Startup Company Arraiy is Building AI that Helps make Digital Effects

Companies like startup Arraiy are attempting to automate the process of making digital effects. The founders of Arraiy are Gary Bradski and Ethan Rublee. Both have experience with robotics and other tech related projects. Silicon Valley ventures and others that support the company have financed it with over $10 million.

This company and their endeavors are part of a larger effort across academia and industry, an effort to create artificial intelligence systems that can produce and manipulate images by themselves. This process will cut jobs in the industry, as AI will replace the specialists who construct these effects in the filmmaking industry today.

Creating digital effects is a dull process. Currently, masses of designers work countless hours separating objects and people from the background in raw camera footage for every single second of movie time. They digitally construct new images from nothing and then combine these with the real images, making the visuals look as smooth as possible.

Arraiy is building tools to ease this process. These tools can eliminate noise and mistakes from images, add simple effects, and even build extremely realistic images. Bradski and Rublee are building complicated algorithms that are able to learn design tasks through analyzing huge amounts of data, in this case, a decade’s worth of work from movie effects houses and some of Rublee and Bradski’s own work.

This new technology is still flawed. Sometimes human designers need to go in and make adjustments to the work produced. But it is continuously getting better. Bradski hopes that further on, this new system will generate the preliminary effects onto the film set, so the filmmakers can have a better picture of how the final product will look.

The goal is for tech companies to automate the tedious work that is needed to make special effects happen. And then filmmakers can use this AI to help achieve their vision.