Google Uses AI to Reimagine The Wizard of Oz (and Maybe the Future of Hollywood)

This past week, a closed group of attendees at a private Google event got a first look at an ambitious project that has been in the works for nearly a year to digitally remaster the original 1939 footage from the film The Wizard of Oz and somehow make it fit onto the 16k digital screens of The Sphere in Las Vegas. While the show doesn’t officially open to the public until late August, the fascinating backstory of how the team of technologists and artists managed to do it was just shared on Google’s blog:

“For all the powerful new technology at play, one of the biggest breakthroughs comes from following the traditions of cinema: having plenty of extra material to work with. In addition to old footage, the team scoured archives to build a vast collection of supplementary material, such as the shooting script, production illustrations, photographs, set plans and scores.

The Google teams and their partners developed an AI-based “super resolution” tool to turn those tiny celluloid frames from 1939 into ultra-ultra-high-definition imagery that will pop inside Sphere. Then, the teams perform AI outpainting to expand the scope of scenes to both fill the space and fill in the gaps created by camera cuts and framing limitations. Finally, through performance generation, they’re incorporating composites of those famed performances into the expanded environments.”

The potential of this “outpainting” technique is more than just upscaling past content to be see on a new screen in a sort of remastering exercise. What’s really interesting is how technologists might partner with creators and the movie studios to access never-before-released footage and utilize that to truly enhance the original films to make them something new, different and immersive. As long as they get permission, involve the original creators and don’t steal the content—this could be a win for everyone.