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VFX and AI: How game and film visual effects are developing
The visual effects (VFX) industry is one of many industries which has experienced a significant shift as a result of the more widespread introduction and use of artificial intelligence (AI) in many aspects of society.
VFX refers to the creation, manipulation, or enhancement of images for media, and is often primarily spoken of in reference to movies, television, games, or advertisements.
Game Lounge Media spoke with Gerardo Schiavone, a VFX artist from Italy who has worked on several major productions, including Netflix’s The Witcher, Marvel’s Thor: Love and Thunder, and DC’s Black Adam, as well as Wonder Woman 1984. Schiavone stated that he is currently interested in real-time rendering, gaming, and utilising AI tools to improve the quality of cinematic projects.
Gerardo Schiavone’s VFX experience
Game Lounge Media asked Schiavone what had made him decide to get into the VFX industry, and also asked him how he got his start.
He replied that he had two dreams as a child, either to become a palaeontologist or an astronaut, but he continued that at some point, he realised that he had a passion for art and also began to realise that the reason he had those dreams as a child was because of his favourite movies, Jurassic Park and Star Wars. From that realisation, he realised that he wanted to work in making movies. “I started with the dreams of everyone starting in the film industry, which is to be a director. I started taking the camera to shoot film at school,” he said.
Schiavone continued that he eventually began to understand that specialising to become an expert at something would earn him more opportunities in the film industry, and so he stepped into the field of VFX, where his career progressed over time until he became a senior visual effects compositor. He added that he is currently in a more technical role which also involves AI.
AI in the VFX industry
In 2022, Schiavone had spoken about becoming more interested in real-time graphics and the video game industry. At the time, he had predicted that the games industry would “merge more” with VFX. With that in mind, Game Lounge Media asked him how this has developed since then, and what his thoughts are now.
He said that at the time, he was “really 100% sure” that the video game industry was merging with the cinematic industry and visual effects, and he remarked that this actually did happen with regard to production. He continued that this especially happened when budgets started being reduced even in major companies handling major series that one would expect to not compromise on quality.
Schiavone commented that the merging of video games and cinema was due to budget, as video game real-time elements are faster to iterate, however, he remarked that there is now the new technology coming with AI, and a lot of companies and people are now focusing on that. He remarked that if there was the possibility to reduce the budget by 50% from visual effects to real-time engines, there is now the possibility through AI to reduce the budget by 90%. However, with that said, Schiavone stated that real-time engines and AI are both just another set of tools in the box for companies or studios.
He further added that since AI “is actually solving some of the VFX final pixel work,” real-time engines such as Unreal and Unity “could be used more than ever in high-end VFX productions”. He added that before AI, such engines were only used for pre-visualisation and very few other cases, but after AI, “they are being used for pre-visualisation that in this case is an input for the AI to produce the final pixels”.
Schiavone said that one aspect that big companies are notably using AI to experiment in is that of advertising. “At the moment in the advertising industry, they are actually using AI for final pixels. Something that a few years ago, even one year ago, they would say ‘no’ because they would have said it is difficult to use AI because there is less control… That is true, there is less control in the image, but we are visual effects artists – our technique is to divide in layers and operator on a little part of the image, layering the image, and we just find a different approach to work on visual effects to use AI where it might give a result that is ten times or fifty times faster, and so it could be a little part of the image.”
He remarked that the powerful thing about AI is that you can click a button and generate something, but he added that this is also the main concern for the VFX industry, as you do not have exact control on what is generated. He said that AI changes the entire image all at once, compared to VFX being able to change the image layer by layer and pixel by pixel.
Game Lounge Media asked Schiavone whether he believes if a ceiling has been reached for how realistic graphics for games can be, to which he responded that he might have said yes some time ago, but due to AI and “the barrier of what’s impossible being broken every three or six months,” he now believes everything in this regard is possible.
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