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You're listening to TED Talks Daily where we bring you new ideas and conversations to spark your curiosity every day.
I'm your host Elise Hu.
A not -so -long time ago, in a galaxy not that far, far away, it is a period of great change.
Moving images made by computers striking from the deep are winning major victories.
During this monumental transition one master of visual effects stood tall on a giant red dot to share the tale of this great collision between art and technology, humans and A .I.
Pursued by a love of exploration, he reminds us that it is the blending of the old with the new that has always driven innovation, bringing artistic freedom to the galaxy.
Okay, is it obvious we're excited about Star Wars day tomorrow, May the 4th?
Today's speaker has actually worked his visual magic on Star Wars films!
At TED 2025, visual effects trailblazer Rob Bredow gives us a behind the scenes look at the history of technology in the special effects industry and why he's hopeful that AI I won't replace creatives, but instead empower artists to create new, mind -blowing wonders on the big screen.
May the Force be with you.
The opening shot of Star Wars, episode 4, the original one, it broke all new grounds and really redefined that era of filmmaking.
Plus, it's just perfectly designed.
Now, behind the scenes, you may or may not know the Camera Rig.
this is the Dijkstra Flex. It's a computerized, motion -controlled camera rig.
It was innovative. It could be moved from stage to stage.
It enabled these new dynamic camera moves on models, on miniatures for the very first time, again, redefining that era of filmmaking.
Today, we're entering a new era of technology.
But instead of being introduced to it with a spectacular opening shot of a movie, we're reading about it in the press.
And as someone who's been a visual effects artist for over 35 years, Some of these headlines are pretty disappointing.
They seem to say AI is coming, and it's coming for our jobs.
And the tools are getting pretty good, too.
You know, I work on movies.
I should be safe for a little while, right?
It's going to take them, well, you know where this is going.
Google, Meta, OpenAI, all showing sophisticated video -generation systems. These appear to be doing some of the same things we are doing right now, frame by frame, with multiple artists, often working weeks at a time to make a single three -to -five -second shot in movies you love.
It's going to be pretty intimidating.
And we're not the only ones who are a little concerned about the future of AI.
Okay. We've been here before.
And I believe this is an interesting, you know, collision, right, of tech and art.
And I believe what George Lucas created in Industrial Light and Magic, his visual effects company, ILM, He founded this 50 years ago to solve the visual storytelling challenges in his films. And what he did there is he put artists side -by -side with engineers.
They were working together to be able to innovate and create the future.
This is artist -driven innovation.
I'm passionate about this.
So what we're going to do today is we're going to look at 50 years of history at ILM.
We're going to pull some of those cinematic gamechangers that have happened over this period of time.
Then we're going to try to draw some universal themes out of that.
And in the end, I'm going to premiere for you for the very first time, a short created by an artist using the latest generative AI tools, so we can see the trajectory we are on and the trajectory we want to be on next.
Now let's turn the clock back to the Jurassic era.
This is the Jurassic Park era, my Jurassic era, 1993.
On this film, they were going to use as many full -scale dynos on set as possible.
I mean, this film really ended up redefining the way visual effects were done in movies.
But it wasn't planned that way from the beginning.
They were going to do these huge full -scale dinosaurs, which they did, and they were amazing.
But for the shots, where they couldn't have a full -scale dinosaur run, like a T -Rex, they were going to do stop -motion animation.
And all that changed one day when Cathy Kennedy, the show's producer, she was walking the halls of ILM, and she noticed this test looping on a monitor.
Now, the animators had actually positioned this monitor, we were hoping she would see it.
This is the early days of CG, computer graphics, and this looks promising, enough to commission a test with skin and lighting.
So they did that test, just real quick, and Dennis murin, the film's visual effects supervisor, and famous stop -motion animator Phil Tippett, they took this down to Spielberg and to Kathy Kennedy, and they looped it a few times in their screening room.
And as the lights came up, they knew cinema history had changed.
It wasn't going to be the same.
Spielberg caught Tippett's eye, and he could see his expression on his face.
He said, how are you feeling, Phil?
Phil said, I feel like I'm going extinct.
