The future of filmmaking and content making industry. What could we expect from the future?

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AR/VR Journey: Augmented & Virtual Reality Magazine

11 min readJul 21, 2019

How will the future of the entertainment industry look like? What can we expect from films and TV series in the future? With the growing number of streaming platforms and our ability to consume content virtually anywhere and anytime the demand for new and original content is increasing at an extreme pace. The ability to cover this demand comes up against limits which are the time and the costs for which we can produce this content. The future belongs to those, who are able to provide original and exclusive content and distinguish themselves from the competition. Only the wide range of original content will provide a competitive advantage in the struggle an increasingly demanding viewer. We can already see this trend today in the form of companies that are building their strategies on their own original productions (Netflix, HBO, Amazon Prime, Facebook Watch, Apple recently joint the club with one billion investment).

The technology is developing incredibly fast and what we consider today a common thing was almost unthinkable just 10 years ago. Therefore, I will try to outline my vision of where the film industry could go from the perspective of the accelerating pace of technology development and technological innovations that are currently in the early or prototype stage, but I expect they will fully develop in the near future.

Part One: The End of the age of real actors and the dawn of virtual celebrities

The best earning actor of the year is Harper Shaw for the second time in a row! Last year, he earned $ 84 million in licensing rights to use his digital form. He was the busiest actor and his social network accounts are among the 10 most followed in the world. The creators/programmers behind his creation (Andrew Cole, Louis Humphrey, Gene Reed, and Dave Mills) are more than enthusiastic about him and have bold plans for the years to come. They all reject the possibility of selling rights to Mr. Shaw despite the huge interest from multiple production companies.

This could be the reality in the near future — a digital celebrity programmed by a group of people — becomes the most successful and perhaps the best-earning actor in the world. How is that even possible? Already now, the animations created for the video game industry are approaching the real footage and the movie CGI characters are almost indistinguishable from real-world actors. The essence of this technique is that the actor has covered his face with small dots/points serve to capture his facial expressions — emotions. This digitized expressions are stored and can be later on projected on any digital face, whether human or dragon-like in the case of Benedict Cumberbatch in the Hobbit movie (picture below).

But what if we will digitize and store 100 or 1000 actors using this technique and create a library of emotional expressions. We don’t have to hire a thousand actors to do so, we can simply analyze already existing movies and actors performances. The machine learning can sort and pair certain emotions with “typical” face expression. We will be able to create any digital face expression based on emotion that digital actor should express.

We could analyze thousands of movies and thousands of performances where the program can learn from the world’s best actors in their life roles. In this way, we could bring life and real-world expressions to digital actors. We can expand this technique future more by analyzing the body movement, the way of verbal and non-verbal interactions, analyze and catalog the of voice in different situations, pace, and dynamics of speech.

Over the time, we could create a digital actor with our own and unique identity, who has his/her typical range of expressions and emotions, its own voice, movement and non-verbal expression that feels real and natural. If we can program this model, its visualization will be indistinguishable from a real actor due to the pace of development and the steady increase in computer graphics performance and the ability to detail and dynamically create a digital image from a huge amount of data.

Part Two: Movie Studios will be replaced by Supercomputers and Technological Companies

Ubisoft and NVIDIA have launched the most powerful “film-production studio service”.Their cloud supercomputer combined with a 100-member team of developers is able to produce 10 feature-length films in a single month. The head of the studio says that by optimizing and improving their own AI called “Fenix”, they can double their capability in the next three to five years.

In the previous section, we explained how it would be possible to create digital actors. However, it is very likely that the entire environment in which these actors will move and interact will be digitally generated to lower the cost of production. Already today, the vast majority of the environment in which the film takes place is created digitally in post-production replacing the green canvas. (picture below)

I believe that we are just a step away from being able to dynamically create realistic environments in a fraction of the time, especially thanks to AI solutions, as you can see in the video below. The principles of dynamic creation that you can see in the video can be also used to create more complex realistic 3D environments for the needs of creating movie scenes and environments. With gaming engines that give these artificial environments real-world physics and objects that behave as in reality, we could generate a realistic environment in which the entire movie can be placed in without just one physical scene being built in the studio.

That is why I believe that the movie studio of the future will require great computing power and clever developers; in a way, film studios will be more software and technology companies rather than classic film studios with a number of hangars and artificially constructed movie sets and props.

Part Three: A movie made just for me, an absolute personalization

I recently saw my adaptation of the classic action movie “Lethal Weapon”. I was really surprised how it all changed when I compared it with the originals. I am wondering what your adaptation would look like? As I know you, your version will be dark with terrible and gloomy music in the background. In the end, probably everyone will die.

This could be a future conversation between two people who decide to watch an older movie digitally edited in a new but personalized form. How could it be possible? To answer this question it is necessary to look at the extent to which the content itself can be personalized. The answer is that we can personalize it to a very large extent.

