Interview with Kim Davidson

A fun and provocative chat with Kim Davidson, President & CEO of SideFX Software. His 40+ years in the computer animation industry gives him a unique perspective on a few of the hot topics of the day, including the Metaverse and Artificial Intelligence. He’s personally won three Oscars. His company has won another two. But, they’ve only won one Emmy.

Watch: https://youtu.be/O9ainoo_7Sw

Unedited Transcript.

Jim Allan: With me today is Kim Davidson, President and CEO of SideFX Software. SideFX is responsible for Houdini, that's the name of your software, right? Leading 3D animation and visual effects software used in film, commercials, and notably video games, so everything basically. So welcome, Kim.

Kim Davidson: Oh, great to be here, Jim.

Jim Allan: How are you doing?

Kim Davidson: I'm wonderful. I'm normally got some notes, but you said just sit back and relax.

So this is Kim, unplugged.

Jim Allan: Unplugged, it's all, you know, it's all in your head. I know it is. So nothing like that.

Kim Davidson: Let's hope, let's hope.

Jim Allan: You know, I figure I invited you here to talk about the hot topic du jour.

Kim Davidson: Sure.

Jim Allan: That's French. Artificial intelligence, the metaverse and whatever else comes up. I figured you're uniquely qualified to talk about this as you've been involved in the development of software that's been used for years in Hollywood movies. Sure. You can jump in and correct me anytime you want. Creating computer generated worlds. In fact, you've won Oscars and at least one Emmy. So how many times have you been recognized by the Academy?

Kim Davidson: I've personally been recognized three times. Our company has been recognized five times when you count a couple more times on top of that.

Jim Allan: So and Emmy, at least one Emmy, right?

Kim Davidson: One technical Emmy.

Jim Allan: So just one Emmy then.

Kim Davidson: Yeah. Yeah, I know. All right.

Jim Allan: So we got to speed things up. I did win an award once. Well, you know, I brought it. Actually, this is not for this. I brought this award. And this is for, I mean, the Hall of Fame of the Film and Video League in Toronto. I don't know if you can top that.

Kim Davidson: Well, I brought an award too, Jim, but I don't know.

Jim Allan: This is just probably not as good as.

Kim Davidson: Yeah, I kind of keep it under wraps a little bit.

Jim Allan: Oh my goodness. So you just carry that around with you?

Kim Davidson: It's just a little bit.

Jim Allan: Just to prove, because no one believes it.

Kim Davidson: But you do the right perspective thing here, Jim. We can do a forced perspective. Yours is a little bigger.

Jim Allan:  It's probably a little out of focus, but.

Kim Davidson: Yeah, I can hold it nice.

Move it right to the corner there.

Kim Davidson: Where do you want him? Facing you, facing me, and doing the rotation thing there. How's that?

Jim Allan: Look at that. Yeah.

Isn't that nice? Let me just make sure we go off. So where is it when you have it? Do you have it at home or is this from the office?

Kim Davidson: Can I pass this to you? Because it's very, very heavy.

Jim Allan: I'll break it. It's heavy. I've heard it's.

Kim Davidson: Right on camera, right? Well, just break it. You know what?

Jim Allan: I'll touch it after. Anyway, let me ask you a couple of questions about that. You know, first we're going to put, we're going to play a game I like to call Sophie's Choice. Sophie's Choice. Okay.

Kim Davidson: I like games.

Jim Allan: Which would you rather win? An Emmy or a Stanley Cup?

Kim Davidson: I think I'd rather win an Emmy, truly.

Jim Allan: Okay.

Kim Davidson: Yeah.

Jim Allan: Okay. Which would you rather win an Oscar or a Larry O'Brien trophy?

Kim Davidson: Oh, see, I'm not. I love sports, but it's like.

Jim Allan: You go to all the games. I know. But you're not a fan.

Kim Davidson: I know. I'm a huge sports fan.

Jim Allan: I'm a huge sports fan, but you go to more games.

Kim Davidson: But I'm not the player. So it's like, how am I, how am I winning that? And what am I going to do with that?

Jim Allan: When I was thinking up questions to talk to you, to ask you about, I tried to remember my own experience as a fan of movies.

Kim Davidson: Okay.

Jim Allan: And computer animation in particular.

Kim Davidson: Right.

