Screen graphics of weapon schematics on "Demolition Man" coordinated by Paul Taglianetti.

Continuing the ongoing series of interviews on fantasy user interfaces, it’s my honor to welcome Paul Taglianetti. Joining the industry at the cusp of the transition to interactive computer generated graphics, his first major feature film was “Demolition Man”, with its visionary take on communication technologies in the year 2032. One of the first movies to use flat panel screens, “Demolition Man” shows the future of seamless video calls, multi-monitor information systems embedded in police cars, handheld clipboard tablets, automated public service kiosks, and many more. In this interview, Paul talks about the state of video playback industry in the early ’90s and the changes it underwent during that decade, the limitations of early flat screen technology for cinematographers, the impact that the Video Image company had on digital image creation, visuals effects and compositing, and how he sees the age of generative AI for the creative industry, especially through the lens of academic teaching. Around all these and more, he takes a deep dive into what went into making “Demolition Man”, as well as the transformative impact of “The Matrix” and its bullet time effects.

Kirill: Please tell us about how you got into the industry, what drew you into it, and what you’ve been doing since then.

Paul: I just wanted to work on movies. I had a background in animation, and I moved to Los Angeles in ’91. There weren’t a lot of opportunities at that time that were readily available. Digital effects had not yet taken off by then. Most of the visual effects houses that were in California were doing more traditional effects, and were still using optical printers to do compositing.

I ended up getting hired at a company in Marina del Rey called Video Image, and the first assignment they gave me was the movie “Demolition Man”. That movie had a lot of video and computer graphics in it, and video gadgets. It was a big job. It wasn’t my first feature film, but it was my first big studio feature film. I had done smaller independent films as a crew member, but that was the first time I had worked on a big studio film with a big budget and A-list actors. There were a lot of technical challenges, because there were a lot of things that were being done for the first time.

I worked for Video Image for about five years after that first job, working on a lot of movies, doing various jobs from coordinating and producing miniature effect shoots, to underwater shoots, to computer graphic jobs, video playback jobs and then eventually I left there to go freelance. I continued working in the movie industry until about 2011, and then I got my master’s degree and went into education. And I’m currently working as a college professor teaching digital media, specifically areas of graphic design, video production, editing, animation and motion graphics – at Antelope Valley College in Lancaster California, about a half hour north of the San Fernando Valley.

Left: Paul Taglianetti with the clipboard screen on the set of “Demolition Man”. Right: the video playback center on the movie. Courtesy of Paul Taglianetti.

Kirill: If you don’t mind me bringing you back to that time when you started, I was about 17 at the time when “Terminator 2: Judgement Day” came out, and then “Jurassic Park” a couple years later. It was just mind-blowing to see that level of complexity and realism on the screen. Was that the level of expectations going into “Demolition Man” in terms of what has been shown to be possible by those productions?

Paul: We were using the same software that they were using on those films (Soft Image/Alias). “Terminator 2” and “Jurassic Park” had just come out when we started “Demolition Man”. Whenever there’s a new technical innovation in filmmaking, other producers want to ride that wave. So there was a lot of interest in using computer effects in movies, and there was definitely that interest on “Demolition Man” to use current state-of-the-art technology to create the effects.

Most of the digital effects done by our team were played back live on set using special modified video playback decks. A lot of the computer and the CGI that you see in “Demolition Man” are done live, fed into flat screens on set. We had a lot less time to do them, because they had to work on the set with first unit and with the actors. You’ll see scenes in the movie where the camera will go by a screen or look at a monitor, and that’s done on set with first unit. So we had to start almost in pre-production building the graphics. And sometimes we were building the graphics after the camera rolled, and we only had a short amount of time to create them.

