The website called “Broadcast” has recently published a blog in which they have shared Ingham's views and comments on the virtualization of content and the role of VFX.
Do you know who David Ingham is? Well, he is a client partner of media and entertainment at a pre-eminent multinational company called Cognizant. He has recently given his views to Broadcast regarding the role and future of virtual effect in the filmmaking industry and how the technology is offering more creative options to the producers and everybody involved in the creative side of filmmaking.
Ingham wrote a blog on the Broadcast website in which he talked about the significance of necessity and how it can spark invention. Furthermore, in the initial paragraph, he also stressed the fact that the current climate and the events which occurred last year corroborate the need for the necessity for an invention to happen.
In the first paragraph, Ingham alluded to the fact that innovation is necessary for the film and the creative industry in general to survive. And, some of the new methods and innovations we see in the film industry might have been decided to happen sometime in the future, but they have been accelerated due to the current circumstances enforced by the pandemic. He also indicated that the television and film production domain has greatly delivered to the demand of flexibility and innovation; however, he is very interested to see further developments and continuity of these innovations instigated by the technological evolution and the impact it will have in the future filmmaking.
In the second paragraph, David Ingham shared an example of the latest zombie apocalyptic film called “Army of the Dead” directed by Zack Snyder. Snyder had already concluded the principal photography of the film when one of the stars of the film Chris D'Elia got himself involved in the controversy Snyder to make the change in the post-production. Snyder did manage it like other things he has managed in his career in the last few years, and hired Notaro, and made the necessary changes taking advantage of VFX technology and proficient visual effects. Ingham also gave an example of Kevin Spacey and Ridley Scott and how the veteran director reshot all the scenes with Kevin Spacey in the post-production.
In the third paragraph, David Ingham also inferred how pandemic has made us solely rely on our technologies and mentioned the fact that the same thing has also pushed the film industry towards innovation and learning to make better use of virtual effects and VFX production. In the pre-pandemic time, all the visual effects scenes were used to be shot in front of the huge green screens (watch behind the scenes of Game of Thrones and Avengers available on YouTube). After shooting the scenes in front of a gigantic green screen, the VFX team gets handed the responsibility of adding any visual effects to manifest the vision of the director. However, things have changed in the past year as Zack Snyder showed with his film “Army of the Dead” that visual effects could be added in real-time by employing the technology utilized in the video games such as Fortnite, thus upgrading the footage entirely. With this example, David Ingham tried to show that the pandemic forced Snyder to think differently in terms of technology, and innovation was born out of hard times.
David Ingham alluded to the fact that the innovation and alteration in the filmmaking procedure might have long-lasting implications in the industry. For example, the logistics involved in filmmaking might change, the use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) will be profound, and instead of set dressers, we might be looking towards digital painters. More important, the manpower and time required to pull off post-production will change to pull off post-production.
However, it remains to be seen how much VFX and AI will impact the filmmaking industry in the coming in the upcoming future. Of course, no film requires the use of too much VFX and artificial tinkering and prefers to keep things original. And also, if AI and VFX take center stage, it will greatly prove the prediction made by some theorists that technology and especially its subsets AI and automation might lead to job losses if they continue to improve over the years.
