MIAMI — Amazon MGM Studios, which produces original movies and shows for the Prime Video streaming service, is continually looking at new ways to harness AI in the production cycle.
The reason is twofold: to enhance the filmmaking process, and to save money — in the hopes of being able to greenlight more movies and films, and produce them faster and at lower costs.
Amazon’s AI initiative was explored in depth Feb. 4 at a NATPE Global panel on which Albert Cheng, who heads AI Studios for Amazon, was joined by Jon Erwin, co-founder of The Wonder Project, the faith-based production company behind the big Prime Video hit series “House of David.”
Cheng talked a little about his 10-year career at Amazon, in which he also headed the studio and oversaw Prime Video in the United States.
“Ten years ago my job was to scale Amazon Studios to be able to produce,” he said. “At the time, we were only doing 16 shows, and we wanted to get to the point where we could do 250 shows released every year and up to about 400 productions at any point in time during the year. And I had to do it in nine months. That’s the thing about Amazon — how do you scale it pretty quickly.
“Now, the weird thing is that I’m asked to figure out how to we do it for less, and faster — which is a very different mindset, because you have to think about what is the impact of technology in that model. And the hard part about it is that in order to get to the transformation, there is a change management challenge. There’s a lot of tech that has to be built before you can even ask any one at our creator partners to adopt AI.
“So part of what I’m tasked to do is to define the new workflows, prove it, and use it as proof of concept to show that we can achieve a high level quality of production at much faster speeds and kind of more cost effective. So it’s very different — I have to be very entrepreneurial again. And we as a studio need to think about how do we scale this across all of our creators that really impact our business.”
Cheng noted that “sitting in the job of Prime Video, you still have a budget constraint on how much content you can invest in. And when it comes to all the film and TV series that we have in development, I’ll be sitting in these seats and going, I wish we could green light all of these. How in the world can we do this? And the only way to do this is to figure out how do we lower the costs to make these — because the more we can reduce these costs, the more titles we can get on the service.
“And the other thing is we are in the television business, and one of the challenges when you’re doing big epic scale television shows like ‘Fallout’ is those shows take 24 months to release one season after another,” Cheng said. “And we all know that over that long a period, you get pretty severe audience attrition, season to season. So you’re looking at your audience go down, season to season, pretty rapidly, because of the time [between seasons], while the costs keep going up. So it’s not economically viable to have a long-running series of that scope. And without AI, it’ll continue down that path.
“AI can help us make these large-scale shows much more economically viable, and we can also get them to release much sooner so that we don’t lose the audience engagement.”
And yet despite advances in generative AI, Cheng said, “what hasn’t changed is the human side. So what we can’t forget is that AI is not a replacement. It is an enhancement. And that’s one of the North Stars that we at Amazon, from an AI perspective, have held us to our principles because as much good as AI is, it still lacks the ability to translate or create things that are authentically human.
“So everything that we do, whether it be writer, director, actor, production designer, costume designer — we believe all these things are very important and critical to the process of making television shows and films. And so we’ll continue to do that. What AI will do is augment it and make things faster.”
Erwin agrees: “Is it a faster way to work? Absolutely. Are there a lot of efficiencies? Is it cheaper? Absolutely. But beyond those two, it’s a more creative way to work. It’s a more collaborative way to work. It’s a new set of tools that are very powerful, and it’s a set of tools and a certain kind of intelligence that pairs incredibly well with human creativity and just amplifies and accelerates everything you do.”
Big theatrical productions such as the “Dune,” “Mission: Impossible” and “Star Wars” movies are becoming increasingly rare in a world where streaming dominates.
“I love these big experiences, but they’ve gotten unsustainable,” Erwin said. “My argument and what I would say is my somewhat contrary point of view is that the primary reason for job loss and lack of green lights is the escalating cost of production, combined with the time of creation. So it takes a long time to create and things have gotten very expensive and if you combine those two things, there’s no green lights, there’s no jobs.
“So I actually see the integration of an AI tool set as an antidote to job loss.”
Partnering with Amazon on “House of David” required making two seasons in 20 months. “So not only did we have to make it cheaper, but we also had to make it faster,” Erwin said. “I had some very, very smart and wise television executives tell me, ‘Jon, we like you, but you’re crazy — not on Amazon. This is impossible what you’re setting out to do.’ And if I had listened to that status quo, there would be no show on Amazon.”
Erwin and his team used generative AI tools to produce many of the show’s visuals, particularly scenes that would have been difficult, and costly, to produce with traditional VFX workflows. In season one, he said, 73 AI-generated shots were used. By season two, the number had grown to upwards of 350.
“By innovating instead of compromising, we made the first season of the show for less than a single episode of some of the larger shows on streaming. So the ROI was great for everyone and we made it way faster. And we also employed 600 people making the show. And those are real jobs.”
Erwin said generative AI is just the latest in a long line of technological tools filmmakers have relied on over the years. He gave a nod to Steven Spielberg, who made film history in the early 1990s when he combined CGI with practical effects on the original Jurassic Park movie.
“So this is simply a new set of tools,” Erwin said. “The interesting thing is the speed in which they’re emerging in the world and how many industries it’s disrupting at once. I still remember the digital camera revolution. I had to learn a different camera every 18, 24 months. But this, if you’re two weeks behind, you’re out. The fascinating thing about ‘House of David’ is that it will actually be this time capsule to show the implementation of the technology, season to season.
“I think the barrier of entry is education and process and fear. So the most important thing for us to do is to engage with it. The worst thing we can do is hide our heads in the sand and hope it goes away, because it’s not going away.”
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