Jim Allan: Because that's your area of expertise. And then I saw a recent interview where you mentioned the same two movies I was thinking about.

Kim Davidson: Okay.

Jim Allan: So I figured I was onto something here. So a couple of watershed moments for me.

Kim Davidson: Right.

Jim Allan: Terminator 2. I remember the ooh-ing and ah-ing coming from the audience as Patrick Wilson walked through the prison bars. I also remember seeing the trailer for the original Jurassic Park. And it seemed, you know, it seemed like real dinosaurs were on the screen, right? Now, it's not your work. I understand that, but you were in the industry at the time, right?

Kim Davidson: Yes.

Jim Allan: What was your reaction at the time? Like, damn, they beat us. Was this like the space race back in the day?

Kim Davidson: Well, when you're in the business, you actually see all this stuff coming. It's like Jurassic Park's the one where, and Terminator 2 is the one where you, you know, Jim and the rest of the, you know, the populace says, oh, wow, what this computers can do this. But we were doing that and it was being done years before. And so it's not as novel to us. It's always nice that it's getting recognition by the broader audience. But we always knew this was possible. It was just a matter of time. In fact, with the Terminator 2, I often say Omnibus, where a company I worked at in 1985 and 86 worked on Flight of the Navigator and Flight of the Navigator had a Chrome spaceship and it morphed and it reflected the environment and it was computer graphics and it was generated. So that was Terminator 2 like three or four years before. So three, four years.

Jim Allan: So you saw exactly the same kind of animation. The trick, yeah.

Kim Davidson: Of course that was a character that morphed. Now we have a human being, but there's a few less frames in that one. And so, you know, it's, yeah, we can do that. And the computers were getting faster. Memory was getting, you know, cheaper. All that stuff was coming. So it's really cool that it was. But those were, you nailed it. Those were two breakout movies.

Jim Allan: So, I mean, Houdini is the name of the software. It's used by VFX companies such as Walt Disney Animation Studios, Pixar, DreamWorks, ILM, Sony, many, many more. For instance, one of the watershed moments for you, I guess, in 2003, five of the seven movies vying for the Oscar nominations used extensive use of Houdini. Am I reading like right out of your promotional material, right? So, I mean, you've done, so it's the animators use your software.

Kim Davidson: Correct.

Jim Allan: But different animators could work on the same film potentially, I guess, right?

Kim Davidson: So, yeah, it's like if you were, if I sold you 3D, if I sold you software to write like Microsoft Word, everyone can be using Microsoft Word. In fact, a whole lot of people can be working on the script with Microsoft Word. That's not what they use for script writing. But you get the idea that we sell this software to a company and there could be 22 animators at that company and 102 at the other company. And they might use some other competitive software. And they might work on just some of the shots and another company might work on some other shots. So, it's really, really been growing. And that was probably an early year because we were in no, Houdini was used in no movies. Then it was like one movie. And I used to track two movies, five movies, six movies. And then some of them are up for the Academy Award. I think the very first one that won the Academy Award was, it was Independence Day. That was one that we used a lot of our software and was one of the first.

Jim Allan: So, from 2003, some of the movies that are mentioned here, and correct me, like Harry Potter, several of the Spider-Man movies, right? Men in Black series, Black Panther story, Toy Story 4, Fate of the Furious, Spider-Man Into the Spider-Verse. So, I mean, the technology has advanced so far, right? Now, sometimes you can tell it's not real when you're watching a show, right? Like, for instance, on Game of Thrones, I'm watching Game of Thrones. And I figure, okay, they probably didn't hire 10,000 actors to be in the army that they're wiping out.

Kim Davidson: And training dragons is really tough.

Jim Allan: It's tough. Well, the dragons are.

Kim Davidson: Yeah, they're real, right?

Jim Allan: They're real. But oftentimes things seem really real. You can't tell. What you're watching is animated. Sometimes they just replace the horizon behind the actors or whatever. It's fairly routine, right?

Kim Davidson: Absolutely. Why would you want to build all that set and props and landscape and get rid of that telephone pole? You want to get rid of all that, and you want to put in whatever you would have built.

Jim Allan: So a lot of things are just done on a set with huge, massive green screen things.

Kim Davidson: Not even green screen for mid- and far-level shots, because in the end it's what they call rotoscoping. You just can take out some of that background and then layer over. I'm sure, you know, it's like you put titles over the top front of this thing. It's the same kind of idea, just layering video on top of, you know, or film on top of film.

