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Comment by DarkNova6 | Hacker News Reader

Maybe the most interesting paragraph: “The cost of [the special effects without AI] just wouldn’t have been feasible for a show in that budget,” Sarandos said.

But given the abysmal quality of CGI/FX these days (look at the new Mortal Kombat trailer ffs), I can’t imagine film deteriorating any further. But industry must seriously step up its game because soon, everyone can make movies like that.

What counts is not the monopoly on talent and technology, but distribution and how much artistic merit you can leverage.

Hollywood is rightfully afraid.

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This isn't unique to AI. Visual effects have been achievable on my desktop computer for as long as I can remember (I'm in my mid twenties). Industry standard compositing tools such as Nuke, Autodesk, Fusion, have had free educational/non-commercial versions forever, and you can replace almost all of those with Blender. Watch Tears of Steel, a short film done almost entirely in FOSS.

Technology aside, I believe that the monopoly on talent, as in the hiring of talent is symptomatic of a monopoly on distribution, which means the devaluing of talent over reach is actually worse for the independent filmmaker.

VFX studios don't have a sufficient monopoly of talent - it's overwhelmingly piecework outsourced to multiple studios, and most jurisdictions give MASSIVE tax subsidises for VFX production (40-70% of total production cost).

The issue for a lot of productions is the budget per episode is low. For example, the show mentioned in the article has a budget of $15M to produce 6 episodes that heavily rely on shooting on location, significant set design, VFX, somewhat high profile actors, and a significant reduction in tax incentives by the Millei government at a moment when countries like Vietnam, India, Philippines, Colombia, and China are creating a second VFX production subsidy war.

Choosing to use GenAI to automate the creation of secondary scenes can become fairly cheap and is the lowest hanging fruit.

MK CGI might as well be on purpose. Paying homage to the cheesefest of the old movies. The CGI in the Uncaged Fury trailer is definitley on purpose an intentionally worse than bad.

No homage can be great enough if the original from the 90s looks better than their contemporary counterpart.

The new movie looks like a collection of scenes containing 2-3 people on a bluescreen, with pre-rendered backgrounds that look worse than the last 2 video game entries (which were genuine pieces of art).

I wanna love it, but I'm currently watching 90s anime and I am impressed by their composition and how they can linger on a single scene to create mood. All while having a dense plot.

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