09 02 25 ABC Tech Reporter Mike Dobuski on The Wizard of Oz at Sphere in Las Vegas

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
It is the Tuesday edition of Colorado's Morning News. Follow
the Yellow Brick Road to the AI world of the
Wonderful Wizard of Oz. The classic nineteen thirty nine movie
is now on the one hundred sixty thousand square foot
display of the Sphere in Las Vegas.

Speaker 2 (00:20):
Have you seen any of the videos of this so far?

Speaker 1 (00:22):
I haven't.

Speaker 2 (00:24):
Would you go to the Sphere?

Speaker 1 (00:26):
I would, but it have to be for the right thing.
I wouldn't go to see the Wizard of Oz.

Speaker 2 (00:29):
Okay, it'd have to be for a show. Yeah, because
tickets right now for The Wizard of Oz are ranging
from like one hundred to like one hundred and twenty
dollars or something like that. And during the film, fans
are immersed in this nearly three sixty degree visuals and
sound effects. However, some aren't really happy with how it's
being run because the Wizard of Oz has been altered
for the unique venue. So joining us now on the

(00:50):
KWA Common Spirit Health Hotline for our Tech Tuesday Chat
is ABC News Tech reporter Mike Debuski. Mike, thank you
so much for your time. As always, Okay, explain a
little bit about what we're seeing on the Sphere screen
because it's how much is truly AI generated in order
to really expand the movie and wrap it around this
really unique experience.

Speaker 3 (01:09):
Yeah, it's a great question, and good morning guys. There's
a couple of different technologies that's being employed in this
new version of The Wizard of Oz that is playing
at the Sphere. The Sphere obviously a pretty unique venue.
As you explained, it's a screen that kind of wraps
around the whole audience. It's about four football fields worth
of sixteen k led screens. That's about the highest fidelity

(01:30):
screen you can get in the business right now, and
that is kind of where they started with modifying this film.
Will you know when you blow up an image, you
lose some picture quality. You know this if you've ever
zoomed in really far on an iPhone photo, it kind
of starts to devolve, It starts to fall apart after
you get kind of past a few zooms. That same
principle applies when you blow up a movie to a

(01:52):
huge degree. So what they did with the help of
Google's artificial intelligence team was they used AI to sharpen
and make clearer a lot of these images that are
now much bigger the Google calls this process super resolution.
So that's that one piece of it. There's also out
painting where you know, you normally see only you know,

(02:13):
part of a character or part of a you know,
environment in a movie. Now, because the screen is so big,
generally speaking, you're seeing like the whole person, or you're
seeing huge landscapes or vistas that kind of sprawl out
beyond the traditional frame. They basically were using AI to
invent what the rest of that scene looked like, or
what the rest of that character look like. In some cases, guys,

(02:36):
they're actually creating character's whole cloth out of nothing. For example,
in an early scene of The Wizard of Oz, the
camera moves right, it pans away from Uncle Henry. Because
there's now a wider field of view. Uncle Henry doesn't
just disappear off screen anymore. The creative team had to
use AI to come up with something for him to do,
and they went back to the original script, they say,

(02:57):
and the director's notes from the original nineteen thirty nine
Wizard of Oz to kind of inform this performance generation,
they call it. But you can imagine that this has
divided opinion in Hollywood. There are some people who are
really excited about the potential for this technology to you know,
enhance filmmaking or change the way that things are done

(03:17):
in Hollywood. But others are saying that this is a
corruption of the director's intention, original vision, right, that art
is just as much about what you do as what
you don't do right and what you don't see. Those
cuts and those pans are there for a reason. You know,
tensions are high, given that it was not so long
ago that this industry went on strike in large part

(03:37):
to protest the creeping influence of artificial intelligence.

Speaker 1 (03:40):
So the next step, obviously in this iteration or a question,
is when does AI do a complete film or movie
of its own.

Speaker 3 (03:47):
Well, that is already sort of in the works. There
are many AI studios that have cropped up in the
last year or so, one of them run by Natasha Leone,
who you might recognize from Russian Dolls, been an actress
for a long time. She recently, alongside her significant other,
set up a stereia which is being touted as an
AI studio, and she says she's making a movie called

(04:09):
Uncanny Valley, which she says she's making with the help
of a lot of AI tools, There's also this other
platform called Showrunner Guys, which is a new company backed
by Amazon that says it has a streaming service that
it's demoing right now where basically you can go into
this kind of like Netflix, but also prompt a show
out of nothing. Say hey, I want to you know,

(04:31):
a cartoon in the style of Family Guy, but I
want it to be set in the far reaches of space,
and there needs to be a character who's a cow
or something like that, and it will create it says,
you know, a several episodes worth of that with you know,
full kind of voice and animation behind it. So this
stuff is kind of here, ready to meet the rising

(04:52):
tide of AI. Will the industry go for it? I
think that remains an open question, Mike.

Speaker 2 (04:57):
If this wasn't a tech conversation, I'd be saying, the
most criminal thing happening at the Sphere with the Wizard
of Oz is actually the price. Because to see a
movie for a hundred don't get me wrong, it's a
cool venue, but to see a movie for over one
hundred dollars, it's pretty crazy.

Speaker 3 (05:10):
Yeah. Well, they spent about eighty million dollars to modernize
the Wizard of oz right. That's that's how much they
spent on this whole process. And given that it's a
big event venue, it's run by the same people who
run MSG here in New York. You know, the tickets
are a lot prizier, about one hundred and nine dollars
to start, but they go all the way up to
three hundred and forty nine dollars. This is not your

(05:30):
average trip to the movies.

Speaker 2 (05:31):
And the four D effects we forget about that too.
All the other part of it as well as they
put it in.

Speaker 3 (05:36):
Yeah, yeah, the wind that kind of blows when the
tornado rolls into town. They have a lot of kind
of like in the theater itself effects that happen, flying
monkeys and what have you, which terrified me as a kid.
So I don't know how much I feel about that,
but even still, that was that was a big part
of it, you know, just to kind of get people
more immersed in the actual the film itself.

Speaker 1 (05:55):
ABC News Technology reporter Mike Debuski, Thanks Mike, of course.

Speaker 3 (05:58):
Guys. Take care