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Netflix has used AI in one form or another on some 300 of its titles, Lee Sung-gyun, the streamer’s senior director of APAC production, told an audience at the Busan
International Film Festival.
On the same panel, “The Outlaws” director Kang Yoon-sung said AI workflows could take 30% to 40% off a feature film’s production budget.
Lee shared the stage with Kang and Kimball Thurston, chief technology officer at Wētā FX, for “Film Production and AI: New Tools, New Possibilities.” Netflix and the MPA co-hosted the session. It was part of Creative Asia, the Netflix and BIFF program for emerging Asian talent. Film critic Yun Sung-eun moderated.
“Across around 300 Netflix titles, AI has actually been put to use in various ways,” Lee said. “It’s being used in previs, in production design, in working out set-dressing concepts ahead of time, in editorial, and of course in VFX.”
Lee said new technology has always startled people when it arrives. “All these technological changes and new tools have helped a great deal with the ‘how,’ how we make what we make better, but they never decided the ‘why,’ why we have to tell this story,” he said. “AI is the same.”
He also screened a reel from Eyeline, Netflix’s VFX studio, about what the company calls hybrid production, which mixes live-action photography, VFX and generative tools. A second clip showed AI and VFX together producing large crowd scenes for the Netflix India title “Glory.” Lee said that under tight budgets and schedules, those scenes would normally have had to be dropped.
Kang co-directed “Run to the West” with AI filmmaker Kwon Han-seul. The film opened in Korean cinemas last October and was billed as Korea’s first feature to use AI across its entire production. Kang turned to AI there as a substitute for CG. “At the time, AI technology was at a really rudimentary, low level, so we mainly used it for compositing and making creatures,” he said. “And back then, even the creatures didn’t blend well with the footage we’d shot.” In just a year, he said, AI’s quality has reached the point where using it commercially is no problem at all.
His test clip for “The Gulf of Aden,” a film built around military operations at sea, was made entirely with AI earlier this year using Kling, the Chinese software. Kang said the test was rendered at reduced quality. Current tools, he said, can output 4K at 10-bit color or higher, which is enough for cinemas.
An audience member asked about cost. “When we calculated how much we’d save on ‘The Gulf of Aden’ for fundraising, it came to an actual reduction of around 40%,” Kang said. “That’s not just from replacing CG and VFX. The shoot itself got simpler, and it cut the overall production period to some extent.”
Kang said AI has put projects that collapsed at the budget stage back on the table. That opens the door to genre and sci-fi films at a time when the Korean industry is struggling to grow. But he also said that because AI handles so much of the creative work, it often cuts out the discussion, effort and experience of many people that filmmaking has always relied on, leaving images made from one person’s ideas alone. “So the quality of the footage AI makes is very high, but when it comes to delivering emotion and moving audiences, I think we’re in a period where it has actually gotten worse,” he said.
Lee said he related strongly to Kang’s point. Some things now come out with a single click, he said, “but when it comes to conveying emotion, ultimately a human has to touch it once more. I strongly agree that a human touch is absolutely essential.”
Thurston described the deep learning denoiser behind his second Academy Scientific and Technical Award as “assistive AI.” “It is basically not allowed to change the creative intent in any way,” he said. “It touches pixels, but it only fixes them.”
He said Wētā has used machine learning for at least a decade, or 20 to 25 years if you count early forms of Massive, the system it built for “The Lord of the Rings.” He also flagged gaps in color accuracy. “If all your AI models have been trained on video images, you’re not getting the right red for a Coca-Cola can,” Thurston said. “You get Netflix red, but not Coca-Cola.”
Asked how the companies keep pace with new models, Lee said Netflix works under strict internal guidelines and tests new tools before adopting them. “If you’re asking about speed, I’d like to say that we’re not wildly obsessed with it,” he said. Thurston said Wētā is building an open-source tool through the Academy Software Foundation to track AI use and provenance, designed to link with initiatives such as C2PA.
On sustainability, Thurston said Wētā’s data center in Wellington, New Zealand, which uses closed-loop cooling, now draws “zero liters of water per year.” Lee said Netflix looks at sustainability company-wide, including its 2030 goal to cut carbon emissions, and doesn’t study AI’s impact separately.
Kang expects AI use to split in two directions. Short-form content will focus on productivity, and he pointed to China, where some short-form projects are made entirely with AI from planning to distribution. Film and drama will focus instead on credibility. He also showed footage from a feature animation he is developing, with photoreal backgrounds and animated characters he wants to move like live-action actors.
On replacing actors, Kang said it would be difficult. “No matter how much AI technology advances, actors are creators who deliver emotion and move the audience,” he said. “Even if AI acting becomes very sophisticated and imitates very precisely, emotion doesn’t come through because of its mechanical coldness.” He sees AI’s role in stunt and stand-in work instead.
Thurston agreed. “The point is not to replace actors, right? No way,” he said. “We are audiovisual storytellers, and storytelling is studying the human condition.”
Lee closed the session by saying technology will keep changing, and surprising, even shocking, videos will keep coming out. “But in the end, it’s humans who will write, and what we want more of is stories told by humans,” he said.
