Ed Ulbrich loved the days in the early 90’s and in the late 1980s, when visual effects meant sitting on sets with filmmakers or in screening rooms in post production, laser pointer on screens and literally designed the appearance of a film. But when CGI tent poles dominate the industry – and he has worked with a number of them, from “Black Panther” to “Top Gun: Maverick” to “Titanic” – a bit of the fun has come out of it.
Suddenly you have thousands of artists on four continents – of whom many will never even meet the director, let alone work next to them – and work with a movie Vfx. It takes part of the personality out of the pursuit. And as Ulbrich told Indiewire during a new interview, his work became “factory work” and not what he “fell in love with.”
Ulbrich wanted something more practical, more personal and something where he could solve creative problems through technology, and he finds it in an unexpected place: artificial intelligence.
Last week was announced Ulbrich to have joined AI Research company Moonvalley as head of strategic growth and partnership. After holding senior roles at Metaphysic, Deluxe and James Cameron’s digital domain, Ulbrich will now work with Moonvalley’s Sister Company Asteria, AI studio founded by Natasha LyonneTo not only promote the technology that drives its model, but also to use it in real projects.
Moonvalley recently launched Marey, an AI model as they say is the first – and only – pure AI model, one as they say is trained only on licensed material from artists who have explicitly granted their consent. That for him, X-Factor, the combination of a seemingly ethical use of artificial intelligence with an independent film studio as want to put advanced tools and workflows in the hands of the filmmakers.
It convinced him, and he thinks it will make other converts aI as well.
“Only the people I know around the industry, there have been a lot of worry, but there are also many people leaning in who are very curious and want to use this,” Ulbrich told IndieWire. “That idea of these things has been stolen from all of us, if you can eliminate it, suddenly you realize, OK, there is something here. These are some powerful tools that will let us do things.”
Ulbrich’s days with AI go all the way back to “the curious case with the Benjamin button” and one of the first major cases of machine learning in film. In that movie, his entire focus was spent on Brad Pitt’s face and tried to develop a way to translate Pitt’s performance into its digital Avatar. Elderly was so time-consuming and so costly that no one even thought to be afraid of the consequences.
But cut to Ulbrich’s work on “Here”, last year’s Robert Zemecki’s movie, with Tom Hanks and Robin Wright throughout their lives. Now the technology can create Deep -deep counterfeits in real time on the video game monitor. But in all its work at Metaphysic on that film, AI was fully licensed educational data with the consent of the actors.
That is why he was contacted by other technology companies to consult or weigh in on tools such as Ouenais Sorait had been a “non-starter.”
“I can’t sell stolen pixels to a buyer. You’re dead in the water,” Ulbrich said. “It sounds good, there is no one I know consciously to say, hello, we will try it. Let’s experiment! Hell no. That’s not how this works. Copyright is important.”
With moonvalley and AsteriaHe thinks the company has “flash in a bottle”, but that doesn’t mean much unless the tools behind it are good. Ulbrich said there may be good computer scientists who are talented in creating the perfect instructions, but what it needs is Intuitive patterns and guis that will “de-mystify” ai For creative types to start twisting the knobs and get something brilliant.
“I met some amazing people during this process, and they focus on controls. That’s what I keep hearing, this theme of controls; it’s the magic, that’s what you want to hear, is abandonment of this,” he said. “I don’t have to understand computer science.
Asteria CEO Bryn Mooser said in a statement that Ulbrich is a “fantastic asset” for the team and praised that he was behind some of the biggest films over the past 20 years: “He created the visual effects that we know and will be integrated in bringing it into the future with new tools and technology.”
Ulbrich knows that AI has the potential to replace countless jobs. His message to those concerned is simple: “Be worried. But do something. Don’t do anything, you will be replaced. It will happen.”
But he also says that, just as we lived through a period of “CGI Slop”, we are in the same period with AI and the abundance of people who use it. It will also change.
“There are filmmakers and people who would never get a shot, and this old system and the gate guards … This is an important change agent that will be rippled throughout the ecosystem without a doubt,” Ulbrich said. “What is different about this then to digital, analog, to CGI, these types of things, is that these things have moved at a more glacial pace. This is – tighten up – it’s fast.”
