Boz to the Future Episode 24: The Future According to Francois Chardavoine

Welcome back for another episode of Boz To The Future, a podcast from Reality Labs. In today’s episode, our host, Meta CTO and Head of Reality Labs Andrew “Boz” Bosworth, is joined by Lucasfilm and Industrial Light & Magic CTO Francois Chardavoine to discuss how technology is revolutionizing the entertainment industry and spawning new opportunities for creators.

With a 20-year history in immersive storytelling, Chardavoine highlights how the history of film is in essence a history of technology. In fact, it’s technology that often serves as a backdoor for people like himself to participate in the industry. Bosworth drew a parallel to Pixar Co-Founder Edwin Catmull’s journey into 3D graphics when he wanted to become an animator — and realized he didn’t have traditional animation chops.

From early visual effects to the advent of digital filmmaking and the rise of new, immersive technologies, Chardavoine points out that each step has incrementally changed how stories are told and how storytellers push creative boundaries. He notes that while the core construct of storytelling remains timeless, the media and methods continually advance, which in turn helps evolve our collective approaches to storytelling. As Lucasfilm and ILM Vice President of Immersive Content Innovation Vicki Dobbs Beck puts it: “Creativity leads and technology enables...but technology can also inspire” because the technology allows things to happen that just simply weren’t possible before, including entirely new forms of storytelling.

From traditional cell animation to CGI to today’s recent developments in AI, each new technology is a different tool in an artist’s arsenal, Chardavoine says, and the real strength comes from leaning into hybrid workflows. Chardavoine rightly points out that the film industry has been using artificial intelligence like machine learning, computer vision, and denoising for over a decade. And while leading with cutting-edge tech for tech’s sake can be counterproductive and do a disservice to the creative process, finding the right tool for each particular job and working within a particular set of creative constraints can lead to better artistic outcomes. And if a studio focuses on delivering the highest quality work on time and on budget and lets that ethos inform how they approach the use of technology, the risk of the process resulting in AI slop decreases.

Take The Mandalorian as an example. While everything begins from an unbounded desire to tell a great story, very real constraints — the release timing, the budget — quickly assert themselves. That led to The Mandalorian’s StageCraft technology, circling a set with an LED volume with real-time rendering that adjusted to the parallax of the camera. With much more accurate lighting during filming, you can find your shot in a way that may not be possible in a sea of green screens, which in turn saves you in terms of post-production.

Together, Chardavoine and Bosworth explore the frontiers of storytelling, particularly interactive and immersive experiences. Chardavoine, a pioneer in 3D cave setups and active stereo glasses in the late 1990s, discusses the challenges and triumphs of weaving art and entertainment using these new canvases. He points to projects like Star Wars: Beyond Victory as new heights of experimentation, blending narrative with gameplay, exploration, and creation.

Chardavoine and Bosworth also touch on the “undervalued” art form of video games and the historical resistance to new artistic media, drawing parallels to photography’s initial struggle for legitimacy. They stress the dynamic relationship between different media and how they compete for audience attention and emotion.

Looking ahead, Chardavoine believes that more traditional forms of storytelling like film and television will continue to grow rather than fundamentally change. He sees technology’s role as constantly pushing the frontier of what’s possible on screen, with a virtuous cycle of research and development, commoditization, and further innovation. This continual evolution makes storytelling more accessible and allows for even richer, more diverse narratives to emerge.

Film buffs will want to stick around for the rapid fire round, where Bosworth asks Chardavoine to name what he’d point to as the pinnacle of visual effects in movies — not as a practitioner of the craft, but from the perspective of a viewer. Spoiler alert: There’s namechecking of John Carpenter’s The Thing, Escape From New York, Star Wars: Episode VI - Return of the Jedi, and Terminator 2: Judgment Day (fans of that particular flick may want to check out Episode 23).

You can tune in to Boz to the Future on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and wherever you listen to podcasts.

Follow Chardavoine on Instagram and Threads, and follow Bosworth on Instagram, Twitter/X, and Threads @boztank.