Jim Allan: So I figure that kind of brings us up to the present in a sense, because there's a lot of talk about virtual worlds and computer animations, but, you know, it's affecting business. It brings us really to this talk of the metaverse, right? Which I don't know a lot about, but there's a lot of hype about the metaverse. I mean, Facebook even kind of reorganized their company to call their parent company Meta, right? So they presumably have made a huge bet on this idea of a metaverse and to billions, like millions of dollars anyway. So in layman's term, what is the metaverse from your point of view? Building virtual worlds or...?

Kim Davidson: Well, the metaverse is a place where you and I can do this, have a sit down and talk, but we don't leave our house. So we can interact in a social or a gaming world, but more like a social thing. We can also, if you combine it with what's also called Web 3, where you can like buy things so I could go in, I could participate, I could build things, I could move things around on this table, but it's all virtual. We're just living in this world. A lot of people think you need to have the VR glasses too. I'm not really explaining, I'm explaining what it's not, but the fact is you can actually participate and live in a much more virtual way than you're doing today. And some people would say it's here today. If you've ever been familiar with Roblox or Minecraft, those kinds of things where kids, they're living in that social three-dimensional world. So it's really a three-dimensional, you know, participating world, multi-user, multi-participant world.

Jim Allan: And you've been at the table for some of these discussions, like you're involved as a software company, right? So how would you be involved in these discussions? Like people coming to you for ideas, or can you please develop this as part of your software, or how does that work?

Kim Davidson: Well, our software is kind of naturally building worlds all the time. People are all using it, they're just not using it in the metaverse, in a meta world. But some games are getting there as well, like if you're familiar with some of the games where people come in and all play at the same time, the multi-user games. So a lot of those worlds are built, but not changing, but are built in with our software, with Houdini software. So in a sense, we're aware of all the uses, or a lot of the use of the software, not evolved. But they also say, do you want to change the software? Can you get on a panel, or can you be part of this consortium, or things like that? And it's not always me, obviously. We have over 150 people at SideFX, and many of them smarter than I am. I mean, here I am sitting with you, Jim, and the rest of them are meanwhile splitting the fourth dimension.

Jim Allan: You're out there marketing.

Kim Davidson: Something like that.

Jim Allan: Yeah, you can write this off as a marketing experience.

Kim Davidson: Well, we'll point our websites to your...

Jim Allan: Well, so I was at this presentation the other day, and it was with, I think, a guy from Sony, and a guy from, I don't know, Dreamscape, or there's so many dreamy names. Right, right. And they're top execs, so they have a way of just sort of simplifying everything. But one other guy said, well, because I saw virtual reality years ago, and wearing goggles at a trade show, and I said, okay, I'm in a classroom in Sweden, cool, I guess. I'm kind of there if I'm moving my head around and stuff. But he said the moment it all changed was when people started collaborating.

Kim Davidson: Right.

Jim Allan: Online, I guess, or it's like you're saying you're... So the gamers, they're playing with their friends. You always hear about all these gamer guys playing all night, and they're interacting, they're playing with and against people from anywhere in the world, right?

Kim Davidson: Yeah, and there's avatars of those people of each other in that space as well. So it's much more dynamic that way when you think about it, and it's not just them interacting with each other, but they can actually move... If they're building something for the educational situation, I can show you how to put that piece, fix your toilet, and talk to you at the same time, or show you how the software works or how they did this effect. We're in the same space, and we're interacting. So I think that's really what's important is to have the other people in the space and then have the space as dynamic as the real world is.

Jim Allan: So during the pandemic, the dirty word, the pandemic, people were using... Suddenly Zoom was a huge thing. QR codes came back in a huge way. But how do you see the metaverse maybe invading the normal work world as well? You talked about we could feel like we're in the same space as a colleague, I suppose, as opposed to maybe the way Zoom did it, and Microsoft Teams and all that with the little squares on the box. Do we feel like we're in the same office room together?

Kim Davidson: Yeah, but why? Ultimately, why? What industry are you in, and you need some alone time, or do you and I need to be working to see each other, to actually see each other in 3D?

Jim Allan: I guess you could be my client and or customer who happens to live in Sweden or something, right? Maybe it's the only way we...

