This AI Tool Looked So Good, We Thought It Was Fake

Hey, welcome to the Next Wave podcast. I'm Matt Wolf. I'm here with Nathan Lands. And today we're diving into the world of AI and visual effects. Today we're chatting with Nicola Todorovic, the CEO of Wonder Dynamics. Now, if you're not familiar with Wonder Dynamics, it's a tool that allows you to film yourself or any human on video and then reskin that video with, like an AI generated or 3D CG character. So if you think of, like, Lord of the Rings and you've got Golem and Lord of the Rings, that was all acted by a human. And then special effects artists went in later and sort of reskinned it as a CG character as Gollum. That's what Flow Studio from Wonder Dynamics does right now. And anybody can use it, and it makes it super easy. And Nicole is actually going to demo exactly how to do that in this video. And, and make sure you stick around as well, because if you've got a business or are doing marketing or you're a content creator, we're going to dive into all sorts of use cases for you as well. So let's go ahead and jump in with Nicola from Wonder Dynamics. Thanks so much for joining us on the show today. How you doing?

Pretty good. Thanks for having me. It's good. It's good to see you guys.

Yeah, thanks. And I think, you know, we were saying this right before we hit record, but the first time that we ever saw the Wonder Dynamics studio tool, both of us thought it was fake. We saw the tool and went, I don't believe this. I think they're pulling our legs. And then we finally got our hands on it a couple of weeks later, and we're actually blown away that it did what it said it could do.

Yeah, no, as I said, I think a lot of people thought that. A lot of people thought we faked our demo, which is always a compliment. Right. When people think that you. You don't know what the reaction is going to be. Right. When you're so close with something for so long.

Well, let's get into your background a little bit. Like, how did Wonder Dynamics come to be? Were you in visual effects in Hollywood? What's the backstory there?

Yeah, so I always wanted to be in filmmaking since I was, you know, 12 years old and started watching YouTube tutorials, you know, video co pilot Andrew Kramer and those guys. You know, that was kind of my little VFX school. And I, you know, I moved to US really to pursue career in filmmaking and, you know, started Working as a VFX artist, as a compositor. First worked for, you know, freelance and a lot of different studios. You know, everything from ads to indie films. And I met my co founder, Ty Sheridan, who's a young actor and a producer. And we really started writing together. Usually whatever we wrote, it was, you know, sci fi with robot characters. So we really wanted to tell this story about the near future, you know, near future when we coexist with robotics. And every time we wrote something, we realized, all right, this is about $200 million budget. There's no way we're going to ever get that. And then we started looking into a bit of AI. First we built something that was more interactive nature. We built a product where you can have a conversation with the character. So let's say you're watching a murder mystery and a little switch happens from a stream into a digital double. That's a 3D representation that you can have a chat with. And we said, okay, this is going to change production. So let's, you know, I always say selfishly, we wanted to just do it to make our own films. So we're like, what's the worst thing it could happen? You know, and the worst thing could happen. We both concluded we're just going to learn what the future of filmmaking is before other people. So we kind of get a little head start. And then about six months in, we realized, all right, this is bigger than just two of us. Let's, let's turn it into a tool and a platform.

What was the first prototype? And like, what made you confident that you guys could actually build it?

You know, what was the first prototype we actually did? If, you know, the spectre opening sequence in Mexico when James Bond walks on a ledge, we did that. And test, we did kind of, you know, just focus on the mocap, you know, AI mocap. And obviously the quality wasn't even close to it. But then we really realized the potential, you know, was huge.

Yeah, I wanted to share too. You mentioned your co founder partner on this was Ty Sheridan. Anybody who's not familiar with them, if you've seen Ready Player One, Tyler, Ty Sheridan's the main character in Ready Player One. Right. So you've probably seen him and not even. And realized it, but very cool. I would, I would love to, to dive in and actually take a look and show off to anybody who actually hasn't seen this product yet what it's capable of. So, you know, if you wouldn't mind sharing your screen and showing us some of the sort of sizzle reel of what this thing could do. We'd love to just kind of, you know, take a peek and chat about that.

So I can guide you a little bit on some capabilities here that you can see. So this is Flow Studio and we have about four project types right now, which is live action, which you mentioned earlier. And that's really tailored about having CG character inside a live action shot. And then we have AI motion capture, that's more just if I want to get the MOCA performance out of a shot. And then recently we launched something called video to 3D scene, which is more towards animation. But I'll show you quickly of how it works. We've really wanted to build an easy, easy interface. So we have three steps. The idea behind Wonder was always how do I get someone who's not that proficient in 3D to also get in the 3D? But then also people that are proficient, how do they use it in their existing pipelines? This is a big issue I saw.

