Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1541878
www.postmagazine.com 23 POST NOV/DEC 2025 VFX: AN INDUSTRY AT A TURNING POINT BY SIMON DEVEREUX FOUNDER & DIRECTOR ACCESS:VFX WWW.ACCESSVFX.ORG The VFX landscape is undergo- ing one of the most significant shifts in its history. The rapid maturation of generative AI, cou- pled with the growth of virtual production (VP), is reshaping workflows, creative expectations and the very definition of what the VFX artist's role entails. Generative AI is accelerat- ing the pipeline by automating labor-intensive tasks — from roto and clean-up to ideation and previs — freeing artists to focus on higher-value creative decision-mak- ing. Leaders across the sector have echoed that AI's role should enhance craft, not replace or diminish it. Meanwhile, VP, particularly the rise of LED volume work and realtime environments, is pulling VFX into the earliest stages of filmmaking. This deeper integration is transforming collaboration between departments and collapsing the traditional boundaries between production and post. Yet these innovations bring real concerns. Questions around intellectual property, dataset transparency and algorithmic bias continue to challenge studios and policymakers. With anxieties around job displacement growing, the industry must reinforce the irreplaceable value of human judgment, hands-on experience and the artistry required to achieve emotional, believable imagery. Technology may accelerate what we can make, but people determine why we make it. Hybrid pipelines, globalized talent pools and increasingly modular studio structures are enabling new levels of flexibility. Smaller, agile teams equipped with realtime tools are emerging alongside traditional large- scale pipelines. The skills required are expanding and so are the pathways into the industry. As new roles emerge, particularly across realtime, virtual art depart- ments, technical direction and AI-assisted production, we have a unique opportunity to redesign who gets access to these careers. The sector has long struggled with representation, often described as lacking racial, gender and socioeconomic diversity. Creativity thrives on varied perspec- tives. Our workforce must reflect the audiences we serve. Building that future means addressing cracks in the talent pipeline. This can be addressed via targeted outreach and mentoring to ensure underrepresented communities are inspired, supported and connected to industry networks. Recognizing transferable skills — from leadership to problem-solving — can help create mid-level and senior opportunities for people from non-traditional or adjacent industries. And equitable access to AI and realtime upskilling can ensure these fast-growing areas don't become exclusive or exclusionary. The challenge for VFX is not simply to keep pace with technological change, it is to ensure those shaping the future of visual storytelling are as diverse, skilled and imaginative as the worlds they create. The next era of VFX will be defined not only by the tools we adopt, but by the breadth of voices empowered to use them. What we're telling M&E companies is that if we look at the data platform now, you'll be ready for AI. When that one dev-ops guy gets something that's so cool, and it hits, and it's so good that they need to scale it up right away to the entire production, boom, we'll be ready for you. That's the message from Dell." Broadcasters will be among those who can benefit the most by using AI to analyze their media archives. "That's the one where people can see real value," he says of broadcast customers. Often times their meta data is limited and the only way to add information is to run LTO drives past playback heads to find out what's on the drive. "Often they only have very poor metadata in these broadcast archives. They might have air date, run length, and show title, and that's it, so you have to watch the show to figure out what is on it. But there's a couple of clever companies that are going out to these large language models that have been trained on the entire corpus of the internet. There's TV Guide or the equivalent, television newspaper listings from X years ago — whenever they stopped print- ing them in daily papers. And that kind of associated metadata is out there and searchable without actually looking at your tape, so you save the wear and tear on the heads. It's imperfect, but so is AI, right? There aren't enough interns in the known universe to log all of the stuff that's created at the pro level, let alone social media, so anything that you can do to watch it and listen to it in faster than realtime is going be huge!" Another challenge Burns sees coming with the adoption of AI is the de- mand for electricity. "What it teaches us is to consider electricity as valuable as data, because the amount of power that we're forecasting to run," he notes. "Before I even talk about electricity, we've seen a fundamental change in compute. I'm of a certain age where I remember you would count render nodes in 'pizza boxes.' One pizza box was one node. Then we went to dual CPUs. Now we're at 196 cores per pizza box. We've gone from computers, to cores, [to racks] and then data centers. That kind of growth in compute will have huge ramifications down the line. And I'm not saying (it's all) gloom and doom about electricity and cooling. You remember when the fiber optic boom happened? That was bad business for the companies that invested late, but all of a sudden, there's all this fiber in the ground that birthed the modern internet — for good or for bad. Is it possible that having a surplus of compute will lead to follow-on effects that we don't yet know? So even if it is a bubble, I think that we're building and we're learning how to look at things on a data-center scale. And I think that's going to be good because some of the problems that the world has are really, really hard problems." OUTLOOK Dell's PowerEdge XE9680 rack server.