Kim Davidson: Right.

Jim Allan: But it does seem like overkill. I mean, maybe the screens... Well, the telephone would have been fine, but people liked, apparently...

Kim Davidson: Well, apparently some people turn off their video, too.

Jim Allan: Well, when FaceTime started, I tried it out right away, and then, okay, I get it, but I never really used it much.

Kim Davidson: Right. And you and I were talking earlier, if I can see you in high-def 3D, maybe that's not what you want. Maybe you'd rather just have just a bit of an expression. I don't need to see that you're in your underwear.

Jim Allan: But the technology is there. The technology, because the gamers like to interact with someone in real time without any lag. So the Internet needs to be extremely fast. I mean, everyone loves high-quality graphics. So the bandwidth is large to get these huge graphics. So, you know...

Kim Davidson: Yes and no. I mean, when you prepare a game like that, you spend a couple of years to make those games.

Jim Allan: Right.

Kim Davidson: So that's the part of it, right? Because those games have to play in real time and look really, really good. So there's a lot of what they go, you know, like baking down all the textures, all the materials to make it run in real time. That's the gameplay. And the character has to be, the avatar has to be played. It's not the actual, you know, all the data in the cloud of the person. So, yes, we still are getting faster and faster, but these guys still have a lot of equipment. You see the boxes that they play with today.

Jim Allan: Yes, and the big chairs and everything.

Kim Davidson: And look at the equipment you have over here. So it's not...

Jim Allan: I'm impressed by the $2,000 chairs.

Kim Davidson: I know.

Jim Allan: I want one of those.

Kim Davidson: And that's not actually in the 3D world. That's just in the real world, right? Yes, yes.

Jim Allan: Well, that's the problem. I'm still in the real world.

Kim Davidson: And what about these chairs? They're pretty sexy.

Jim Allan: These are leftover from my parents and I've recycled them. So I spare no expense researching this show, this interview. So I just got back from NAB in Las Vegas. It's a huge trade show.

Just for the...

Jim Allan: Just for you. So I'm writing the flight off.

Kim Davidson: National Association of Broadcasters. Las Vegas had no appeal whatsoever.

Jim Allan: No, no, no.

Kim Davidson: No, all recent.

Jim Allan: I like going to Las Vegas because it's all about the convention that you're going to. Anyway, that's... Okay. You can get distracted by other things. I'm a sports fan, so there's the rooms where all the games are on simultaneously. That's cool. At NAB in Las Vegas, you usually get a hint at what some of the new trends are. A lot of it's marketing. A lot of the companies are trying to attach themselves to artificial intelligence. That's the buzzword du jour, as I said earlier, of the day. Interestingly, though, no talk of the metaverse at all. So I might have heard it once. So what happened to the metaverse? Is it dead?

Kim Davidson: Right. So out with the metaverse. In with artificial intelligence. In with AI, which is really, in many cases, not AI at all, by the way. It's what I'll call machine learning. But you're familiar with the Gardner hype cycle?

Jim Allan: Yes.

Kim Davidson: So remember there was this thing called Internet, and then there was big data, and then there was VR and AR and XR. So hype doesn't mean that it's not real. AI is real. It's here.

Jim Allan: The hype cycle. Right.

Kim Davidson: But the hype is always a little more than the actuality. And I think that's why you throw the metaverse out, because the hype is already being replaced. Hype's getting replaced faster and faster.

Jim Allan: So they'll change the name or something. Or it'll sneak in on a store.

Well, metaverse is still going on. I mean, people are still developing Web 3.0 and the metaverse and those things and all the laws that have to go along with some of those technologies. But you're not seeing it in NAB, because this is all about the next thing.

Jim Allan: The next thing.

Kim Davidson: The hype that's current. And the hype that's current is chat, GBT, AI. It hit the mainstream. Wait, chat, GBT, AI. The mainstream was six months ago.

Jim Allan: So did the folks at Facebook miscalculate? Were they wrong in making such a... They made a huge play, right? They changed the name of their company.

Kim Davidson: No, the metaverse is here and it's growing. It is a real thing. When the internet first came out, it was like, oh, well, this is just a fad. This is a fad and it'll go. And then people just sort of forgot about it. And then all of a sudden someone puts a front end on it. And it's like, oh, we all watched the hamster dance. And then we kind of forgot about it, but didn't make it stop. It just meant you didn't pay attention.