In Generative AI even early on, it was a lot of black boxes. You get certain results, but you can't really push it and edit it. So we were, from the get go, we said, okay, it's not there yet, but if I can get 60% there, what is the data I can get out that I can then plug in in existing tools and push it there? Because as you know, being an artist is all about control of every single element, whether you want to control your performance or animation, or you want to control the camera or lighting, et cetera. So that's the idea behind it. But I'll show you a quick kind of workflow on what that worked. And then the other thing we wanted to do, we wanted to not just work shot by shot, but we said, let's enable it so it works in a sequence. So I'll show you quickly a couple of shots that you've probably seen. But it's good to show. So, you know, a bit of a non related shot. And then we have one with a couple of connected shots with the same actor. So let's say I'm happy with my edit. I would go on my next. And then what I do is I scan frame for actors and then it looks for the actor in the shot. And then we have characters here that you can apply. You know, we have a couple of characters that we. A few characters we provide for people that don't have their own. But the idea is that you can upload your own characters. Right now we have a blender and a Maya add on to help you prep your character a bit easier in those. So the idea was always, you know, create your character traditionally as you do until AI gets there, that you can completely control it. So let's say for this first one, we'll assign this test crash dummy. And then I have my second shot, and we'll come back to this one. And for this one, I'll assign. We have this little alien character. So I'll just drag and drop. And then I have a couple of shots with the same actor. I don't have to go target for each one. I just need to target once. And then we use something called RE ID that's looking for the same actor in multiple shots. So let's say we'll do this also test crash dummy, and pretty much that's it as far as interaction, really where the power is in these elements and the scenes. So I can export my mocap. I can export clean plate, alpha mask, camera track and character pass. And then I can export a 3D scene out of it. So essentially what it takes, it takes that plate. We have about 25 models in there. And these models are everything from facial performance, tracking body pose tracking, camera tracking, lighting estimation. And these shots are considered. If nothing, they're considered really easy VFX shots. So you're gonna get pretty decent results out of it. But for a trained eye, you're going to be like, all right, obviously, I can see a little leftover of the actor there. Not happy with the lighting here, et cetera. So what I would do is basically download my clean plate so my compositor can go in and clean what didn't clean well on the actor. But most importantly, I would really download these 3D scenes. So let's say I download this 3D scene. So clean plate, obviously pretty straightforward.

You get image sequence of that shot. So obviously I can see the actor remaining. So my compositor will clean that out. But when it comes to 3D scene, essentially I'm getting.

Each one of these shots in a separate 3D file. So if I open one, what happens is it takes that performance and it estimates the animation and the camera. So it actually tracks the camera and it tracks the animation, right? And then I have an option to.

Download my path, which is my texture for the character, and I can download the clean plate, which would be my background. And essentially what that gives me, I'm going to remove these point clouds. But what that gives me gives me that shot right in elements. I need it so I have full animation data in it. That I can control. I have obviously camera, I have lighting info. So if I want to adjust my lighting right, So I would really continue. I would continue my animation the way. The way I do. So in this case, let's say I want to control to the smallest details. I want the character to actually look up a little bit higher. I can control that. So the idea always has been around. How do I not lose control as an artist when I do things like that? So that's why the data you get out of it is really main thing of what we did inside of Flow Studio. And then obviously, one of the things that we always get from artists is, you know, I don't need all the passes. Can you just give me camera track and clean plates? So we open these wonder tools as well that are essentially just these single models because we have so many models running in the background. So these will do quicker as well. And let me show you a couple of other things that I think is interesting. You know, you probably saw the demo we launched for animation use case. The idea for it was that if I have multiple sequences in one space, can I calculate my camera setups? So in this case, I have a shot, two shot that goes to one shot, another shot, and then it goes a little bit, two shot behind them. What it does, it actually calculates the footprint from those actors and the trajectory of the cameras. And then this is all one camera. But I just edited it. Right? But what animation use case does. It really places it in 3D space based on the cuts, right? So it tries to guess where those cameras are. So it pretty much sets you up with a kind of virtual production inside of Maya or Blender. What we wanted to do here is, you know, what if I'm in my living room and I want to frame my animation how I like it, but I also want to cut it how I like it. But I don't want to deal with each shot separately. I want to have that performance to be one continuous performance with different camera setups throughout the through the shot right on the side. So there's obviously a lot of models working here together to try to calculate that. And one thing we saw is you are only basically guessing position of joints and everything just based on an image, right? So once you lose an actor or they're occluded by another actor, an object, it's really hard not to have it break. Right. So one thing we recently released is.

I have this issue is that anything you film as you know, you're always going to have occlusion Right. So it's very hard to rely only on image. So we built something called motion prediction that essentially predicts motion if you lose the character. So if he sees it few frames before this tree, he will guess, okay, Most likely it's still walking, right? Or if he only sees half of the subject, it's still, you know, going to guess what it is. So in this position, I see upper body. Most likely it's sitting. So I'm going to set up my lower body. Why is this important? Because for live action, you kind of only care what you see in a frame, right? Because that's what you framed it. But for animation, you really want a full 3D body pose for that. So you can control everything, and it's going to affect your animation as well. So another thing also it does is if I go in a closeup.

