INDUSTRY
fireside chat
Framestore’s CEO of film & episodic delves into the impact of enhanced tax credits, the rise of AI and the need to fill the talent pipeline, giving insights on the road ahead for the VFX industry
W e are seeing green shoots, which is heartening. There are projects coming down the line that are creative not just in the stories they seek to tell, but in their workflows, methodologies and concepts of what it’s possible to achieve with VFX. This all speaks to a recalibration across the film and high-end TV sectors, as studios and streaming services seek to craft content that sets them apart, curating a considered slate and choosing quality over quantity. This doesn’t negate the impact of the six-month hiatus in all production, which is still being felt to some extent. But if
you’re in VFX, it is picking up a bit. There are lots of opportunities to work on bold new stories and figure out how to best deploy new and emerging technologies to bring them to life. The UK VFX tax credit uplift was welcome news for the VFX community. Visual effects is a globally competitive industry. The sands shift for different reasons, and tax credits provide some stability when they do. The UK has always been the place for productions to come to, and tax credits further strengthen it as a place to work. Knowing that this investment in our creative industries will
continue gives immediate reassurance. This in itself is a positive effect that will keep talent, their ideas and the infrastructure that’s been built – all essential to any film – here in the UK. While generative AI tools are interesting, in our field we’re working with directors and filmmakers who have specific visions, brought to life through a highly iterative creative process that requires back and forth between people embodying a multiplicity of skills. The specificity of this process, the level of control required and quality of output can’t be replicated with AI tools. Film studios, in addition to making blockbuster movies to be enjoyed by audiences on the big screen, are also creating company value via copyrightable works, which are the result of human endeavour and authorship, not simply a prompt. For us, it’s ‘test and learn’ in a closed environment: what could generative AI mean for our workflows when the provenance of the data is known? How big does that dataset really need to be, and could our artists have more editorial control of the constituent elements to better direct the output? These are some of the questions we’re working out the answers to here. There’s often also a lack of transparency in the data used to train models, and the legality is uncertain. We
AT SCALE Framestore’s FPS has worked on Paddington in Peru (above) and Wicked (top right)
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