ILM’s New Chief Talks Deepfakes, A.I. and the Virtual Reality Used on ‘Solo’
Rob Bredow, the visual effects supervisor on Solo: A Star Wars Story, took over the reins at Lucasfilm's Industrial Light & Magic when he was named senior vp, executive creator director and head of ILM in May. Having previously served as the company's chief technology officer, he brings with him expertise in both the art and science of VFX that he will be sharing when he delivers the Aug. 13 keynote address at Siggraph, the annual conference on computer graphics and interactive techniques, in Vancouver.
Deepfakes aren't a high enough quality for us to just run a deepfake algorithm and put it in one of our films. But we've identified what those limitations are, and it won't be too long before we'll be able to use something like that at much higher quality [in motion picture production]. I don't think we're 10 years away from that. We may only be one or two.
We see a lot of applications for processes both in filmmaking and outside of filmmaking, but from just the filmmaking perspective, there's nothing like getting people to walk through a virtual environment that is actually at scale [before a practical or digital set is built]. You can do that in virtual reality, but in augmented reality it even has more potential because you can still see the people around you and interact with them.
Can you cite an example of how you've used virtual reality on a production?
Yes, on Solo, we were working on the scale for that train heist sequence. We had a pretty good sense of what that train car scale needed to be, but VR really helped us tune those parameters.
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