And you only see the top of the body, it will float, right? The bottom part will float, as you can see here. So even if it only sees the upper body like that on a close up, it's still going to generate what the bottom body is doing. Right. And that's important for any animator, Right. They don't want to be doing so much cleanup when the thing break.

Very cool. I'm curious, how has the sort of reception been to this in Hollywood? I know, you know, there's obviously, when it comes to AI in general, there's a lot of sort of fear around job loss and things like that. How. How has the reception been?

Yeah, we were very cautious about it. I think, if you notice in our demo, we don't really. I always say we don't generate art. We're accelerating. Right. It's still the artist that made that character, still the artist that made the environment. It's still. We're picking performance from the actor, right. So we were very cautious about how we build it. And obviously, we're a bit different also, because everything we train on is synthetic data. Because we're not generating art, we didn't really have to rely on scraping the Internet or similar. So.

The way we started, we also had some really big names on the board, from Russo Brothers to Spielberg, et cetera. And Tai is an actor. So we come from this space from the entertainment industry. So as an artist, I saw the fine line. Right. It's a really tricky one, but sometimes you almost have to resist building certain things just because of that. But in your question, how did Hollywood react? I think this example of kind of OpenAI with a recent release, it's good example of how these Reactions sometimes are very drastic. I've seen it early on, you've probably seen it 20, 23, a lot of panic around it and how things were trained and then it calmed down a little bit, then it comes back up.

Yep. Seems to be waves for sure.

There's waves? Yeah, there's waves. I would say, you know, we see a lot of innovation and a lot of directors that really accept it because it gives them an opportunity to, you know, make things quicker and iterate quicker. We see people that are scared of it, you know, mostly sometimes lack of understanding. And again, you know, flow studio is a bit different. So we're in this interesting intersection where we don't have to. We went through a bunch of studios we work with. We had to go through security, rigorous security processes and stuff. So the fact that we're not generating art is always something that is a big relief. Right. But I've also seen studios, some accepting gen AI, some not.

Some can talk about it, some cannot. But for me, we really did build this for indie artists first and foremost. Even though we have studios as customers. I always say studios will be okay. They'll figure out their way no matter what the change is. To me, what's exciting about AI and I think.

For a lot of people is it is a very hard industry to break into. I got a lot of luck on my side to happen. Took me many years to break in the industry. But I know a lot of artists that are way better artists than me that didn't have these opportunities. Right. So I think that's why people are excited because you really going to open up opportunities for people to tell stories. And maybe I'm a little bit naive, but I don't think, you know, storytelling should be tied to any kind of socioeconomic status. It really, storytelling is too important for you to, you know, be a good salesperson or meet a producer to be able to tell your story. Right. So to me it's like, you know, it should be a clearer path and easier to tell stories.

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I spent a little bit time in Hollywood, so I was partnered with Barry Osborne, the producer of Lord of the Rings and the Matrix. And we tried to create a movie studio together. And I. The same thing you're talking about, like, you know, it takes like $200 million to do a film with big special effects. I was like, this is. This is nuts. You can't, if you want to, like, start a new studio, you're talking about, like, raising hundreds of millions of dollars in the future. Small independent creators, whatever's in their head, they'll be able to get it out of their head and onto film, which just has not been possible before.

Yeah. And Nathan, you know this well. I mean, there's so much sacrifice from a script. Like, it's, It's. It's very hard to write scripts. I, you know, I used to write and I still write. And to me, start. Sometimes I say starting a company might be easier than writing a script sometimes. But you know, how much sacrifice you go from a script, what's on paper to what's on screen? You know, there's always, you know, as they say, like, you. You can't push that imagination to the screen. There's so many technical challenges. And I don't know, to me, it's a little bit ridiculous that you have, you know, Ty and I always joke when we walk. Like, you ever. I think we were in San Francisco and we're like, how much do you think that building cost? And we look it up, it's like $40 million. We're like.

Someone makes one movie that's three of these buildings spent three years and then has a weekend to potentially get the money back because they have to make double that amount. It's such a broken system. I mean, think about it from a standpoint. If you're starting a company, a startup, if you have a startup that you built for five years and you put $200 million and you only have that weekend to get your money back, and you have no control what's going to happen that weekend. Nobody would fund it. Nobody would fund it. So I had a friend that said he's like, the difference between a tech and a film industry is that, you know, in tech space, there's obviously much more capital. And film we do because of love and occasionally a hit here and there.

It's also, like, sexy to be involved in, right? Like, people. Some people invest because, like, if I get my money back, that's cool, but I get to be involved in. Around the Hollywood which was slightly how I got involved through friends in Silicon Valley, actually.

