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- ❌ Samuel L. Jackson says "I Cross That Shit Out"
❌ Samuel L. Jackson says "I Cross That Shit Out"
Plus Pixar and Disney's new AI use case
Jason Levin
June 24, 2023
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💬 Pixar and Disney Used AI in new film
🎶 Samuel L. Jackson says “I cross that shit out” to AI
🍿 AI Kernels
Pixar and Disney used AI in their latest film Elemental
Pixar’s new movie Elemental included a character based on The Good Dinosaur that was made out of fire — but actually animating the character was proving to be quite the conundrum.
They were trying all sorts of combinations of effects and the character Ember was looking like a terrifying “cross between Studio Ghlibi’s Calcifer and Nicolas Cage’s Ghost Rider, but somehow harsher.”
“Fire naturally is so busy, but if you slow it down, it can turn into something that looks like a plasma,” said Peter Sohn, director of The Good Dinosaur. Paul Kanyuk, a technical supervisor at Pixar, said that Ember looked like a demon. “It can look horrifying if it's too realistic, like you actually have a human figure made of real pyro,” he explains.
“How do you capture the ethereal nature of fire onscreen, and how would a corporeal body made of water even work? Can you see through it? Do the eyes just float around?”
To make Ember look good, every single shot would need an effects pass, something that’s both super time-consuming and very expensive.
So they decided to use AI — a specific type of artificial intelligence called neural style transfer (NST) which is used to move pixels around to look in a certain style. “I’m going to give you five ideas, and maybe two of them will work. Let’s do all of them,” Kanyuk told his co-director.
Ember (left)
To do this seemingly impossible task, Kanyuk got help from Disney Research Studios, a Zurich-based lab that specializes in researching how AI and machine learning can do things like make actors appear older or younger or how to best recreate someone’s skin quality. Kanyuk worked with a Pixar artist named Jonathan Hoffman to draw a set of swirly, pointy flames which the lab then used NST to combine with blobbier fire.
“Once you apply a style transfer to naturalistic fire, you can actually start to direct its style and start to bring the artist’s hand into something that is otherwise not touchable. It was a real breakthrough to be able to say, ‘I see the size of her features and the shapes here, and I want to complement those shapes with my own style.’ It harmonized the look of Ember in a really unique way.”
Ultimately, they were able to render the shots they needed. Kanyuk says that Pixar is still “scratching the surface” of what NST can do, but he’s very excited they found a use case through Elemental.
“It’s this coming together of left brain and right brain, and using technology as a tool to help express emotions,” Sohn says, “and in turn we can connect to tech, versus it feeling like some cold new thing.”
Samuel L. Jackson on AI in Contracts: “I Cross That Shit Out”
Samuel L. Jackson says he doesn’t sign contracts that let projects use his likeness “in perpetuity”, meaning studios can’t use his image for things forever. It’s something he’s been thinking about since his Star Wars prequel days.
“People just started worrying about that? I asked about that a long time ago. The first time I got scanned for George Lucas [for The Phantom Menace] I was like, ‘What’s this for?' George and I are good friends, so we kind of had a laugh about it because I thought he was doing it because he had all those old guys in Episode I, and if something happened to them, he still wanted to put ‘em in the movie.”
He had similar experiences while playing Nick Fury in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Jackson revealed that every time actors change costumes in a Marvel movie, they scan you. “Ever since I did Captain Marvel, and they did the Lola project where they de-aged me and everything else, it’s like, ‘Well, I guess they can do this anytime they want to do it if they really want to!'
This is something Jackson has worried about, and which has made him more careful when signing contracts. “Future actors should do what I always do when I get a contract, and it has the words ‘in perpetuity’ and ‘known and unknown’ on it: I cross that shit out,” he says. “It’s my way of saying, ‘No, I do not approve of this.'”
AI Kernels
Here’s a round-up of interesting news and stories that caught our attention this week:
Turn your drawings into animations in seconds! Check out AniMagic, this is so cool!!! Back when I was a kid, we just had Pivot 😭 → AniMagic
Turn your selfie into a 3D avatar! THIS WAS THE COOLEST THING I’VE EVER DONE. IT LEGIT LOOKS LIKE ME. → Avaturn
TikTok parent company ByteDance buys $1B worth of Nvidia GPUs for AI. What’re they working on? What new AI features are coming to TikTok? →Tom’s Hardware
AI-Themed Content of the Week
Every week, we’ll hit you with a piece of content centered around AI. It might be a book, movie, whatever.
Check out the subreddit r/WeirdDalle for weird DALL-E 2 generations. Here’s some that are at the top of the subreddit right now.
 Billionaire Sumo Wrestling |  Monkey performing banana surgery |