Jim Allan: It's in the background.

Kim Davidson: The average person didn't. And so the metaverse is still, or whatever we want to call this, the next generation of online. We'll call it meta because that's what was coined. It's still going. People are still building immersive environments that we can all participate in.

Jim Allan: It's just like what you're saying about the animation for T2. You saw it because it was happening for three, four, five years. Before. So it got realized at that moment, but you had seen the development of that particular trick for a few years.

Kim Davidson: And if you watch what happened after Jurassic Park, it's like the price had already come to a point where it could actually make money at the box office and pay. But you just saw a whole lot of directors go, like Jim Cameron was, in a sense, way ahead of the curve. But all of a sudden everyone else goes, oh, all the directors go, I got to do that. The producers are going, how do we get that into our next movie? Not dinosaurs, but computer. What can we do? Can we blow something up?

Jim Allan: Well, there's a documentary on Netflix right now talking about Jurassic Park in particular. What's that animator's name?

Kim Davidson: Steve Spaz Williams.

Jim Allan: That's the guy. So he's like defying his boss by secretly working on whatever you would call it.

Kim Davidson: Yeah, he and Mark the Pay were in the cave.

Jim Allan: So that was meanwhile, but they're also hiring and paying people to make real life models.

Kim Davidson: The Phil Tippett, yeah. So yeah, that's right. And Stan Winston.

Jim Allan: So it was sort of they're doing the real stuff and then they have this breakthrough on the animation side and then they basically decide to go in that direction.

Kim Davidson: So speaking of seeing that coming, it's like at Omnibus, which was several years before that, five or six years before that where I was working, we were working on walking and talking characters and then when is real character is going to be something. And then right after Omnibus went under in 87, I started a company and I worked with Steve because he had come out of Sheridan. So Steve actually worked in Toronto before going to ILM. So I know who the guy is. I know what he's capable of doing. I know what Mark the Pay, I went to ILM to visit and I met several of the people that worked there. Those are two of them. And obviously that was a little moment in time that they were in the right talent and the right place and the right time.

Jim Allan: So someone just...

Kim Davidson: But it was all possible. It's just they happen to be...

Jim Allan: Someone insubordinate enough just to do it.

Kim Davidson: I'm not taking away from their talent. Like I'm in some ways a benefactor of being in the right time and the right place and ending up with an Oscar for being in the right place.

Jim Allan: So at NAB, I saw a couple of very introductory type presentations about AI, right? Because everyone's interested in it and the moderator kind of divided AI into three categories. Just text, images and video. And then he would poll the audience, like what are you working on and what software are you using? Because there are things popping up for each. All the while, he's conceding AI is just now entering the mainstream. We're six months... I mean, everyone's heard of chat GPT, but now... It was six months ago only that it really started getting a lot of attention. So now you've called AI machine learning today and elsewhere. What's your definition of machine learning then? Because it actually seems... It makes it more clear to me.

Kim Davidson: Right, so what machine learning is you take a lot and lot of data and whether those are images or whether they're weather reports over a number of years, and you just scrub all that data and you look for trends. And then it's like, okay, I see the trends and you try to fit those trends. So it's like, I want to see... I have all this information. I've scrubbed this trends and I want to see an image. I want to see images that look like squirrels. And so you have this feedback loop. And if it doesn't look like a squirrel, you throw it out. And it's training itself. So this is a machine training itself to figure out what a squirrel looks like. Because you have based all these different pictures that are named squirrel, and then it can find squirrels anywhere in any picture because it's been doing this so millions and billions of times. That's machines learning how to do certain types of tasks or certain types of recognition. So then we think, this is crazy. I can say, hey, get me a picture of a squirrel. And it comes up with a picture of a squirrel or is a squirrel in this picture, yes or no? And it does it. And you say, hey, that's AI. And I say, okay, it's not that much intelligence. I mean, I like real intelligence. This to me is not real intelligence. It's intelligent people training machines to train themselves. So I sound a little jaded, but I'm not. No. But I think there's just a little, I guess I'm a little anti-hype, Jim.

Jim Allan: No, that's why you're here. I want the truth. The truth. You're here to tell me the truth.

Kim Davidson: Just to settle down a little of the hype on the show.