Yeah, it's interesting. I mean, it's such a. Such a passion thing. Right. Storytelling is very important. You. I was fortunate enough to work with a lot of people that are really, you know, not in it to become famous or anything. They're in it because they really believe their story can make a difference. And, you know, that's. That's novel to me. So, you know, that's one of the reasons I came into it as well.

Very cool. You mentioned that, like you, some of your clients are big studios. Are there any, like, films out in the wild or maybe even stuff in production right now where this technology is in use?

Yeah, we have a lot, but unfortunately we have hefty NDAs that you can imagine.

No AI involved in any of the films.

Okay. Unfortunately, we do have some. That, you know, some kind of one I really like Boxel Studio did a Superman and Lewis and did this case study. They used it for it. So one that's one of the public ones that you see for. For a TV show. And it's very cool. I like those guys at Boxel Studio. They're really innovative. They're like throwing a lot of tools and playing with it and combining and being more efficient on a turnaround. But yeah, we've seen it. Obviously, besides film and tv, we've also seen it being used at gaming, you know, a lot of games. Also marketing a lot of brands as well on that side. And then obviously a lot of content creators, you know, kind of individual content creators. And what's exciting for me is we saw early on.

People that don't know, you know, what rigging is or what, you know, things like they would get into 3D and start learning because it seems easier, right? Because to me, 3D is always. I used to do compositing and then when I switched to 3D, I was like, this is overwhelming. It's so hard to start. It's so complicated. CG is so slow. So I think that's the beauty. If we can make it easier for people to get in the field and not be so, you know, scared of even going that way, as you said, Nathan, it's like sometimes when you look at the process, filmmaking process from the outside, you're like, oh, my God, this is. This is. This is so hard. This is so scary.

I got it. I got a tour of Weta and also, like, I had to go back, you know, backstage when they were working on Mulan for Disney and got to see the early special effects and things like that. And I was. I was very intimidated. Like Silicon Valley. I was like, this is. There's so much money involved. It's so hard to get involved. I wish I could just be like a. Just raise like 5 million to be able to create, like, something cool just out of my own head, versus having to depend on some gigantic studio like Disney.

Yeah, no, I think a lot of people feel like that. And also I think a lot of artists are. A lot of artists are introverted as well. So it's very hard for you to go and pitch a project or, you know, go in a room and try to ask for money and things like this. So a lot of true artists I know are like, brilliant artists, but they're just not good at that part of the game. And unfortunately, today you have to be good at both parts of the game. So I do see a lot of kind of benefits when we see this AI, you know, I think, you know, obviously it's not there yet, whatever tool and you're looking at, but it's getting there. I'm excited. And also it's going to be much more global. You know, it's going to be much more global. Right now. It's still very local. You have to be in certain part of the world to be able to get funding or greenlit on a project.

I'm kind of curious what your thoughts are on, like, AI Video, because I imagine using something like that and, like, getting the shot I want and then going into some kind of AI video tool in the future and, like, spicing it up and changing it.

Yeah, yeah. We've seen people do it the other way also. We've seen people generate AI video and then getting that to use that for animation source so they can run and get mocap out of it and then get a 3D source out of it. Right. So we've seen it both ways. Yeah, we've seen it both ways. I think AI Video. My problem still with AI Video, I think it's gonna get there, but it's really that editability because I still. It's too general. I'm a big believer in separation of elements. Like, I have to control my character, but I have to control individual elements of my character, whether it's hair, whether it's eyes, whether it's. Right. And then I'm also a big believer. You can't prompt the performance. Performance too subtle, especially reactions. Right. If you look at your reaction now, Nathan, I can't describe what you're doing to the word right. It's very, very subtle and every actor is going to do it differently. So I do think this multimodality is really where we're going. You know, even though we marketed this kind of animation and live action, we really are building foundational models so we can add these models on top of it that can help us get consistent in. Spatial awareness is a big issue, as you know, because right now with AI video you can get a couple of good shots, but if I go from a wide to a close up and then do five step and then I cut to another shot, will it really be consistent of how much space it went? Right. This is the limitation of the training data really, because these AI video models are trained on 2D video that doesn't have this 3D awareness, the world awareness. So we're seeing a lot of companies now understanding that we've been from the beginning kind of making a bet of let's build this world synthetic data. And so we can then have this consistency in 3D space, but then we can also control it. But as I mentioned, I do think it's going to take a little longer than people think. So the pipelines will not change overnight, at least for professionals. You still need passes, you're going to still get notes, you're gonna still have to control every single element of your video. So I think it'll get there. It's just, you know, right now probably is gonna get used a little bit quicker on, you know, social media, maybe advertising and et cetera, and then we'll see where we end up with copyrighting because a lot of people that wanna make commercial thing still can't touch it because it's still being, you know, to be determined, you know, is fair use a real thing or not a real thing. So we'll see what happens.

Yeah, I still really feel like none of the AI video tools have nailed character consistency. You know, I feel like a lot of them are starting to claim that they've got character consistency now, but you watch them back and you're like, do.

