…Amazon has a plan to ensure that the new 4K Select stick will launch with most of the apps customers expect from such hardware when it goes on sale later this month: It will simply run Android versions of popular apps that haven’t been ported to Vega yet in the cloud, and stream them to the Select stick.

I decided very early on to use the bare minimum of equipment: no artificial lighting outside during the day, no bounce cards, no overhead frames, no diffusion. We picked most of our roads running east to west, so we would start shooting in the morning and be back-lit until about 11am. So, we would shoot everything looking east in the morning, then start doing some profile work in the middle of the day and, when the sun was a little higher, we’d do some wider shots. Then, as the sun came around, we would go behind the guys and start shooting. The difficulty was in keeping these shots moving for, at times, five or six pages. I think the longest scene we did was seven pages, and we would shoot them top to bottom. We had these two electric vehicles—one that had a jib arm and the other a telescopic arm with a stabilized head—and would just go traveling.

We had two electric vehicles that had the cameras [on] them. We would always shoot with two cameras. One would be a little wider and one a little closer, or it would be two overs, or one would be a profile and one would be straight on. Then we had a video village and sound cart. Francis, myself and one of the producers were in another golf cart. We built this thing that we could put two monitors in for us that was blacked out where we had video playback as well. It got very hot in there at times in the summer in Manitoba. We would get the convoy going, move forward and travel the whole scene. Then as we landed at Point B, we would all get out of the vehicles and walk back with the actors.

A key challenge is seamlessly blending hand-painted elements, photographs and 3D renders – especially when the shot is animated with camera movement and parallax, according to Mueller. “Artists often rely on projection mapping and multi-pass renders to achieve the desired result. Making a painting look photorealistic while aligning with the film’s or game’s artistic direction is critical. It must feel like an organic part of the world, with lighting, camera angle and mood all perfectly matched.” Mueller notes, “As visual effects increasingly shift toward 3D asset-driven, procedural systems constrained by budget, the need for 2.5D-style matte painting has become more important than ever. Matte painters can work independently, without relying on other departments, allowing for greater efficiency and significant savings in both time and cost for productions.”

We articulate a vision of artificial intelligence (AI) as normal technology. To view AI as normal is not to understate its impact—even transformative, general-purpose technologies such as electricity and the internet are “normal” in our conception. But it is in contrast to both utopian and dystopian visions of the future of AI which have a common tendency to treat it akin to a separate species, a highly autonomous, potentially superintelligent entity.

Miller was reluctant to get in a debate about what AI can or can’t do, because it might be able to do something that we don’t even know about yet.