When we started shooting, “Jurassic Park” had just come out. Joel Silver the producer of “Demolition Man”, who later also went on to produce “The Matrix”, came to the set one day after watching the screening of “Jurassic Park”. There’s a scene in “Jurassic Park” towards the end of the movie where Arianna Phillips reactivates all the systems that had been shut down, and they showed the screen where the graphic zooms in to a virtual 3D interface where she turns everything back on – and Joel Silver really liked that. He wanted to do the same thing in “Demolition Man” for one of the scenes, so we ended up creating a graphic that wasn’t an exact copy, but had the same feel to it. So there’s a scene in the police station where they’re looking at a computer graphic to try to locate the villain’s chip, and it zooms in and has a similar dynamic.

So yes, there was a desire to make it look like these other films, but we had a fraction of the time to do all of the work. We had to create them so that they were ready to go as the camera was rolling, because the idea was to shoot most of the graphics on screen to save money and time. If you watch that movie, especially the scenes in the police station and some of the other sets, there’s always video on the monitors. That enhanced the whole feeling of you being in a futuristic society. There’s a lot of live feeds with CGI digital work in the film.

Paul Taglianetti on the set of “Demolition Man”. Courtesy of Paul Taglianetti.

Kirill: How challenging was it? It was probably right at the beginning of the transition away from video decks to live computer graphics.

Paul: The graphics were created on a computer, then we sequenced individual frames. And then we transferred them to either Betacam SP tape or three-quarter-inch tape. “Demolition Man” was shot with 35 mm Panavision cameras and we were using flat screens. These were brand new. They had just come out. We were one of the very first movies to have flat panel screens for video playback on set.

Now we call them plasma screens or LCD screens. They were not cathode ray tube so they didn’t have video refresh rates. You wouldn’t see that shutter refresh bar that you always see in movies when they don’t sync the camera to the screen. The discrepancy was due to the difference in refresh rate. Video refreshes at 30 frames a second, and film runs at 24 frames a second.

Greg McMurry, one of the founders of video image, came up with a sync box that connected to the camera and then, through a Grass Valley switcher and time base corrector, also connected to a three-quarter-inch deck, and that allowed the video to sync with the camera. That device worked with CRT screens, but many of the screens were those new flat screens – used in police cars and handheld devices. For instance, what you see in the scene where Sandra Bullock is in her car, having a video chat with Andre Gregory. For that feedback we were using Betacam SP tape, and it gave us a better resolution. That also did not require any sync box connection, because the flat screens and the Betacam SP were in sync with each other without requiring any outside sync pulse. Those were a little easier to manage because we didn’t have to worry about the shutter problem with the camera. All of that onset stuff was supervised by a technician named Monte Swann who was one of the top playback guys for computer graphics and video.

The crew of Video Image on the set of “Demolition Man”. Courtesy of Paul Taglianetti.

Now everything is flat screen, and sync boxes probably aren’t used that much anymore because we don’t normally play back to CRT screens. Video playback now runs directly off of laptops or computer setups, and then they feed the video or the computer graphic. They don’t need to worry about syncing the playback device to the camera.

We had so many graphics on “Demolition Man”, and we were on set almost every day of the shooting. There’s a few scenes that don’t have any video, like when they’re in the subterranean layer of the rebel people. I don’t think there’s any video on that, but almost every other scene has video.

We had this big setup in the boardroom of the future leader, Nigel Hawthorne’s character. We called them “vid heads”, which were flat screens with Betacam SP direct feed. Those plasma screens were brand new, and were never before tested on a major movie. They were fine as long as the camera was pointed directly down the center, but the moment you turned them left or right or vertically, the image would completely go away. That was tremendously frustrating to Alex Thomson who was the cinematographer of the film. He was one of the most respected British cinematographers, and he had never dealt with these devices before. He would get frustrated because he wanted to shoot Dutch angles and everything, and then the image would disappear.

We kept trying to tell him that this is a limitation of the screen, the technology, and that unfortunately, he’d have to shoot as close to dead center as possible. He felt that was very limiting, but there wasn’t any way around it. Of course that was 30 years ago, and now they’ve worked that problem out. They don’t have that issue anymore. You can shoot flat screens at any angle and still retain the image. But back then, if you moved it slightly to the right or the left, the image would completely fall away and you would barely see the image.