They really though the hard problem?

Yeah, I don't really feel like they have. I do like that workflow though of using something like Flow Studio, generating sort of what you want to see and then sort of doing like a, you know, a video to video sort of AI transfer. That kind of stuff I think is going to get really, really cool. Especially, you know, I know early on when I first heard about Flow Studio, when it was Wonder Studio, I remember the corridor crew guys, they did, they did some, some content around it as well. And those guys also did this big video where they were trying to use AI to make an anime film. And yeah, I mean, how, how much easier has that gotten now? Right? You can actually use stuff like Wonder Studio, Flow Studio to actually go and, you know, create all those scenes now, run them through a video to video workflow and get a very sort of consistent look. So I think these workflows are really, really improving right now, 100%.

That's one thing we also want to do in a sense of like kind of having that, you know, having at least that look that's, that's sort of post vis and then really push it, push it forward more. I think the, you know, kind of rendering approach will change. We're going to see a lot of change in it.

I love what companies like Pika and Runway and Luma and those guys are doing and it's really cool and it's progress. But I think what's really exciting for me is that before this AI boom, you had VFX studios that had engineers, maybe 30, 50 on a big studio. And that's who was building these tools. A bunch of these major tools like Nuke came out of Digital Domain. It was engineers and TDs inside of these VFX houses that had to solve a problem and then they build a software that ended up being a global software. Right. But now you have millions of people working on these tools. So the pace of innovation is such a growth that we're seeing. So that's exciting. I think we're going to see much, much quicker. And I'm excited also that content creation is such a main thing. Yeah. You know, people are talking about, talking about. But it's also a little bit ironic. You know, the idea behind AI and robotics has always been, you know, how do we help humanity not do monotone things and focus on creativity, which really we're meant to do.

Right.

And then the first industry in danger is creative industry. So it's like, okay, yeah, yeah. An irony, right? Yeah, yeah.

I've seen memes going around that are like, yeah, I want AI to, you know, do my dishes and fold laundry so I can be creative. I don't want AI to be creative, so I have to go do my dishes and fold laundry.

I know, I know. But I think also it's a bit like, you know, Nathan, as you said, if we can get quicker to a shot, we can iterate quicker. And really, to me, that creative aspect, you know, obviously you have to build it ethically. And I think we need to build it instead of our industry as well. I think the best tool will be built by storytellers. But at the end of the day, I don't think. And this is a good question. I'm interested in what you guys think. So do you believe that we're going to have a future because a lot of these AI video tools are generating humans, Right? Do we believe that five years from now all the celebrities and actors on the box office top five are all synthetic? Are we going to be okay with that? I'm. I'm not a believer in that. I do think we love. We love. I mean, take like.

You know, certain TV shows, severance or.

Things like this. We love talking about it because we also love those. We love those artists behind it. Right. We love their performances. It's so. I don't know. I don't know. I have this conversation a lot lately. So. Interested to see what you guys think.

Yeah, I mean, I've got my take on it. I don't know if it's the same as Nathan's take or not, but I still. I still believe that, you know, humans appreciate the skills of other humans. I still think that we're, you know, people go to live theater. I still go to the theater with my wife and we watch like, you know, Hamilton, and we just watched a Harry Potter play. We're going to see Book of Mormon in a couple weeks. Like, we still go to live theater. Even though movies exist, even though I could watch it on my home tv. Like, I still like that. Sort of getting to see humans be talented in front of me. And I don't think, think AI is going to take that away, personally. I think people are still going to really, really appreciate it. I can generate any song with AI that I can imagine now with tools like Suno and Udio and things like that. But I still love to go and watch live acts. I still want to hear music that I know was created by a human. And I mean, I do think AI is going to get better and better, but I think just the idea of knowing that a human created that is. Is still an important factor to the listener and to the viewer. And I don't really see that going away, personally.

Yeah, my take's pretty similar.

Right.

I do think we'll have a new genre in the future where it is like entirely AI Video generated. Entirely AI generated. It'll be like just crazy stuff that humans can barely even imagine.

Especially in horror and sci fi and anime and some of these categories. I think AI Video will be able to do some stuff that humans just haven't done yet. Like, I've seen some things from AI videos. Like, that's more terrifying than anything I've ever seen in any horror film ever. Right, right. And so I think in some of those areas, it'll be like new genres or it'll, you know. But I think overall, I think you're right. I mean, like, the human performance is so important, but I think you'll probably start to kind of like, mix the two. You'll have human performances and then like, probably stuff with like, you know, Flow Studio and things like that. You'll integrate that human performance into having AI enhance it in other ways. Different special effects or changing the environment or things like that.

I think so too. I think as long as, to me, it's like, okay, if you're going to have a character that doesn't exist in this world, it makes sense, right? Whether you're going to do traditional CG or you're going to kind of generate it. But if you want to just generate a human that doesn't exist.

