Lights, AI, Action: Wonder Dynamics's Tye Sheridan

**Sam Ransbotham** (0:02)
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Job loss from AI gets lots of attention because increasingly capable machines can do more and more every day. But these increasing AI capabilities can also help create jobs.
On today's episode, learn how one Hollywood actor is using his industry knowledge to help creators without massive Hollywood budgets.

**Tye Sheridan** (1:19)
I'm Tye Sheridan from Wonder Dynamics, and you're listening to Me, Myself, and AI.

**Sam Ransbotham** (1:24)
Welcome to Me, Myself, and AI, a podcast on artificial intelligence in business. Each episode, we introduce you to someone innovating with AI.
I'm Sam Ransbotham, Professor of Analytics at Boston College. I'm also the AI and Business Strategy guest editor at MIT Sloan Management Review.

**Shervin Khodabandeh** (1:42)
And I'm Shervin Khodabandeh, senior partner with BCG and one of the leaders of our AI business. Together, MIT SMR and BCG have been researching and publishing on AI since 2017, interviewing hundreds of practitioners and surveying thousands of companies on what it takes to build and to deploy and scale AI capabilities and really transform the way organizations operate.

**Sam Ransbotham** (2:09)
Hi, everybody. Today, Shervin and I are pleased to be joined by Tye Sheridan, co-founder and president of Wonder Dynamics.
But you may be more familiar with Tye from films like Ready Player One and X-Men Apocalypse and Mud. I did my homework by watching movies over the weekend here. Tye, thanks for taking the time to talk with us. Let's get started.

**Tye Sheridan** (2:29)
Thanks so much for having me. And thanks for doing some homework on me, apparently.

**Sam Ransbotham** (2:33)
Well, the homework was easier than usual. Although, I mean, some of the homework involved looking at patents that you filed, which was something I wasn't expecting.

**Tye Sheridan** (2:41)
Oh, really?

**Sam Ransbotham** (2:42)
Maybe we can get into that too a little bit later.
But if we think about a movie like Ready Player One, there's clearly a bunch of AI in the content of that movie. But that's not what we're focusing on here. Tell us about Wonder Dynamics. What's going on with that?

**Tye Sheridan** (2:56)
Wonder Dynamics is a company that I started with a friend of mine, Nikola Todorovic. Nikola kind of comes from a background of visual effects. I was a visual effects artist and then later turned supervisor and was a filmmaker as well. For folks listening who don't know who I am, I kind of came up through the world of film as an actor. Got involved in films from a really early age and fell in love with it. But I was always completely obsessed with filmmaking technology and the entire process.
When I met Nikola, we met working on a very small film called Last Days in the Desert. This was over 10 years ago.
And we were both kind of wanting to make our own films one day and knew, you know, we wanted to make big films and knew that, you know, we didn't have the budget to do so, right? And so we really kind of started collaborating together and started developing projects. And then that's when we realized, oh, wow, this is going to cost $150 million. Where are we going to get a check for this?
And so that's really where Wonder Dynamics was born, really out of our frustration of trying to make big films and not necessarily having the budget. So Wonder Dynamics' entire mission is to enable indie filmmakers anywhere in the world to make studio-level movies with CG effects, but on an indie budget. We do that by using a suite of AI machine learning models running in a platform, which is our flagship platform, called Wonder Studio, which we launched back in July. Wonder Studio is an AI-driven VFX studio. You upload any 2D video and you can extract a lot of data out of that video from 2D pose and the lighting in the scene to the noise and the way your camera is moving. There's 25-plus machine learning models running in the background. Then we take all that data and we enable it to be exported into 3D software so that artists can continue working in the traditional softwares that they are used to working across the industry.