Screen graphics and video for vid heads on “Demolition Man” coordinated by Paul Taglianetti.

Kirill: I think they were pretty expensive when they just came out.

Paul: My recollection, and keep in mind that this was 30 years ago, is that a lot of the screens were given to the studio. I forget which manufacturer it was, but they provided the screens to production because the idea was to have them shot and promoted. We were in the early days, and flat screens weren’t commercially available for another few years after. These were being used in a studio film for the first time ever, and the company that manufactured them really wanted to promote that. They didn’t come directly out of our budget.

We did have to modify them. For the boardroom “vid heads”, we took those flat panels and fit them inside the casings which you see in the movie. They swivel with the help of a little robotic gear on them. And we had to put a neon coil inside each unit as a rear light to expose the image, because back then the plasma screens had no internal lighting. Without that internal light, the DP would not have been able to get an exposure on the “vid heads”. It would have looked dark. And even with those internal light sources inside those robotic heads, you’ll notice that when he walks around the room and the bid heads turn, you’ll see that the image completely falls away, and you can’t see the faces anymore. That was the limitation of that early technology.

Screen graphics and video for the video call on “Demolition Man” coordinated by Paul Taglianetti.

Kirill: But for the audiences of the time to see a video chat between a person in the office and another person in their car, or a video conference with 10 screens following your movement around the table – that wasn’t something that people had in their real offices.

Paul: There’s a funny meme going around the Internet about how prophetic “Demolition Man” was as a movie, and I find it hysterical. There’s the whole live video conferencing with multiple people in the “vid head” scene, but the funny one is the social distancing. There’s a scene where two of the police officers greet each other, and they wave their hands up front, and nobody touches each other in the future because they’re germaphobic. People point out that the movie predicted the lack of social interaction people have these days. Nobody shakes hands anymore because they’re afraid to get Covid.

As far as predictions in technology, like video conferences with multiple people or video chats in the car, those were probably seen as the inevitability of communication. One day we’ll be talking not into phones, but to a video screen. I’ll leave it up to your readers and to you, on whether or not you feel that’s particularly insightful or prophetic. I think that’s the natural progression of looking at technology and seeing which way it was going. It’s certainly not the first time that video chat has been seen in a film.

Kirill: Going back to the software and hardware that was available to you back then. SGI was pretty popular back then with IRIX and the beginnings of OpenGL, from what I remember. What did you use?

Paul: There were two types of graphics we created in that film. There’s the schematic flat graphics, like the one in the museum that showed weapons and their capabilities, or the anti-graffiti activation screen that you see when Wesley Snipes is at the kiosk. And then we have three-dimensional graphics, like when Stallone is being cut out of the ice puck, and you move around in three dimensions.

Screen graphics and video for the unfreeze sequence on “Demolition Man” coordinated by Paul Taglianetti.

At that time everything was done in Softimage. At some point Softimage merged with Alias and became Maya, and that is still going to this day, so you can see it as an early version of Maya. A lot of the companies who were working in 3D CGI were using Softimage at the time, and we were using that, working off the Silicon Graphic computers. Most of the work done on “Demolition Man” were done off of SGI computers and high-end PCs at the time. Eventually, that company did move to Mac to create graphics with high-end Macs, but I’m not sure we used any of them on that particular film.

Later on, Video Image moved to an all-PC world, not only for their screen graphic work, but also for their visual effects work for movies. I do have a comment on Video Image. You read and see documentaries about ILM, and they were certainly pioneers in the use of computers in filmmaking. There’s no question about that. But I think Video Image was also pretty revolutionary. It’s generally recognized that “Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan” with the Genesis thing was the first time you saw a 3D CGI full sequence in a movie. That summer is when we also saw “Tron” which also had full 3D rendered scenes, and those were revolutionary.