That is where I'm a little bit like, okay, maybe we're going to have a few celebrities, like Lil Mikayla, if you remember, you know, was like kind of cg. But I just don't. I just don't see. And I also don't hope we have a future where. Because I know these technologies are starting like this, but really, you know, they're kind of same as we're doing with, you know, getting facial performance. Like, you want to transfer that performance and drive a character by human performance. That's why I don't. I think multimodality is really where to go. But I hope we're not in a future where, you know, certain actors are kind of licensing their likeness, is sitting at home and doing five production at the same time. That, you know, that also to me is like a bit of a scary future that might. That might happen. You know, some people might. Might do that.

I mean, so like the one possible positive there, if that technology does get that good to like, you know, recreate like human performance. You know, you imagine someone like a Quentin Tarantino where they're like a control freak. Well, now they can really be a control freak and like, actually control, you know, really control their actors. Like, they want to, you know, like, like here, you know, virtual character do it exactly this way. Oh, you didn't do it right. I want to tweak you a little bit, you know. And so on that side, I kind of find that exciting.

But I also feel like a sort of future like, that could lead to just like too much choice, that the cream kind of has to rise to the top. I mean, if you look at like streaming services right now, you've got Netflix, Hulu, Disney, hbo, Max. Like, the list goes on and on and on. At any given moment, you have 2 million options of something that you can watch right now. Yet we still all talk about severance, we all still talk about Breaking Bad in the office and some of the cream that rose to the top. And so I think if you kind of hit that future where, you know, the rock is in 17 releases all in the same month, you know, it's. There's gonna be a lot of slop mixed in there and the cream will have to sort of rise to the top. I don't know. I don't see that being a future that like the majority of people want.

Yeah, no, I agree too. I think, I mean, similar when digital cameras came out and DSLRs came out, right? Everybody's like, everybody's gonna be a filmmaker. But I do think the. The artistic eye, and I see it with artist and wonder.

We have internal artists and we worked on some projects and some big films, really. And you can see how it takes so much time to train artistic eye. It doesn't matter that your tools sped you up from a week to a day. You still need to recognize when a shot is good, when something's good. And let's say maybe recognition when shot being good is going to be easier. But when your story is good, when your beats are good, when your performances are good, right? That's really hard. That's what I learned. Like, you know. You know, Nathan, you can probably back me up on this. Like, if you look at your work 10 years ago, you can be like, I can't believe I thought this was good. I can't believe I actually showed this to someone. It's embarrassing, right? So I think that's what really comes down to, you know, doesn't matter what tool it is. Like, can you recognize when there's a good story that you made? Like, is this. Is this shot and sequence work together, right? Does this structure of your story work together? So that's why I think I agree with you, Matt. I think it's gonna be kind of like what happened with music as well. You have. Everybody can release their own song on Spotify and self release, but it's one is much. You're gonna get, as you say, the cream on top. But I Think also marketing is gonna be such a hard thing. Who can break through the noise? Cause it's really hard to break through the noise on the side.

I hope it doesn't happen like music, though. So I feel like music's been a horrible spot for a long time. So when you say that, that's like, kind of terrifying to me. Like, it's gonna be like music. It's like, oh, it's like, suck for like 30 years. Okay.

That's funny. But I, you know, I do. I do look at, like, you know, like, Lord of the Rings is a great example, right. You've got Gollum in Lord of the Rings, and we know that a human played all of that, all of that behind the scenes. Right. You can actually see the emotions in Golem. You can see that acting come through, even though it's sort of a CG character overlaid on top of that. And something like what Flow Studio does now is it kind of democratizes being able to do that for more people and more companies, like, smaller budgets can do that same kind of thing now.

Yeah, yeah. And that, to me, is exciting. Regardless of wonder, I think in AI in general, I think if we can get more people, we've had, when we launch, especially a lot of smaller production tell us, hey, we had this project forever. We're a team of summit. We could have never do it. Thank you so much. Now we can finally do it. And that's so rewarding. You know, as a founder and a storyteller, it's very rewarding to hear that because you're like, okay, I made something that, you know, we made something that people actually can, you know, do something they couldn't before because of the financial constraints. And, you know, it's. It's nice to hear.

Yeah, absolutely. Now, I want to go back to something you said a little bit earlier in the conversation. You mentioned that you've actually been seeing it used for, you know, marketing and by content creators. And, you know, our audience on this show specifically is a lot of those, like, solopreneurs, small businesses, content creators that makes up a lot of the audience. So I'm curious if maybe you can share some of the, like, ways you've seen it used in those worlds.

Mm, yeah, I think a lot of it's been used by people. Well, let's maybe separate YouTube and some other social media platforms. We've seen a lot of use on kind of, you know, VFX creators. Like, you have a lot of these at home. VFX creators that do incredible things. And I love seeing that because again, you know, going back to video copilot Andrew Kramer, that was my intro in visual effects. I saw someone, you know, who was producing and making things that inspired you to follow. So we see it a lot in, you know, kind of this short form content where people are creating content with CG characters or they're just doing it to drive.

