AI has already been used on about 300 Netflix titles, and you still don't get a list or a label for them. Sung Q Lee, senior director of production for Asia-Pacific, said so Saturday at Netflix's Creative Asia event during the Busan International Film Festival. The session, Film Production and AI: New Tools, New Possibilities, was co-hosted with the Motion Picture Association.
He described the work as previsualization, production design, set-dressing concepts, editing, and visual effects. The question he said matters is what more a given title can do with that help. Your plan price stays the same.
New tools, he said, help a crew make the story. The reason for telling it stays with people. He screened a reel from Eyeline, Netflix's visual effects studio, on hybrid production, which mixes live-action photography, effects, and generative tools in the same shot. A second clip built crowd scenes for the Indian title Glory. On a tight budget and schedule, he said, those scenes would normally have been cut.
"But when it comes to conveying emotion, ultimately, a human has to touch it," Lee said.
Kang Yun-sung, the director of The Outlaws, shared the panel and is making The Gulf of Aden with generative tools from Kling. He said that approach could cut the film's production costs by about 40 percent, through a simpler shoot and a shorter schedule as well as the effects work.
Last year Kang co-directed Run to the West with Kwon Han-seul. It was billed as Korea's first feature to use AI across the production, and it earned about $100,000. He said the tools were still rough, used mostly for compositing and for creatures that didn't blend into the footage, and that the visuals looked dated by opening night.
Kimball Thurston, chief technology officer at Wētā FX, described his studio's tools as assistive. They hand a director images quickly enough to spot mistakes, and the creative intent stays with the filmmakers. Wētā is also building an open-source tracker with the Academy Software Foundation, so a production can record which tools touched a shot.
Netflix tests a tool under its own guidelines before it puts one into a show. Lee said the company isn't obsessed with how fast a new model shows up.
Keep choosing titles the way you already do. A savings figure from one director stays on that film.