Video Image was formed in 1983 and their first movie “2010: The Year We Make Contact”, the sequel to “2001: A Space Odyssey”. They were creating 3D screen graphics for that film, and they were working on revolutionizing visual effects by using computers to not just create digital images, but also to composite digital images. They did “Bill and Ted’s Bogus Journey” in 1991, two years before “Demolition Man”, and apart from a couple of miniatures, that movie is done almost entirely with computers – including compositing.

They were also early pioneers of digital effects in movies, and they don’t really get a lot of notoriety for it. One of its founders, Richard Hollander, worked with Robert Abel associates who were generally recognized as some of the earliest pioneers of 3D computer-generated imagery. They did some of the earliest work in that field. All of the original Video Image founders were department heads for Doug Trumbull’s company EEG which did “Close Encounters of the Third Kind”, “Blade Runner” and “Brainstorm”. That’s where Richard Hollander, Greg McMurry, Rhonda Gunner and John Wash met and later they broke off to form their own company [Video Image] to concentrate on computer and video applications for visual effects.

They were definitely early pioneers, and I don’t think they get enough recognition for their work. They were way ahead of their time.

The crew of Video Image on the set of “Demolition Man”. Courtesy of Paul Taglianetti.

Kirill: Did it feel like the age of special effects – miniatures, matte painting, other techniques – was over, and that computers were undeniably the future of the industry? Or maybe it was a longer transition?

Paul: Definitely longer. There wasn’t an immediate transition from analogue, even at Video Image. When I was at that company, we did a lot of miniature work. It wasn’t an overnight thing where a switch was hit, and we were immediately all digital. That didn’t happen. It took many years for Hollywood to step away, and it all had to do with revenue, time and cost. When miniatures became no longer viable because of time and money considerations, then digital started to get a foothold. But it wasn’t a thing that happened overnight.

Certain people saw the writing on the wall. I remember I was at Video Image one day, and I was talking with Richard Hollander. At that time we were bidding on a lot of jobs, and a lot of times we would be outbid. We would lose jobs to these big companies, and they all had big optical compositing departments. So I asked Richard about why do we not have an optical printer department, and he said that in a few years, those things will just be paperweights. And he was 100% right, because that’s exactly what happened. Around mid ’90s everybody switched over to digital compositing. It was the most practical, and quickest, and most efficient way to do compositing.

Schematic drawing of the San Angeles map for “Demolition Man”. Courtesy of Paul Taglianetti.

The optical printing composite methodology and procedure is very involved. The optical lineup is time consuming. It involves multiple passes, and then you process what you have, and then look at it, and screen it, and repeat. With digital compositing, you can render it, and then look at the composite without having to send film out to the lab. Once people realized that it was a more efficient way of doing things, the transition was much quicker. Then after a time, it became more economically viable, and then it reached a point where there was only one VFX house left in Hollywood that still had an optical printer. They were the only ones that were still compositing with an optical printer setup.

It wasn’t an overnight thing, and it took some time. There were definitely people who knew the technology was there, and it was only a matter of time. Richard Hollander was one of those people. He knew eventually no one will be doing optical printing compositing.

Screen graphics and video for the San Angeles map on “Demolition Man” coordinated by Paul Taglianetti.

Kirill: One thing that stands out to me when I watched “Demolition Man” and some of the other movies from that time is the limitations of those screens in terms of color depth. How many distinct colors were they able to display?

Paul: It was such a long time ago, and I honestly don’t remember. I’m fairly certain that when we were working on them, we were working in a 10-bit color range, but I don’t remember exactly. I’m not even sure that high definition, as we know it today, even existed back then. At the time, the computer graphics were transferred via a sophisticated video transfer system, and after they were transferred on tape, there was a certain amount of resolution loss, because we were outputting off of either three-quarter-inch or Betacam SP. So you can’t look at the graphics in “Demolition Man” and compare them to some of the other ones that came out in the last few years. They’re not going to hold off. That has largely to do with inputting the images to either CRTs or very early plasma screens from Betacam SP decks.