But I think artists right now, many of us, are feeling that same threat of extinction.
There's good news here.
This is not what happened on Jurassic Park.
Innovation thrives when the old and new technologies are blended together.
Jurassic broke all new ground in computer graphics.
All new techniques, for the first time, had been used at this scale.
but many of the techniques were exactly the same as before.
The animators taped themselves on video for reference, they drew these amazing storyboards of these shots that are now indelibly imprinted in all of our minds.
Engineers at ILM even went so far as to make the dinosaur input device.
It's a stop -motion armature, each of the joints, it has a little encoder on it so it can send the data back to the computer.
So the stop -motion animator can do frame -by -frame animation like they normally would, the computer would record it, that animation could be sent across the Bay from Phil Tippett's shop to the artists at ILM who could put the skin on and light it and render it, even touch up the animation digitally to create the final shots in the film.
Literally a combination of the oldest animation technique we know, stop -motion, and the brand -new computer graphics techniques back in 1993.
This has been true recently with AI technology as well.
Harrison Ford from Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, performing on set in that iconic role he created, but he's looking a little younger for the opening of this film.
Our artist hand -tuned generative AI models on past performances of Indiana Jones, of course, with Harrison Ford's permission.
In addition to that, our artist also created a full CG computer graphics version of his performance.
So, why did we do it two different ways?
Well, it turns out the AI system is really, really good at getting that likeness, pulling all the details out of Harrison's performance that he could do unencumbered on set, to get that into a likeness and a correct age that we are looking for for this character.
It wasn't as good at the details and the controls.
That's when our CG model came to the rescue and our artists created a blend of the two to create the opening 20 minutes of this movie.
And I'd say, some of the best work of this kind ever done.
It's not bad if Harrison Ford says, It's pretty good, it feels like me.
So that's blending the old and new.
Right? Leaning on the experienced artist to drive even the brand new techniques.
I believe that we're designed to be creative beings.
It's one of the most important things about us.
That's one of the reasons we appreciate it, and we just love it when we see technology and creativity working together.
We see this on the motion control, on the original Star Wars, or on Jurassic Park with the CG dinosaurs for the first time.
We just love it when we see creativity in action like this, tech and creative working together.
If we fast -forward to an old sort of concept that we have to have to improve, Ready?
And we went to 2020.
We can see the latest real -time virtual production techniques.
This was another creative innovation driven by a filmmaker.
In this case, it's Jon Favreau, and he had a vision for a giant Disney Plus Star Wars series, first time we were ever going to do a series of Star Wars on TV.
This is for The Mandalorian.
And it was a big show, but we didn't have a normal film schedule.
We had to shoot it all very, very fast. So rather than flying the cast around the world to try to find these exotic locations, we brought locations to them on a single sound stage in Manhattan Beach where we had configured this LED wall to act as a virtual production background so we could immerse our actors, our entire crew, all of the departments, in these virtual worlds, and even some locations that weren't from our world, they're from outside of our world.
Interestingly, Kathy Kennedy, the same producer who produced Jurassic Park, she now runs Lucasfilm.
She was one of the people who got behind this idea early before any of us knew that it was going to work.
The technology leading up to this had been created hand in hand with filmmakers over the years.
So I was supervising Solo, a Star Wars story, and we thought, can we take what they had done before and can we make the content high enough quality so you could point the camera directly at it?
And we started making shots like this for the very first time.
This is hyperspace in the cockpit of the Millennium Falcon, and you can see my friend, the DP, Bradford Young, and he invented this shot.
We'd shot hyperspace tons of times before.
But in the moment, he saw the light coming in, and then he realized this was a moment of hope in the film.
So as he pans over to Hans Solo you can see the reflection of hyperspace in Hans' eyes.
Just a beautiful collaboration between tech and art that elevates the storytelling and gives our artists new tools.
That's what we love.
So that catches us up to The Mandalorian, where, as always, it starts with words on a page, the script.
And then our artists break it down.
And I'll break it down for you, how they add all the different elements, computer graphics, ship, added in post -production.
But the rest of the background, that was live on the day on that LED wall for all the departments to work together to create life in that scene and block these shots out.
