AI Tools Bring Efficiencies But Have Limitations, Says Weta CTO Kimball Thurston: “Tech Companies Should Collaborate More With Creatives” — SkimNews
Get the Culture newsletter
Daily culture — film, music, books, the trends and ideas worth your attention. Free.
- Kimball Thurston of Weta FX joined Korean filmmaker Kang Yun-sung and Netflix APAC's Sung Q Lee on a panel at Netflix's Creative Asia day during Busan International Film Festival to weigh AI's role in production workflows.
- Thurston said Weta is using AI "at a measured pace" for image clean-up and crowd-scene motion but flagged unresolved color-volume problems and text-prompt interfaces that aren't intuitive for visual artists.
- Thurston urged deeper collaboration between tech companies and the creative industry, arguing that color science and creative interfaces require industry input that hasn't been there historically.
- Kang Yun-sung, director of Netflix's upcoming Korean-language action thriller "Gulf of Aden," said AI tools let the production recreate war-torn African locations and modern-day pirate battles while cutting costs by 30-40% and shortening the shoot.
- Sung Q Lee of Netflix said the streamer uses AI for pre-visualization, editorial, and VFX under strict internal guidelines, stressed that "the human touch is always critical and necessary," and pushed back on sustainability critiques by pointing to net-zero challenges beyond AI's water footprint.
- Kang argued AI-generated battle scenes may match production quality but cannot yet convey real human emotions, making actor replacement unrealistic in what he called the current transition phase.
Why it matters: For streamers and VFX houses racing to embed AI into pipelines, the unresolved color-volume and interface issues Thurston flagged are real production-quality risks, while Korean productions like Gulf of Aden demonstrate concrete 30-40% cost savings on location-heavy genre shoots that change the math on previously unaffordable films.
Ask SkimNews
