visual effects

They did a re-release, and it was part of an attempt to plus up the numbers and take that, you know, number one spot from James Cameron.

But all they really did was include some, uh, additional scenes that were basically delete- deleted scenes that did not have completed VFX.

I remember like Hulk looking pretty janky-

Hmm

and you put them all together into a building and then suddenly crazy things start to happen because it is this constant series of creative problem solving as a group.

It's one of my favorite things about filmmaking and visual effects, like the ability to collaborate and problem solve with other creative people.

As an example, in the early days of Coraline, there's a sequence in that film where it's foggy.

There's fog everywhere, right? And Henry did not want to go CG with the film.

And that was, with E.T., it's a similar sort of situation where People really connected with that character emotionally, not to mention what the actors were doing, which was incredible as well.

Carlo Rambaldi's design was really unique and different to my eyes.

So picture, we're in dailies, it's dark, it's early in the morning, and you're looking at visual effects shots.

It's six seconds max.

Uh, there are like a few things in, in post that we color corrected.

Uh, um, like, it had to go to VFX.

Like, it was, it was so much that it, uh, in terms of, like, even the movement of the people in front of the color, so that's why we had to, uh, we had to go to VFX.

And then the rest we did in the color correction, which also actually Jalal did, our, the, our cinematographer.

So.

There's a scene that shows a car blow up and it just says...

Yeah, it says VFX missing or insert here or whatever it said, and you're just like, I'm

crying laughing like everybody else I'm

watching it with are just laughing their asses off.

It's matters what 20-year-olds think about it, is the honest truth.

My opinion of it [chuckles] is that it's a very useful tool in many ways, provided you use it respectfully, and provided you pay actors if you're gonna replace them with some kind of AI embodiment or something like that.

So just like with any animation project or, or, or, or just as part of the VFX toolbox.

And we've made, there's about 30 seconds of it in, uh, in, in, in our movie, where we animate a couple of old photographs, which you'll have seen online the way that it does that, that you can bring old photographs to life, and that's the kind of way we use it.

Oh, and there's some mice.

We then had the weird AI dog podcast for The End of Oak Street, which completely blindsided me, 'cause I didn't even realize that when I saw the movie.

Then I saw an interview with Chris Nolan, who actually had a similar response to Danny Boyle.

He said it's a tool in the VFX toolbox.

What does that ecosystem look like in practice? Creators are now combining GPT, Blender, and H3 Max to build beautiful scenes, try ideas in parallel, and accelerate professional production.

For Hollywood and VFX teams, that means a new workflow built around iteration, references, and control, rather than starting from scratch.

That word controllability comes up again and again.

They argue that the biggest gap in the market is controllability.

And they wanted me to come on cause I was president of stunts limit at the time.

And they had the top VFX artists.

They had just made Titanic and they were wanting to say how CGI was now going to replace the stunt man.

And we were going to become obsolete.

Right.

And then they're not going to be needed anymore.

VFX is going to replace all that.

And at the time in 2000, I remember this.

It is horrifying.

Actually, Tim, I'm going to jump on the VFX thing real quick, or the visual effects thing, because it does look, like, obviously, like, goofy and fake, but I'll tell you, the start of the movie, where it's, like, a good minute of just, like, the POV of Little Death, like, going to the part of the set, setting this whole, like, introductory scene up, that first kill when it hits, and there's just a fucking volcano of blood.

Yeah.

It is one of the most beautiful things I've ever seen in my life.