One color-related thing that we had to consider, and it was especially important with the CRTs, is that in addition to transferring them, converting the video to 24 frames through a time-based converter, and then transferring the image to three-quarter-inch tape, they had to be color corrected and balanced for tungsten. Quite often the cinematographers would use tungsten-based lights, and those lights emit in a certain color frequency range. So you have your video that is coming out and being transferred to the videotapes, and we had regular tapes and then tapes balanced for tungsten lights. If they weren’t balanced properly, you would get odd-colored graphics. The color would be completely off, like overly blue or overly red, depending on the content of the image.

In every situation where we were transmitting or transferring directly into a CRT monitor, and the set was lit a certain way, we would have to use videotapes that had gone through a tungsten balance transfer. There were all kinds of things that we had to keep on top of, because otherwise the playback would come out looking all wrong.

And also, if something happened with the sync box or the Grass Valley sync generator on the set, which helps sync the video decks through the box to the camera, and it’s not syncing, then you would see a shutter bar. The film comes back, you look at the video monitor, and you see this little bar at the top jittering. We always had to keep on top of that, and make sure that we had backups, and that we had backup decks, and backup sync boxes, and backup everything. It was a pretty big undertaking. We had a great playback team, and that was all led by Monte Swann who’s done some of the biggest playback jobs throughout his career.

Screen graphics and video for the initial police investigation on “Demolition Man” coordinated by Paul Taglianetti.

Kirill: How many different types of cables did you see through those times?

Paul: When I was doing that work, all the equipment was owned by Video Image. I left Video Image around 1997, and about a year later they were purchased by 20th Century Fox. They were then merged with another company Fox bought called Blue Sky. For a brief period of time, they were merged together as one company called VIFX Blue Sky. They started to do bigger films, and eventually they dumped the video playback division. I believe Monte Swann took over a lot of their clients that came to them for that, and they became strictly a visual effects company.

Fox held on to them for a while, and then eventually decided they just wanted to keep Blue Sky. I suspect that was because the movies they were producing, like “Ice Age”, were doing well, so they felt that was more beneficial to them to hold on to Blue Sky. They sold VIFX to Rhythm and Hues, the company that did “Life of Pi”. Rhythm and Hues absorbed the personnel of VIFX, and coincidentally that was also right there in Marina Del Rey. They just moved over a couple of streets when they merged with them.

Ultimately, Rhythm and Hues went out of business as well, and they were also a pioneer in the field of using computers in movie making. It’s unfortunate we don’t have that industry in Southern California anymore. At the time I was involved in that industry, it was the gold rush. It was the perfect time to enter the business, because computers were just being introduced as a viable method to create effects work, and at the time there weren’t a lot of people. Now, the visual effects field is a global industry, and some of the biggest visual effects companies are all overseas. What you’re seeing now are smaller companies, boutique companies, and people maybe working from home. The business dynamic has changed radically as well.

Screen graphics and video for the initial police investigation on “Demolition Man” coordinated by Paul Taglianetti.

Kirill: Can you sometimes believe what is possible today, if you make the jump from 2024 back into the early 90s, ignoring the evolution of the capabilities that happened in between? It’s pretty unbelievable what studios are making today.

Paul: Yes, because they benefit from the advancement of technology. The time it takes to render images now is much quicker than back then. Working with people in another country and in another time zone, transferring data to them now is almost instantaneous, whereas before it might have taken a full day to send data down a T1 line to an FTP site. That’s why the market in a way is flooded. Every week a CGI animation film comes out. We have the technology and the personnel to roll them out with great frequency.

Kirill: There’s also another interesting aspect of moviemaking, as it is commercial art.

Paul: That’s the big conundrum with filmmaking, particularly commercial filmmaking. It’s a convergence and an intersection of art, commerce and technology. If you remove one of them, the whole thing collapses. If you remove the art part, you end up with garbage. If you remove the business or commerce part, it can’t stand up because it’s not self-financing. And if you don’t have the technology, you can’t make the images.

