Google DeepMind and Google Cloud teamed up with Sphere Studios, Magnopus, Warner Bros, and others to recreate the 86-year-old classic The Wizard of Oz for the colossal 160,000-square-foot screen fitted at the Sphere entertainment arena in Las Vegas.
The Wizard of Oz was a feature film released in 1939 celebrated for using Technicolor. It used a three-strip Technicolor 35mm motion picture camera to make the film's vibrant colors like the yellow brick road and emerald city.
In a blog post, Google said it used "specially tuned" versions of Veo, Imagen, and Gemini generative AI tools for the job. Multiple Google teams and partners developed a new AI-based "super resolution" tool to transform tiny celluloid frames from 1939 into "ultra-ultra-high definition" imagery that will pop inside Sphere.
It's worth noting that the Las Vegas Sphere features a massive 16K LED screen, the highest-resolution screen in the world to date. The screen wraps around the interior of the spherical space, where a sitting audience of 17,600 can watch the content being played.
The teams had the original 102-minute film to work with and sourced archives of shooting script, production illustrations, photographs, set plans, and scores as supplementary material.
Using a process known as fine-tuning, all of the material was used to train Veo and Gemini on specific details of original characters, their environments, and other production elements like camera focal lengths for particular scenes.
One of the complexities Google and other teams dealt with was magnifying the original grainy images to fit the Sphere’s 16K x 16K resolution. "Not that the team can simply enter a few AI prompts, click their collective heels and call it a day," it said.
Traditional films use camera cuts to remove characters from specific scenes. However, the Sphere experience requires all elements to be together in hyper-realistic detail.
While Google could have used conventional CGI to handle the scaling issue, it said that effectively filling out the rest of the scenes wasn't a cakewalk. The teams performed AI outpainting to extend backgrounds and digitally recreate existing characters who would otherwise not appear on the same screen.
"The team developed innovative storytelling techniques that allow multiple characters to remain on screen for extended periods, even when traditional editing would have dictated cuts. This enhances the audience's immersion, making them feel like they were part of the epic journey," a press release said.
Google Cloud offered a highly scalable and AI-optimized infrastructure to handle the massive data and computational demand of the movie project. Over 1.2 petabytes of data have been processed throughout the project to date.
The project invited thousands of researchers, programmers, VFX artists, archivists, and producers from Google and its partners. They worked for months to reconceptualize the 1939 classic using AI, traditional VFX, and film techniques. The Wizard of Oz will arrive at the Las Vegas Sphere on August 28 this year.
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