By Tom Davenport
March 13, 2023
Since the beginning of movies and television, directors have needed to film their stories in particular settings. Sometimes they went on location, sometimes they filmed on studio back lots with fake New York street scenes and building facades, and sometimes they hired painters to create backdrops. More recently, they filmed in front of green screens on which images could be superimposed later.
But now there is another alternative for generating the images that go on volumes for film and TV production. A few weeks ago I visited Hollywood—specifically XR Studios, which has a couple of large volumes—to check out Cuebric (after Stanley, of course), the first generative AI system to produce and edit images for film and TV volumes. The founders of Seyhan Lee, the Massachusetts-based company that produced Cuebric, have partnered with XR Studios to demonstrate the tool’s capabilities. They were in LA giving a demo to a large group of producers and video effects people, and I squeezed in just before them. Pinar Seyhan Demirdag has an arts and design background, and her co-founder Gary Lee Koepke has lots of ad agency experience on the creative side.