Tomorrow, a “reconceptualised” version of The Wizard of Oz will officially open at The Sphere in Las Vegas.
The original four-by-three image on a 35mm piece of celluloid has been updated using artificial intelligence to accommodate the Sphere’s 160,000 sq ft 16K screen.
Visual effects artists, archivists and producers at Google DeepMind, Google Cloud, Sphere Studios, Magnopus, and Warner Bros Discovery have all been involved in the project which has taken months to complete.
In a blog post, Buzz Hayes, global lead, entertainment industry solutions at Google Cloud has detailed some of the work that has gone into preparing the film for its ultra-big screen premiere.
To fill the Sphere’s screen, the team trained Google’s Veo AI tool on petabytes of video at a variety of resolutions, which enabled them to fill in missing details while preserving the original natural features and nuance of the characters, said Hayes.
The team also needed to expand the scope of scenes to fit the scale of Sphere. They used AI outpainting, which expands videos beyond their existing frames, to recreate character details that were cropped in the original shots by the original framing.
They also used what Hayes describes as “performance generation” to fill in incomplete performances on screen. “This approach enabled us to extend action and movement into the new expanded environments, closing gaps in the traditional editing of the film that features cuts or reverse shots to capture the action,” said Hayes.
“For example, in many scenes in the film, the characters are not all in the same frame at the same time due to the original photography and editing of the film,” he added. “The size of Sphere’s display plane is better suited to a continuous shot with all the characters still in view. Through a combination of performance generation and outpainting, we’re able to keep Dorothy and her friends together in the frame for the whole scene.”
Hayes described the project as “an epic production undertaking, achieved with still new and largely experimental technology”, adding that it is one of the most technically and creatively challenging he has worked on.
Read the full blog here.