Jim Allan: So text, images, and video. So ChatGPT and other programs that are coming out, they can write your article or your essay or your menu or lay out your event plan, whatever you can think of. That's text. Everyone kind of knows about that now. With images, you can put together a PowerPoint presentation very quickly or create artistic representation of people of things. So I can say, combine, if Abraham Lincoln and Kim Davidson had a baby, what would it look like? And the image will come out probably Kim with a beard, but that kind of thing I've seen, creating art. With video, you can also write essentially an essay or you can say into certain software, tell me about poverty in New York. And then it'll go out and seek essentially stock images and put the story together. And again, like ChatGPT, there might be some errors, but it'd be pretty good if there's a weird image or you can fix it.

Kim Davidson: Human intervention.

Jim Allan: So that's sort of where AI is right now just for the normal folks. Here's a quote from the New York Times. If AI chat bots can seem eerily human, that's only because they have learned how to sound like us from huge amounts of text on the internet. Everything from food blogs to old Facebook posts to Wikipedia entries. They're really good mimics, experts say, but ones without feelings. So will that change as we continue to interact with it? Can we teach the squirrel how to feel? Be more human.

Kim Davidson: No, I get it. Can you fall in love with someone online that keeps coming back and giving you sort of real feeling? And there have been some case studies of that happening until they decide that it's gone a little too far. People abusing these machines get run away and people are starting to ask pornographic questions and things like that. So they take the thing down.

Jim Allan: That's actually an interesting point because they do with chat GBT, there's a filter in there where they filter. They won't allow you to do any hate speech or anything negative or as you say, porn. But that's an interesting point because well, who's deciding where that filter or what the filter is? So there's a human somewhere decided no hate speech. What is hate speech? So there's a human somewhere with a lot of power, I would think.

Kim Davidson: Well, the programmer who put this thing together or programmers who put it together, it's a runaway train in a sense. They have a black box and they decide, oh, let's scrub these public websites. Oh, by the way, it scrubs some private websites, but that was a mistake. No one knows. It's a black box. And so legal cases are just starting to get their head around. What's copyright? Who controls it? Who owns it? Did it only scrub stuff? Can we prove that?

Jim Allan: You can ask it to write music. Write me a number one song in the style of The Beatles. Who owns the copyright?

Kim Davidson: Who created that program to do that? And is it only Western stuff?

Jim Allan: You were a mathematician at the beginning. A lot of music is just math. So it's like the sequence of certain notes and chords please us, and the computer can be taught certain chord progressions in music are heard over and over and over again, and you can get a number one hit out of that. And the computer can spit out, in theory, a number one song, right? But who owns the copyright? You're right though.

Kim Davidson: Right, because it didn't just do it probably on theory. It probably learned it by stealing from it. Right now, it steals it on borrows from a whole lot of different phrasing and framing and sounds and that sort of thing.

Jim Allan: The Beatles stole from Beethoven. Yeah, exactly. They were influenced by Chuck Berry or, you know.

Kim Davidson: Yeah, no, it's a lot of fun. It's a lot of fun. I love to play devil's advocate on a lot of these things too. Not because, you know, I'm a naysayer. I'm actually like, it's the way you learn. It's the way you, you know, human test things. It's like, what's wrong with this picture? Is this a real person? What's the, you know, you train yourself to sort of figure out what's really going on here and is this art? Like you said, you called it, it creates art. I'd say I don't know if that's art at all. Like who's the arbiter of when even if, forget the copyright thing. It's a lot of stuff I see is like a toy, a play. It's like, it's not exactly what I would call art. It's a fun thing that people, you know, love to goof around with and say, look what came out, I got out of this. But if it's just going to get it wrong all the time, what are we, we got to think that this thing is going to have, we got to have our antenna up, I think more than normal. Did you see the article, by the way, in the Globe the other day where the writer went to chat GPT and said, hey, tell me about this guy and it was the actual writer, something he knows a lot about.

Jim Allan: Right.

Kim Davidson: And apparently he got the date, you know, the guy's, he put all the square brackets, all the stuff that was wrong about the guy. So he wrote a 300 word essay on the author of the article and apparently the guy, it ends with the guy dying and he goes, well, I'm still very much alive. So, but it reads perfectly exactly what you said earlier. It reads, it reads like the truth, but it's not the truth.

Jim Allan: Right.