Their camera or something. They need out of the two elements. And then on YouTube side. Actually, we've also seen it a lot on obviously 3D content creators. There's a lot of subcategory on YouTube of 3D content creators. Pretty large. We also seen it a lot of kids animated show, which is cool to see kind of some of these mainstream kid animations. I think the reason why it lends itself naturally to YouTube as well is because, you know, you guys know this well. My release time in a. In a film is two to three years. My release time in a TV show is a year. Two. My release time on YouTube is a week. Right. I can't really do CG much when I only have a week. Right. And you mentioned corridor crew. That's what they do, you know, two, three weeks. They release a new video. And it's so impressive how quickly they do it. I mean, I remember I was in some indie films and, you know, you can't afford to do any Roto because. Because Your budget's only 10 million and you're like. And the producer is like, no, we just can't. We can't even do Roto. Not alone green screen. And then you're so limited, you're like, wow, like, I. 10 million is little. Like 10 million is 10 million. When you tell someone who's not in the film space, they're like, 10 million is a really small budget. They're like $10 million.

Like, are we talking dollars?

Right? So that's that concept. And I think this new generation of, you know, YouTubers, they're just. They're just so crafty and they move much quicker, right? And so they find the tools, they combine a couple of tools and they're releasing content. So I think that's what's going to happen. I think we're going to see a bit of shift of like, you had big studios, they're only one that can do big visual film. And then indie films cannot they. You got a more. More grounded, more like live action. And then you have, you know, your social media content creators. I think what's going to happen is like, your indie filmmakers are going to be able to produce now major visual stories. But to me that's exciting because now you're gonna have grounded stories, like more character driven stories that you can make higher risks because studios cannot really risk. If you make something for 200 million, you can't really make an art piece. Right.

You can't explore new ideas. Like films have been repeating the same things with barely any new ideas for a long time.

So you said that, Nathan, you said that. Love me, you said that.

It's the same thing in the game industry. Same thing in the game industry, you know. So like in both of those I'm excited for AI to like kind of change and bring new ideas hopefully.

So I do think like that where indie filmmakers are, we're going to see you know, kind of this social media content creators really push it more. So they're going to be creating and then I think studios will just push it higher. So that's really exciting for me. It's like you're, you're kind of like we're shifting where everything was a little step forward, right. And you know I think, I think that's, that's. I don't know. I've seen some in AI video space as well. I've seen some things that are so creative. You're like, wow. Because if I had to do this traditionally I would have spent so much time. And then during that process you still have to keep that vision and then creation of some element will take you forever. Animating by hand, everything will take you forever. So you might not actually keep that original vision because the limitations will push you back and you might change. You'll sacrifice, you do something so kind of that.

Artistic. I guess instinct works fast, you know, like when you're ideating something you're like oh, got it this right. But sometimes that, that comes and then three months later you're still trying to work it and now you question it million times. You're like is that really what I wanted? Maybe this is better. And then this I can. Because I don't have money, et cetera. So yeah.

Have you seen like any, any like brands or you know, e commerce companies or you know any, any sort of like marketing use cases where you know, had a alien selling their product or something like that. I'm just curious about some of the like really fun sort of marketing.

It's out of this world.

We have, we have, we have seen a bunch of it and we can recognize our characters and our characters. You know, we, we open it free for license wise people can download it so We've seen it and sometimes it's going to pop up on my YouTube as an ad and I'm like, oh, that's our robot.

I've also seen ads on my Instagram where it's like they're advertising a tennis game. And like, you know those ads on Instagram where you like see it and it looks so good, then you download. It's nothing what they advertise. It's like not even close. Right. I've seen one. It's like tennis game. And I'm like, I'm pretty sure. I'm sure. I'm pretty sure this is Flow Studio. I'm pretty sure this is ours because I can recognize animation. I can see where like little clean play didn't go fully. And I can also. I'm a tennis player. I can recognize this is real footage. This is based on real movements. This is not someone animating it. So it's funny. Like you see it in those aspects. And then we've had some major brands also that we worked with closely that did it with certain characters as well. So it's been fun. I think advertising makes sense because you have a lot of kind of spokesperson like Geico, but not every brand can afford spent that much money because Geico traditionally is known how high production and I love those ads. Right. So but it's not cheap to make. So yeah, this, it's, it's been, it's been interesting to see like how some of the ads. But some of the ads are just, you know, also kind of terrible.

Yeah, I think that's a really smart approach. I think like, companies should start making their own little like, mascot and then, you know, like the Geico Gecko mascot or Tony the Tiger kind of mascot and start using something like Flow Studio to, to have that be their, their brand representative.

Yeah, it's safer than having a person. Right. You know, the person could go off and say some crazy things on social media or whatever.

