Wren Weichman
VFX Artist & Director at Corridor Digital
VFX artist, engineer, and host at Corridor Digital (@wrenthereaper) who fronts many of the channel’s AI-in-VFX experiments — he calls the democratization AI brings to filmmaking “incredible” and bets NeRF-style tech will become indistinguishable from real video.
In his words
The democratization is incredible because it allows for more people to put out their ideas, for more people to tell their stories, to express their artistic visions.
I have a very strong belief that it’s just a matter of time before no one will be able to tell the difference between a NeRF and actual video.
Biography
Wren Weichman (born 1989) is a VFX artist, mechanical-engineer-turned-filmmaker, and one of the most visible faces of Corridor Digital, where he hosts the VFX Artist Reveals series and co-hosts VFX Artists React. Online he goes by @wrenthereaper, and his specialty is the on-camera stress test: taking an emerging tool and seeing how far one artist can push it.
The crew’s AI test pilot
That specialty made Weichman the natural front man for Corridor’s machine-learning experiments. He has demonstrated neural radiance fields (NeRFs) for asset capture and background projection in videos like “I try the tech that WILL replace CG one day,” used AI tools to recreate blockbuster effects on a YouTuber’s budget, and walked millions of viewers through what generative models can and cannot yet do for working VFX artists.
I’m doing a poor man’s interpretation of that very advanced effect. But it’s going to require a 1,000th of the effort.
Profiled by Freethink in May 2023 — weeks after the backlash against Corridor’s AI anime — Weichman made the optimist’s case from the working artist’s side: AI augmentation lowers the barrier between imagination and finished image, letting more people tell their stories. He was not the author of the “Anime Rock, Paper, Scissors” shorts that founders Sam Gorski and Niko Pueringer directed, but he has remained a steady advocate for treating machine-learning tools as part of the VFX toolkit rather than a threat to it.
Where they stand in the war
Who backs them up
Sources & further reading
Canonical record: https://battlelines.ai/topic/wren-weichman