Imagine that a movie is not a video file that is only distributed to customers. Imagine a movie as a huge set of data resp. as a software application that on-demand generates a video content that could be different each time depending on the input data that the program receives from the user. The resulting video is, therefore, the result of the inputs you enter (customer personal data) Personal data are already at our disposal, we could easily extract from your personal data extremely wide range of information that could be used as input such as what movies you like, what kind of genre, which actors or people, in general, you like, what content you like, share and respond to, what kind of music you like to listen what places and environments you like etc.

Based on this data, the program will tailor your output video to create a highly personalized movie that is embedded in the environment you love, with the background of music that is based on your musical and genre preferences. Your movie may take place in a completely different environment than the same movie that someone else will watch, your characters will look different, the storyline may also develop in a different way, and the film may have several alternative endings depending on whether you prefer a drama or you like “ happy ending ”. Almost every aspect of the film could be and will be personalized in the future, with individual aspects changing and adapting based on viewer preferences. Movies will be basically software applications that generate video content on-demand based on our personal data, preferences, and data collected from the services that we use.

Part Four: Beyond Movies and New Virtual Worlds

I went to the store and bought a new razor blade that Harper Shaw promotes and guess who sold it to me… Harper Shaw itself, recently I also downloaded him as my personal trainer and also as my personal assistant to my phone, my wife hates it but I can’t help his buzz are just cool.

How will future marketing look like if we have at our disposal a digital actor who does anything we want, he could be anywhere and simultaneously at thousands of locations, interactively responding to each fan/customer individually?

What if Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson could be literally in every mobile? In every UnderArmour retail store as a virtual salesman (using AR), whatever its digital form might be… your personal fitness trainer, dance teacher or whoever you will want. The possibilities are almost unlimited and I do not expect that the technology mentioned above will be used only in the film industry. I think that it will find wide application in different sectors and segments. Of course, as well as now, famous people simply sell more and in the future famous people could be also fully digital artificially created and perhaps they will be more successful than living ones.

Part Five: Me as a superhero or a villain

All my friends were honestly surprised to see my performance in the latest movie, I was also surprised by some scenes, especially those where I saved everyone, it is so cool to be an action hero. The next time I try to play the main villain, I wonder how a negative role will fit me, I am really looking forward to it.

When we will be able to generate on-demand any digital actors with an almost unlimited library of expressions. Why can’t we do things personalized to the point where you become the main star of the movie you want to watch? All you need to do is scan / digitize your body and face, record the necessary length of your voice, and the rest will be taken care of by the technology that can put any expression on your face and give the digital your own voice. Your virtual model can replace basically any character in the movie.

Who wouldn’t want to be a Batman or a medieval knight an epic battle of good and evil? Such a scenario can easily become a reality, in the future, it is quite possible that our digital twin will find a much wider application and maybe we will be intervening in our ads.

Part Six: Everyone can be a creator — everyone can sit on a director’s chair

What are you going to do at the weekend? I don't know yet, but I was thinking about making an action movie. I’ve had an epic idea in my head for a long time, what’s gonna be about, it’s gonna be really cool.

If it will possible to create realistic movies just by using the software, it is only a matter of time before this technology will be available to a common user, and the movies could be theoretically created by anyone without the need of a supercomputer or a large team of people. It is quite likely that there will be technology companies that will provide movie production as a service, for a modest fee they will provide you a software application and computational power. You will only need to set the “parameters” and the properties of the movie you are going to create.

I think that from a technical perspective It will be quite similar to the Google Stadia currently available for the gaming community. This means you won’t need powerful hardware because your computer is just a “control console” and the entire computing power is running on the server-side, this service will be available as a cloud application. It will be really interesting when ordinary people will have a tool for creating a professionally processed content that will be indistinguishable from professional movies. In this scenario, the only limit to what you can create is just your imagination.

Final thoughts

“Shared movie experience will be really rare and precious”

Although the previous text sounds futuristic and distant, the things I write about are much closer than we actually realize. All of the above mentioned technologies are already available, although they are not yet fully developed. But, if we take into account the pace of development and technological progress, we realize that these are no longer decades but broadly the years that divide us from their full potential. So what will the future of filmmaking industry be like?

The future will be different for each individual. We will see a huge increase in content creation on both, professional and personal levels, but the quality difference of these two will gradually disappear as a result of more sophisticated technology available to ordinary users. Films that will be created in the “old way” where will be performing real actors in real locations and with the physical props will be rare and will be the subject of film clubs. (We could compare it to analog photography these days.)

It is difficult to summarize how the future will look like, especially whether it will be a positive or a negative change. I personally perceive it as every big technological shift, which holds huge risks but on the other hand, huge opportunities as well. It is up to us how we will use the potential provided by this technology.