.\u201d<\/p>\n
(Genaro Molina \/ Los Angeles Times)<\/p>\n
Erwin is among the first working directors at a major streaming platform to fully integrate AI into a commercial production.<\/p>\n
Last month, he launched Innovative Dream, a Manhattan Beach production services company backed by Amazon. The company will rent its virtual production facilities to other studios and develop training programs for emerging filmmakers.<\/p>\n
Although much of Hollywood is bracing for AI to hollow out<\/a> jobs, Erwin argues the opposite: that AI, applied ethically around human performances, can return at least some production jobs that have been outsourced even as other positions are eliminated.<\/p>\n \u201cI think the greater threat of job loss in our industry is actually just how expensive things have gotten and how long they take to make,\u201d Erwin said. \u201cIf you can make things quicker, and you can make things at a price point that studios will say \u2018yes,\u2019 you can employ more people in aggregate and create jobs.\u201d<\/p>\n Although computer graphics have been essential to Hollywood since the 1990s, they traditionally required hundreds of artists and months of post-production work to place actors or crowds in digital worlds. Much of the labor-intensive visual effects work known as rotoscoping was outsourced to shops in India and other countries with much lower labor costs than in California.<\/p>\n By 2019, productions such as Disney\u2019s \u201cThe Mandalorian\u201d series advanced this further by using massive LED screens<\/a> to project images of photorealistic digital worlds \u2014 \u201cStar Wars\u201d ships, forests, or deserts \u2014 as actors\u2019 performed in costume in front of them. A virtual art department spent months designing the digital environments, and then loading them onto the large screen<\/a> on the day of the shoot.<\/p>\n AI takes the process a step further. <\/p>\n Through \u201cMoses,\u201d Erwin is championing what he calls \u201chybrid\u201d filmmaking: a workflow that marries live-action with AI-enhanced workflows in virtual production. The process combines what used to be separate phases \u2014 filming with actors and visual effects \u2014 to occur almost simultaneously. Scenes shot on set is made available to multiple editors and AI artists within minutes on the production floor, as they show near-finished sequences back to the cast and director.<\/p>\n \u201cYou can create assets in three or four days, not 10 weeks. And that means you can actually kind of generate the environment while you\u2019re shooting,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n Erwin, 43, grew up in Alabama and built his career around faith-based films such as \u2018I Still Believe\u2019 and \u2018Jesus Revolution.\u2019 He had spent years trying to tell biblical stories at the scale portrayed in the source material.<\/p>\n When he pitched \u201cHouse of David<\/a>,\u201d a drama about the life of King David, studio executives were initially skeptical. \u201cI was told to just come up with a smaller idea,\u201d he said. <\/p>\n To portray Goliath\u2019s origin story, actors were filmed on green screens and AI was used to generate a mythical sequence involving dark sky, rain, mountains and angels with wings. <\/p>\n It marked one of the first integrations of generative AI in a major commercial production. The series, which premiered last year was viewed by 44 million viewers worldwide and reached No. 1 on Prime Video in the U.S. <\/p>\n By Season 2, the team used 30 different tools, both traditional and AI, to generate images, sounds and video. They pivoted from shooting solely on location in Greece to filming some parts in L. A. in front of an LED wall.<\/p>\n AI was used to generate battle scenes<\/a> and expand the background crowd size to thousands of people in a fraction of the time traditional CGI required. The use of AI-generated scenes jumped from 70 in Season 1 to 400 shots in the second season.<\/p>\n Jeff Thomas, a generative AI filmmaker who directed two episodes of Season 2, said each episode was made for less than $5 million, defying studio consensus that the show required a \u201cGame of Thrones\u201d-level budget of $12 million to $15 million per episode. Erwin declined to disclose the budgets for the \u201cHouse of David\u201d series or the \u201cMoses\u201d prequel..<\/p>\n \u201cThe Bible describes that battle as there was 100,000 people on each side. Well, it\u2019s never been portrayed like that because we\u2019ve never had the resources,\u201d Erwin said. \u201cWe\u2019re finally able to show that scope and scale.\u201d<\/p>\n Erwin conceived of the idea of \u201cMoses\u201d over Christmas, wrote the script in January and created a four-minute trailer entirely created by AI. Amazon greenlighted the series later that month.<\/p>\n Kingsley had a short window before his next commitment, so Erwin prepared and shot all three episodes on a soundstage in a week \u2014 a project that would have previously taken six months to prepare.<\/p>\n
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