{"id":10933,"date":"2025-06-24T14:27:12","date_gmt":"2025-06-24T14:27:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/10933\/"},"modified":"2025-06-24T14:27:12","modified_gmt":"2025-06-24T14:27:12","slug":"vfx-pioneer-ed-ulbrich-on-joining-ethical-ai-company-moonvalley","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/10933\/","title":{"rendered":"VFX Pioneer Ed Ulbrich on Joining ‘Ethical’ AI Company Moonvalley"},"content":{"rendered":"

Ed Ulbrich loved the days of the early \u201990s and late \u201980s, when visual effects meant sitting on set with filmmakers or in screening rooms in post-production, aiming laser pointers at screens and literally shaping the look of a film<\/a>. But as CGI tentpoles dominate the industry \u2014 and he\u2019s worked on a number of them, from \u201cBlack Panther\u201d to \u201cTop Gun: Maverick\u201d to \u201cTitanic\u201d \u2014 a little bit of the fun has come out of it. <\/p>\n

Suddenly, you have thousands of artists on four continents \u2014 many of whom will never even meet the director, let alone work beside them \u2014 working on a film\u2019s VFX<\/a>. It takes some of the personality out of the endeavor. And, as Ulbrich told IndieWire during a recent interview, his work became \u201cfactory work\u201d and not what he \u201cfell in love with.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"In<\/a> \"The<\/a> <\/p>\n

Ulbrich wanted something more hands-on, more personal, and something where he could solve creative problems through technology, and he\u2019s finding it in an unexpected place: artificial intelligence.<\/p>\n

Last week, Ulbrich was announced to have joined AI<\/a> research company Moonvalley as Head of Strategic Growth & Partnerships. After holding senior roles at Metaphysic, Deluxe, and James Cameron\u2019s Digital Domain, Ulbrich will now work alongside Moonvalley\u2019s sister company Asteria, the AI studio co-founded by Natasha Lyonne<\/a>, to not just advance the tech powering their model, but also to use it in real projects.<\/p>\n

Moonvalley recently launched Marey, an AI model they say is the first \u2014 and only \u2014 clean AI model, one they say is trained only on licensed material from artists who have explicitly granted their consent. That for him was the X-factor, the combination of a seemingly ethical use of artificial intelligence with an independent film studio that wants to put advanced tools and workflows in the hands of filmmakers<\/a>.<\/p>\n

It convinced him, and he believes it will make other converts to AI, too.<\/p>\n

\u201cJust the people I know around the industry, there\u2019s been a lot of apprehension, but there\u2019s also a lot of people leaning in that are very curious and want to use this,\u201d Ulbrich told IndieWire. \u201cThat idea of these things have been stolen from all of us, if you can eliminate that, suddenly you realize, OK, there\u2019s something here. These are some powerful tools that are going to let us make things.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"HERE,\u2018Here\u2019\u00a9TriStar Pictures\/Courtesy Everett Collection<\/p>\n

Ulbrich\u2019s days with AI date all the way back to \u201cThe Curious Case of Benjamin Button\u201d and one of the first major instances of machine learning in film. On that movie, all of his focus was spent on Brad Pitt\u2019s face, trying to develop a way to translate Pitt\u2019s performance to his digital avatar. The de-aging process was so time-consuming and so costly that no one even thought to fear the implications.<\/p>\n

But cut to Ulbrich\u2019s work on \u201cHere,\u201d last year\u2019s Robert Zemeckis film, starring Tom Hanks and Robin Wright as seen throughout their entire lives. Now the tech is capable of creating de-aged deep fakes in real time on the video playback monitor<\/a>. But in all his work at Metaphysic on that film, the AI was fully licensed training data with consent from the actors.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s why, when he was approached by other tech companies to consult or to weigh in on tools like OpenAI\u2019s Sora<\/a>, it had been a \u201cnon-starter.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI can\u2019t sell stolen pixels to a buyer. You\u2019re dead in the water,\u201d Ulbrich said. \u201cIt all sounds nice, there\u2019s not anybody I know knowingly saying, hey, we\u2019ll try it. Let\u2019s experiment! Hell no. That\u2019s not how this this works. Copyright matters.\u201d<\/p>\n

With Moonvalley and Asteria<\/a>, he feels the company has \u201clightning in a bottle,\u201d but it won\u2019t mean much unless the tools behind it are great. Ulbrich said there might be great data scientists gifted with crafting the perfect prompts, but what it needs are intuitive designs and GUIs that will \u201cde-mystify\u201d AI<\/a> for creative types to start turning the knobs and get something brilliant. <\/p>\n

\"AsteriaBryn Mooser (middle right) and Paul Trillo (far right) with animators at AI studio AsteriaPaul Yem<\/p>\n

\u201cI met some amazing people during this process, and they\u2019re focusing on controls. That\u2019s what I keep hearing, this theme of controls; that\u2019s the magic, that\u2019s what you want to hear, is demystifying this stuff,\u201d he said. \u201cI don\u2019t need to understand data science; I\u2019m a filmmaker. I now have tools that I can use. They\u2019re either physical tools or digital tools that I can use to make things in a way that feels right. To me, that is where you start to see true innovation. And it\u2019s so amazing to be at this point in this trajectory.\u201d<\/p>\n

Asteria CEO Bryn Mooser in a statement said Ulbrich is an \u201camazing asset\u201d to the team and praised him being behind some of the biggest movies of the past 20 years: \u201cHe created the visual effects industry as we know it and is going to be integral in bringing it into the future with new tools and technology.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

Ulbrich knows that AI has the potential to replace countless jobs. His message to those concerned is simple: \u201cBe concerned. But do something. Don\u2019t do anything, you\u2019re going to get replaced. It\u2019s going to happen.\u201d<\/p>\n

But he also says that, just as we lived through a period of \u201cCGI slop,\u201d we\u2019re in the same period with AI and the abundance of people using it. That too is going to change.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere are filmmakers and people who would never get a shot, and this old system and the gatekeepers\u2026 this is a key agent of change that is going to ripple through the entire ecosystem with no doubt,\u201d Ulbrich said. \u201cWhat\u2019s different about this then to digital, analog, to CGI, those types of things, is those things have moved at a more glacial pace. This is \u2014 buckle up \u2014 it\u2019s fast.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Ed Ulbrich loved the days of the early \u201990s and late \u201980s, when visual effects meant sitting on…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":10934,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[21],"tags":[691,738,11849,1020,11850,1149,158,67,132,68,11851],"class_list":{"0":"post-10933","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-artificial-intelligence","10":"tag-asteria","11":"tag-film","12":"tag-future-of-filmmaking","13":"tag-interviews","14":"tag-technology","15":"tag-united-states","16":"tag-unitedstates","17":"tag-us","18":"tag-vfx"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/114738812852342121","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10933","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10933"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10933\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/10934"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10933"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10933"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10933"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}