Screen graphics and video for the initial police investigation on “Demolition Man” coordinated by Paul Taglianetti.

Kirill: How much time in total did you spend on “Demolition Man”?

Paul: I was on that movie for over 10 months. We started in pre-production to begin the design and create everything, and then stayed throughout the principal photography. Principal photography on that film was troubled, and it went over their originally planned schedule. It was around five months, and then we had pickups. We were heavily involved in the pickups, because they had to get a lot of close-ups on monitors and other things that they didn’t get the first time, or things that didn’t look good and that we had to go back and do close-ups. Pickups went for another month or two.

Video Image also did some of the visual effects of the movie. We did the Life is Hell graffiti and graffiti removal effect. We did some of the battle scenes for the prologue pre-title sequence.

Kirill: Did you do the replacement of Taco Bell to Pizza Hut?

Paul: No, I wasn’t even aware of that. The graphics that we were given were always about Taco Bell. Tom Southwell, who also worked on “Blade Runner”, created those graphic designs, and they were given to us to create screen graphics from. I wasn’t aware of the Pizza Hut thing, because that happened later when the movie was sent to other countries.

Overall it was a longer job than on most other movies I did. Another thing that has changed since then is how studios do credits. You watch credits now, and they go on forever. There’s thousands of people. But back then, Warner Bros had a strict policy about credit time, keeping them down to about two minutes. I had done multiple Warner Brothers films, so I had to deal with this a lot. So in order to stay within that limit, vendors who were hired to do the technical work on the film were only allowed five names. Video Image had a large crew on that film, but only five or six people actually got a credit on the movie – and mine was one of the names that was gone. My name was on the crew list every single day for 5-6 months, but Warner Bros took my name out of the credits on the film. So the only way people know that I worked on it is if they see my IMDb page or something.

There were also companies they hired to do video games, and we were supplying them with copies of the graphics because they were putting them in. There were several video games that came out based on “Demolition Man”, and we were assisting with that. I think the only movie that I was on for a longer period of time was “The Matrix”.

Visual effects for “The Matrix”. Courtesy of Paul Taglianetti.

Kirill: That was about to be my next question. How was “The Matrix” for you?

Paul: That job was different, because it was a line-producing job where I was dealing with visual effects, not screen graphics. There was another team that was doing screen graphics for “The Matrix”, and I had no involvement there.

Kirill: Did it feel that you were working on something transformational? I remember that it took a bit of time for that movie to find its audience, and it really exploded when it went to DVD.

Paul: Oh, no. “The Matrix” was a gigantic hit when it came out. They did a Time and a Newsweek article on us.

There’s an interesting thing about its timing. “The Matrix” came out in 1999, and Warner Bros were concerned about releasing it too close to “The Phantom Menace”. At the time there was so much hype for a new Star Wars movie coming out 15 years after the last one. There was a tremendous amount of anticipation and excitement for the new Star Wars movie, so Warner Bros moved our release date up. That’s how we ended up coming out at the end of March, because they felt that the original April date was too close to the release of Phantom Menace. So we had to accelerate our schedule to finish the film on time.

But when it came out, oh my. People were calling every day to interview the visual effects supervisor John Gaeta on the film. It was a gigantic thing, and then, of course, we won the Oscar for visual effects, beating out the “Star Wars” prequel, which surprised everybody. It became a major phenomenon. I remember a lot of the press were saying that this was the “Star Wars” for the new generation.

Behind the scenes of “The Matrix”. Courtesy of Paul Taglianetti.

Kirill: Certainly for myself, I can mark “Terminator 2: Judgment Day” and “The Matrix” as the most transformational movies that I’ve ever watched.

