One of the most data-intensive O industries is entertainment. Streaming services like Netflix or Apple TV are driven by data, collecting information about what you watch and for how long and using it to make personalized recommendations to keep you online. But that is only one side of how artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) is used.
Filmmakers today use data science to forecast box office success and, on the rare occasion, a TV show can be picked up before a pilot has been showed - all thanks to technology.
But there is another part of the movies where data matters - visual effects (VFX). Even though computer generated images have been popular since the 1990s when films like Jurassic Park and Terminator were released, the amount of data generated today by production houses is unfathomable.
Gretchen Libby is an American visual effects artist who worked at Industrial Light & Magic, the VFX company founded by Star Wars writer and director George Lucas. While she is known around the world for her work on award-winning films like Star Wars: Attack of the Clones, Iron Man, and Avatar, she decided to join Amazon Web Services (AWS) in 2020 as the director of visual computing to help those who create film and television content do so in the cloud.
Avatar: The Way of Water, most recently, was rendered in AWS. The movie was so computer-intense it couldn't be stored in the production company's data center. "Many of us who know about visual effects, computer-generated water is some of the hardest work [you can do]," said Libby at an Amazon's re:Invent panel.
"My first meeting on Avatar was in 2013," explains David Conley, an executive VFX producer of Wētā FX, to FORBES AFRICA
This story is from the February - March 2023 edition of Forbes Africa.
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This story is from the February - March 2023 edition of Forbes Africa.
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