Between Wicked and The Sphere, Oz is having a really big moment right now. Let me back up before I start making jokes. Yesterday, I logged on to Twitter to talk about the upcoming NFL season and was met instead by a bunch of tweets of people arguing over The Wizard of Oz. As it turns out, I had not been transported back in time, but was in the middle of something seemingly more insane. The Sphere in Las Vegas is showing The Wizard of Oz, but they have enhanced the movie with AI to make some shots clearer, add background, change depth of field, add digital performances in expanding frames, and lots of other things. It's become the most divisive topic in film this week, so I want to unpack it today. Let's dive in. The AI Wizard of Oz The backlash from film purists centers on what many are calling a "desecration" of the original film's artistic integrity, by adding AI performances from characters, expanding the frame, and outpainting other parts.Basically, they used AI to generate new visual information to expand the film's original 4:3 aspect ratio to fit the Sphere's immense, wraparound screen. This process has resulted in the creation of new footage and even the insertion of "extra" actors into scenes, performances the original cast never consented to.It's also not what the filmmakers intended. And when AI was used to scrub some of the other shots, it added grass and changed depths of field, distorting the...
Published By: NoFilmSchool - Yesterday