Kim Davidson: So how do we know, Jim?

Jim Allan: Right.

Kim Davidson: Like this is, this is, this is, I think the antennas have to go up and that's why people want to pause on, on AI because we're just getting way too ahead of ourselves.

Jim Allan: Well, yeah. I mean, you're talking about, you know, real fakes, you know, what I would call real fakes, you know, they're, they're getting to be common. There's potential for misuse is, is, is kind of scary. I mean, they deep fakes freak me out. I mean, imagine a, you know, Orson Welles, war of the world situation. A lot of people were fooled by that. That was just a radio show because they tuned in slightly late. They didn't hear the disclaimer at the beginning. So they just turned on the radio and they saw, oh my God, the world's being attacked.

Kim Davidson: Right.

Jim Allan: But with deep fakes, you can see and hear an actual world leader on TV and there's words. It's all fake though, but it looks real. Yeah. We think it's real. So the potential for disinformation is great. Right. So I've, you know, even recently I heard complete, uh, just audio simulations, audio, deep fakes or whatever you call it. Yeah. Supposedly from Taylor Swift. Right. Disparaging her own fans for spending too much on her concert tickets. And it, it sounds like, cause they've, they've sampled her voice. Right. And they've, you know, enough, enough examples exists where she's going all my fans, like, you know, anyone who pays $300 and is an idiot and it's not my problem kind of thing. That was kind of the quote. So, okay.

Kim Davidson: So you're talking about, So how do we verify that? Like you just have to have your touch points at the end of the day.

Jim Allan: Five years ago, I saw a deep fake of Obama talking. I mean, it was something off about it, but it was,

Kim Davidson: But let's say it was perfect then.

Jim Allan: It was pretty good.

Kim Davidson: You might go to, you know, the, the, the, the CTV, BBC, you know, like, uh, the globe, like you have, you want the writers, you want to see if anyone is, if you can find three different sources of this, um, that they can verify.

Jim Allan: Who's got time for that?

Kim Davidson: Well, if it's important, if it's a world leader saying something, you just all of a sudden have to believe that, Hey, this world leader, where did I see it? I saw it on, you know, Instagram or something.

Jim Allan: So it's like, I say that to my wife all the time, though, it's like, okay, you just read something, consider the source. Like, where did you, sorry, where, where did you hear that? Exactly. I think it was, I'm not sure. I think it was on Facebook. I'm not, I don't know. Right. It just sort of seeps into your, your being. I mean, I'm not sitting at the kitchen, kitchen, breakfast table. I can't, I don't have time to check three sources. I'm trusting.

Kim Davidson: But if it's a world,  If it's a world leader, Jim, you're going to.

Jim Allan: But I'm trusting the Toronto Star.

Kim Davidson: Who's saying come, come, come to war or something like that, or, or please give us your, um,

Jim Allan: But do you believe everything you hear on, on Fox News or?

Kim Davidson: No, absolutely not.

Jim Allan: Which is, you know, in the news lately, I never have, but, and then, so if you're not trusting CNN, or some people don't trust CNN or MSNBC, who do you trust?

Kim Davidson: Do you trust me?

Jim Allan: trust you. Cause you're the one programming the software.

Kim Davidson: Yeah. But, but it's, those are debates are, are at a higher level and a more serious level than they've ever been. Like, you know, the, the, the, the local, um, guy down, the local shopkeeper, do you trust him? You know, do you trust the, the person you just hired not to steal from the cash register, but a trust level, and now it's just gone off the map with everyone living online.

Jim Allan: You got to trust somebody at some point, I suppose.

Kim Davidson: Oh, I definitely believe in that.

Jim Allan: But it just takes that once. Like, you know, if it's Putin or Zelensky or Biden or whoever, right?

Kim Davidson: And the information travels at the speed of him.

Jim Allan: Well, if it's, certainly if it's super inflammatory, right? Cause it just takes that once. Like, you know, we're being...

Kim Davidson: They're saying bad news travels so much faster than that.

Jim Allan: Well, we're being bombed or whatever. What do you, what do you do? So Elon Musk, Andrew Yang, Steve Wozniak, as you know, you know, the question that's coming, all signed a letter a few weeks ago saying that entire, uh, the entire AI community should take a, or developers should take a six month break. Um, is that even realistic? I mean, I could, I got a pen you could sign, sign it if you want to, is, is, is, uh, I mean, can we really, I mean, trust any of these people? I mean, they don't trust each other, presumably. If they sign something, there's still guys in the back room working on this stuff, right?