Paul: They both had the distinction of being very good films, highly entertaining, and also had groundbreaking effects in them. And they were both rated R. It’s rare that an R rated movie becomes a mega blockbuster. There are some exceptions of course, like the recent “Deadpool & Wolverine” that became the highest-grossing R-rated film of all time. But statistically, R-rated movies don’t make as much money as a PG or a PG-13 movie, because their audiences are more limited.

There’s another similarity I noticed after both of those films came out. After “Terminator 2” came out, everybody wanted to do morphing. After “The Matrix” came out, everybody wanted to do bullet time. It reached a point where, after a while, those effects became passé. The challenge has always been for effects people to find the next innovative methodology, to advance the art, and also to get noticed.

On “The Matrix” I worked for a company called Manex. They are not around anymore, but at the time they got so much notoriety. It was this little company that was the evolution of a company called Mass Effects that was originally based in Lenox, Massachusetts. They were small and not well-known, and then they did “What Dreams May Come” and “The Matrix” back-to-back, and they all of a sudden got a lot of notoriety. When you’re innovative, and you have innovative artists working for you, you get noticed. That’s what happened with the crew on “The Matrix”.

The bullet time rig on “The Matrix”. Courtesy of Paul Taglianetti.

Kirill: I would maybe also add “Avatar” in terms of how transformational it was. And everybody wanted to do 3D for a few years, but it didn’t go anywhere, because everybody was cutting corners on 3D and doing it post-conversion instead of the real thing.

Paul: Right, because doing 3D native requires a very specific kind of camera equipment. You need experts in 3D cinematography. I don’t know if there are a lot of them that can claim that. It’s a different logistic, and there is a significant difference between native 3D and a movie that goes through a 3D conversion in the quality of the image. Perhaps that’s why it never took off.

The bullet time rig on “The Matrix”. Courtesy of Paul Taglianetti.

Kirill: The last part of what I wanted to talk with you about is generative AI. It feels like it’s the next big frontier in so many fields, including in how we teach the next generation – which brings me closer to what you are doing today. What are your thoughts about generative AI for artists, but also generative AI in terms of how you talk about it with your students?

Paul: First off, if I’m teaching a particular skill, I don’t allow my students to turn in AI work. One of the classes I teach is digital illustration, and I do not allow them to use Midjourney because then they’re not learning to be illustrators, and they’re not learning a skill. But it would be foolish to ignore AI. It’s the future, it’s happening.

I keep thinking back to early movie technology. When movies introduced sound, there were a lot of people against it, believe it or not. And when movies introduced color film, there were probably a lot of people against that, too. It’s difficult to stop change, and students need to be aware of it. They need to be familiar with it. If they really want to learn a skill, if they really want to become artists, they have to learn the art form. They have to be able to think like an artist.

If they just hit a button, they don’t learn anything. AI works by interpolating things that are already out there. It synthesizes from what already exists. What it gives you back is a computerized synthesis of what it is gathered and interpolated. I would argue that’s not necessarily art. But if you use it as a tool to help with a job, or do something where time is a relative factor in completing something that you’re being hired to do, it’s a consideration that you can’t ignore.

It’s a reality that digital artists and people who work in Hollywood are going to have to confront at some point. You can’t deny it. I’m in contact with a lot of my colleagues or former colleagues in the VFX community – artists and VFX supervisors. The people who create the images seem to be very against it, because they feel that it will put them out of the job. And also, it’s not art created by the human mind. It’s a computer program.

Where the meeting of minds will happen is when they try to figure out a way to not take human beings out of the loop, as they say in the movie “WarGames”, but to integrate them into the process. You still need humans making creative decisions. But we can’t ignore the fact that generative AI is here. Lionsgate’s already announced that they’re going to use it pretty aggressively in creating stuff for movies.

What you need to consider is the backlash to something like that. If you go to a movie theater to see the work of artists, and you find out that this movie was all kicked out by a computer where we typed a few prompts – they might walk away from that film. You might get a cold reception of that. We have a ways to go before we see what a sensible application of this technology is.