Walkers in the background?
You'll never guess.
They were stop -motion animated over a tippet shop.
Yes, the same Phil Tippett, far from extinct all these years.
So it's a combination of the oldest technique in the book with the latest real -time computer graphics to bring an illusion together on the screen in front of the whole cast and crew.
Our artists worked really hard to make it a seamless blend between the two.
And now we can pop these LED stages up anywhere in the world when it's the right creative fit for a filmmaker.
OK, so that's blending the old and new.
How tech and creativity, working hand in hand, create things we just love.
And last, and maybe most importantly, our theme about artist -driven innovation.
So what happens when you put the latest AI tools in the hands of talented artists, both to see how good these tools are these days and what does it do to our artists' imagination, where does it take their imagination?
So I'm gonna premiere for you a brand new short film.
Elisse here, a quick note head to TED .com to watch the premiere Rob mentions here.
It's a short film made by an artist using the latest generative AI duels available today.
And now back to the spaceship, I mean, Rob.
This is just a test. This is not a final product.
This was created by one artist. His name is Landis Fields.
He created this in two weeks is just to explore what it would feel like if you sent a probedroid out to a brand -new Star Wars planet.
What would it see? And more importantly, with this kind of show, if we made this, and I'm not announcing a new show, this is just a test, if we made this, what would it feel like?
Pretty fun to see artist expression leveraging the latest new tools.
Now, this, as I mentioned, it's just an early work in progress.
For a show, for a movie, we need a team.
For so many reasons, but we at Lucasfilm and ILM, we don't think we're just around the corner from one or two people making a film in a dark room by themselves.
We benefit so much from the diverse skill set of the artists and the technicians that work on our films. They bring so much creativity to our projects.
That's what we want to capitalize on.
What you see here, you can kind of think of it as like a mood board, but a moving one.
How much more powerful is it to have a tool like that to get an early impression of a show as you're deciding what to do next?
It is natural for us to think about jobs as these tools continue to evolve and get more powerful.
If you go back to the days of models and miniatures and motion control, there was only a couple dozen people in the whole world who knew how to build and operate these complicated machines.
Today, there's literally hundreds of thousands of artists around the world who know the latest CG techniques, the latest computer graphics, visual effects techniques.
There's a huge opportunity for creative, talented people with these skills.
And as our tools continue to evolve, and we take our responsibility seriously to grow and develop the talent that's working on our projects.
This is how we've been doing it for the last 50 years.
In fact, some of the artists who worked on the original Star Wars series are still working with us at ILM today.
So that's artist -driven innovation, like you've seen on our productions over the decades.
Now, the tech companies on their own, they don't have the whole picture, right?
They're looking at a lot of different opportunities.
We're thinking about it from a filmmaking perspective.
And it gets us excited to think about that future where we are going to be able to give artists these kinds of tools.
And as these tools do get so powerful, we do need to use them thoughtfully, with the full permission of the talent.
Like you saw in the example of Indiana Jones.
viability of superfan where Harris and Ford gave his permission for his likeness to be used, and we had full access and the rights of people and people not to be used.
and the rights to the training data.
So that's what we're focused on at Lucasfilm and ILM, the next generation of creative tools, leaning on all these amazing innovations.
And then we can just imagine that next game -changer, that next star destroyer moment that's going to light up screens around the world.
It's going to be even more imaginative, can be even more creative than that original that inspired us all in 1977.
Thank you very much. Thank you.
That was Rob Brettau at TED 2025.
And to see the many visual references made during this talk, head to ted .com.
If you're curious about TED's curation, find out more at ted .com slash Curation Guidelines.
And that's it for today's show.
TED Talks Daily is part of the TED Audio Collective.
This episode was produced and edited by our team, Martha Estefanos, Oliver Friedman, Brian Green, Lucy Little, Alejandra Salazar and Tonzika Somarnevone.
It was mixed by Christoper Fazey -Bogen.
Additional support from Emma Tobner and Daniella Ballarazzo.
I'm Elise Hu, I'll be back tomorrow with a fresh idea for your feed.
Thanks for listening.
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