Yeah.

It's not us. It's not us. It's the lizard.

But it's funny. It's funny how we all remember these characters. Right. They're not real, but we all, as you mentioned, you know, the tiger gecko, there's so many of them that we see. What is the, the fox. The Carfax. Right. It's a fox.

You got Jack in the box. Jack character.

So it's interesting how that stays with us.

Yeah, yeah. So this is sort of the last little rabbit hole I want to go down with you. And I don't know how deep you want to go on it. But I'm curious about the relationship with Autodesk. I know you guys were recently acquired by Autodesk. How did that whole thing happen? Was there a reason you decided that they're the people we want to work with?

Yeah, yeah. Always happy to go down the rabbit hole with you, man.

How big was the check?

Well, I'd say, you know, we started, we started the Autodesk partnership maybe a year before acquisition. And we, we did it because we knew a lot of our users used Maya. Obviously, Maya is being, you know, a leading tool in animation and character creation for so long. So, you know, we spent a year working with them and Diana, who runs the media entertainment part of it, we kind of really aligned on the vision. We had vision. And then one thing that was really important for me is, you know, you always had this perception as a startup founder. Like once you go into corporation, they're going to tell you what to do. It's going to be like, you know, they're going to turn you an add on or whatever. So from the get go, Dana was very honest in like, hey, Roadmap's, your product is yours. I believe in your vision. You're still running it as your startup. And that really has been true. And every decision has been, you know, our team and mine on what we're building, what the roadmap is going, how the product's going to look. I mean, I just showed you we use Blender as one of the outputs. You know, we actually doubled down on that. You know, we were like, you know, let's have an open ecosystem. So it's been very, I've been very fortunate on that side, I got to say, because I had a lot of friends as founders that really like went into, into a bigger company and you know, kind of lost that control completely. Right. So, you know, from the get go, others came to us and said, hey, you guys been building this for a while, we want to learn from you guys and you know, we don't want to be steering you in certain directions. We really want you to be independent and we like the product and you should build the platform and the vision you have. So we always went with like, here's my five year vision. And you know, so far that's been really supported on the side. And to us it made sense because we, we are big believers in 3D. You know, like you have your AI video, but I do think that 2D 2D approach is needed for one another. You know, that kind of consistency Whether it's latent consistency or you're talking a spatial consistency, it's a big problem to solve. And I think you need to be in 3D space, and I think you need to be in 3D space to be able to control it. What I've seen is with a lot of startups is this, they come from research space. They create something that generates and then you're like, okay, how do I control animation? What's a rig? How do I control a body? Right. Oh, how do I control a camera? So they're kind of learning the film terms as they go, right? They research first and then the film term. We went kind of bottoms up. We were. You know, I'm a big believer in like, okay, I have to be able to control a camera in an inch. I have to be able to control a performance, and then I have to go back and forward a lot. So for us, you know, that made sense. And also, as I mentioned earlier, I don't think the pipelines will change. I don't think the pipeline will be okay. Now we have these 10 tools, right? In VFX professional pipeline. I don't think it's going to be one AI tool that's going to replace it all. I think it's going to be a combo because they are built for a reason by very smart people for the past 30 years in the industry and how the creative process works. So I'm a big believer it's going to be a mix. And also, we never wanted to build our product to be like, hey, I'm going to disrupt completely. So that's what we built. Let's fit it in until some of this research gets better. So we can take more part of the pipeline, but the control and editability being the main aspect of it. So that's where our vision's really aligned on that side.

Awesome. Well, so is wonderdynamics.com is that the best place for people to go check it out, use it themselves?

Yes. Wonderdynamics.com Cool.

And if anybody wants to follow you personally, do you have any sort of social platforms that you hang out on, anything like that?

I'm not. I'm not big on that. Yeah. Too busy. Yeah, I'm more of someone who, like, goes, you know, on Twitter and Instagram to follow things than to post.

Gotcha.

So I'm not the best at it. I'd say Follow Wonder Dynamic Socials. Like, Follow Wonder Dynamic Socials. Yeah, you don't have to learn anything's too smart for my socials.

Well, amazing. This has been absolutely fascinating. Fascinating. Thank you so much for demoing everything and going down these rabbit holes with us. We really, really appreciate it. And thanks for your time on the episode today.

Yeah, thanks so much for having me, guys. I'm a big fan of what you guys do, and I think it's important that you're, you know, kind of educating people in this moving, kind of pace environment we're in.

Appreciate it. Thank you.

Thanks, guys.

Thank you so much for tuning into this episode. If you haven't already, make sure you go subscribe on Apple or podcast or YouTube or wherever you like to listen to podcasts. And also, one last thing, this podcast is up for a Webby Award in the business category. So if you could do us a huge favor and go cast a vote for this podcast, we might actually win an award and we really appreciate it. So thanks again for tuning in and hopefully we'll see you in the next one.

J.