Screen graphics and video for the in-car displays on “Demolition Man” coordinated by Paul Taglianetti.

Kirill: Going back to what you were saying before, a lot of studio decisions are driven by money. If they can cut a few corners and save some money, they’ll go for it. I was reading your interview from 2020 and you were saying that VFX was never cheap to begin with, and it’s not getting any cheaper.

Paul: Well, good VFX. I’ve worked for people that have made incredible effects out of bits of cardboard, throwing some things together quickly. And because of the way they shot it and their skill with photography, they made it look really great. That’s what I mean by the human hand, the human quality of the art of creating effects.

But yes, good effects were expensive when they were miniatures or stop motion, and they’re expensive now. If you want to make something that looks great, you have to put the time in to do it. It’s like any other art form. Writing a good book or recording a good album takes a lot of time and effort. If you just press a button and something comes out, people will notice it.

Kirill: One interesting thing for “Top Gun: Maverick” was that the entire PR campaign was very much around the physicality that Tom Cruise was in there. They kept on hammering that it was shot in real time, in a real cockpit, flying over real terrain. That it wasn’t generated on the computer.

Paul: If you want to look at a movie that has great effects, and of course it was in the pre-digital age, look at James Cameron’s “Aliens” and the amazing work that Stan Winston and Robert and Dennis Skotak did on it. Almost all the effects on that movie, with the exception of a few optical shots, were done in camera. They were big on using rear and front projection back then, and you see a lot of that in that film. They saved a tremendous amount of money by not having to do optical composites. That movie is a masterclass for producing an amazing working film on a limited budget. That film’s budget was about $18M, and for a movie done back in 1986, that was quite an achievement to bring something that looked that good in for that price tag. It was largely due to coming up with innovative yet inexpensive ways of executing the effects in that film. If you’re going to talk about non-digital work on a movie that looks great, that’s a great film to look at.

Screen graphics and video for the in-car displays on “Demolition Man” coordinated by Paul Taglianetti.

Kirill: What’s your message to this next generation of digital artists and filmmakers, your students that you are shepherding into the industry?

Paul: I’m not sure I would necessarily say I’m shepherding them into the industry. I like to think of it as I’m giving them tools to make their own art.

What I would say to anybody that I’m training or, or anybody I’m working with in an educational form – don’t wait for somebody to let you make art. Make your own opportunities. We’re definitely in a situation right now, at least economically, in terms of media, where there aren’t necessarily a lot of opportunities, particularly at the film production. We’ve seen mass migration of visual effects companies out of, not just California, but the United States.

That doesn’t mean that students learning digital media or computer art can’t have opportunities. There are a lot of opportunities. The real challenge for students now is to make those opportunities for themselves. I would say don’t wait for somebody to hand you an opportunity. Make the opportunity yourself.

Screen graphics and video for the Compuchat kiosk on “Demolition Man” coordinated by Paul Taglianetti.

There are a lot of students doing that through creating their own online media, creating their own digital content, their own ways of generating revenue. I have a lot of students who’ve made their own films and won awards in film contests and have created opportunities that way. So don’t get a degree and then wait for somebody to give you a call. Make the opportunity happen for you.

I realize that it’s a tall order. Everything that we do now relates directly to digital media, to visual media. Our cell phones, iPads, computers, television – everything is about visual media now. Someone has to create that content, so the opportunities are there. If film doesn’t seem like a viable way to get in, find some other way to be creative. Create your own opportunities. That’s the best thing that someone just coming out of school can do. That’s what I try to convey to my students. Don’t wait for someone to let you be creative.

Paul Taglianetti on the set of “Demolition Man”. Courtesy of Paul Taglianetti.

And here I’d like to thank Paul Taglianetti for taking the time out of his schedule to talk with me about his work, and for sharing the supporting materials for the interview. You can find Paul on LinkedIn, DeviantArt, and Facebook. And if you’re interested to read additional interviews about the wonderful world of screen graphics and user interfaces for film and TV, click here for more.