Method Studios, a subsidiary of Deluxe Entertainment Services Group Inc., has significantly expanded its New York presence in order to meet growing demand in the market for high-end visual effects work for feature films and commercials. The company is looking to further tap into the growing number of New York-based features, having already delivered graphics and VFX for such films as The Avengers, Wrath of the Titans and Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter.
Stuart Robinson, formerly executive producer at Smoke & Mirrors, will be at the helm of Method’s NY operation as exec producer. And Dan Seddon has been promoted to serve as creative director, relocating to the Big Apple from L.A. Also moving over from Method’s L.A. facility to the N.Y. shop are eight other artists.
Method continues to maintain its feature and commercial VFX operations in L.A., NY, Vancouver, London and Sydney.
Robinson brings to Method decades of experience developing and executing technical and creative solutions at major VFX houses in the U.K. and the U.S. He eventually combined those talents with his abilities to collaborate with clients and explain complex procedures in straightforward terms, ultimately supervising the production of many commercial and new media projects from pre-production through to delivery.
Seddon joined Method in Los Angeles as a VFX supervisor in 2009, bringing experience that included award-winning creature creation and other CGI work. Seddon’s work has landed him three Visual Effects Society (VES) Awards and two additional nominations, as well as accolades from BAFTA, Cannes Lions and many others. While at Method in Los Angeles, Seddon has worked on a great many VFX-intensive features, including Let Me In, Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides” and he led the CG team on Wrath of the Titans.
In 2024, Artificial Intelligence Was About Putting AI Tools To Work
If 2023 was a year of wonder about artificial intelligence, 2024 was the year to try to get that wonder to do something useful without breaking the bank. There was a "shift from putting out models to actually building products," said Arvind Narayanan, a Princeton University computer science professor and co-author of the new book "AI Snake Oil: What Artificial Intelligence Can Do, What It Can't, and How to Tell The Difference." The first 100 million or so people who experimented with ChatGPT upon its release two years ago actively sought out the chatbot, finding it amazingly helpful at some tasks or laughably mediocre at others. Now such generative AI technology is baked into an increasing number of technology services whether we're looking for it or not — for instance, through the AI-generated answers in Google search results or new AI techniques in photo editing tools. "The main thing that was wrong with generative AI last year is that companies were releasing these really powerful models without a concrete way for people to make use of them," said Narayanan. "What we're seeing this year is gradually building out these products that can take advantage of those capabilities and do useful things for people." At the same time, since OpenAI released GPT-4 in March 2023 and competitors introduced similarly performing AI large language models, these models have stopped getting significantly "bigger and qualitatively better," resetting overblown expectations that AI was racing every few months to some kind of better-than-human intelligence, Narayanan said. That's also meant that the public discourse has shifted from "is AI going to kill us?" to treating it like a normal technology, he said. AI's sticker shock On quarterly earnings... Read More