Kim Davidson: Right. There's still, um, maybe some of the bigger research labs and some of the bigger companies that have a lot of people working on it. They can say, we're not going to put it into our software or into our release software. We're going to pull that back or we're going to spend more time on with the governments at this, at this period of time, but it doesn't stop. I mean, you don't stop the world. Um, we're, we're still investigating at side effects. Um, ML, uh, we can use, um, or I'll say AI for the purposes of this. So what's that? How we can use it in our software. So, and, and we go to customers and they say you want to, um, do, we want to do this with ML.

Jim Allan: Sorry, what's ML stand for?

Kim Davidson: Machine learning. Learning machine.

Jim Allan: Okay, so.

Kim Davidson: Or AI. Um, so we want to, they want to do this, these things, and we say, yeah, we could, I think we can do that. One thing they want to do. So this is a, a concrete example that's not images, video or, or, or maybe a little off that track, but they say, we want to say a word like, I want fire that, um, in, in my shot. And we then will put that fire in their shot. Our software will put that fire in their shot, but it'll also give them the network that created that fire. We have a network of, of, of controls, and they can play with those controls to then further tweak it. So they want both, to match this one image, but it's not an image they need. Obviously they need a video, or they need a computer graphic fire, and they want to play with that with the controls that would be there. So it's like, yeah, we could do that, and then we have to decide how much we want to do versus leverage some of the, um, some of the engines that are out there. So it's a really interesting time, but we're not stopping because someone signed a letter, but do I believe that we need to work harder on the legal, the social aspects? Absolutely.

Jim Allan: Yeah, that's interesting. Just, I mean, just in my Instagram feed in the last couple of weeks, uh, I've been seeing ads for, you can hire, like, for your company, your corporate video, for instance, but you can hire an AI host so you can, uh, choose male, female, uh, younger, slightly older, the ethnicity of this person.

Kim Davidson: Yeah.

Jim Allan: You feed them a script, and it, so there's a host just talking right back to you, and I think they can do Spanish, so they can do multiple language. I'm sure they'll do more eventually. But the kind of cool thing about that, so I saw it.

Kim Davison: Yes.

Jim Allan: It's clearly a little fake because there's some little edits in it sometimes, right? But I'm sure they'll fix that. But the cool thing is, like, six months, so an onboarding video at a company, right?

Kim Davidson: Right.

Jim Allan: But maybe six months later, you need to make a change or amend it or add a, you can just add a sentence or two, type it in, and boom, it's done. You don't need to get the actor back to reshoot it all. You don't need to crew or anything. It's just, you add a sentence, it's done.

Kim Davidson: Yeah.

Jim Allan: So it's pretty interesting. It's not perfect.

Kim Davidson: That's the beauty, though, Jim, of computer graphics. I mean, to me, that's the coolest thing is that the actor goes home, but you've captured his whole body.

Jim Allan: Does he get paid once? He, she get paid once?

Kim Davidson: Exactly. And you want the younger them, you've got that.

Jim Allan: Blonde, Burnett, you know.

Kim Davidson: You create the younger actor, Keanu Reeves, and you've got him, and you're just doing a hundred Matrixes ten years from now, and you've still got the actor, the essence of the actor.

Jim Allan: What was that Scorsese movie, the really long one that played on Netflix where they de-aged.

Kim Davidson: Right.

Jim Allan: Everyone. Yeah. You know, it was Pesci and De Niro. They de-aged them, and De Niro's eyes needed to be blue. And if I wasn't told that, maybe I would, but I was all I could think of, oh my God, his eyes are blue, because he's The Irishman. Yeah. He's the Irishman, because he's supposed to be Irish, right? Not Italian American.

Kim Davidson: We did that on purpose, by the way, right?

Jim Allan: You did that?

Kim Davidson: Well, no, no. There's like two old guys who can't remember stuff, but we actually did, but we know that the people watching this are going, the Irishman! And they're just shouting at it, but we did that just to get them pissed off.

Jim Allan: Well, there's time lapse. There's the irony in this movie, though it went over 30 years or something. So in theory, the character of De Niro or Pesci, they're in their 40s at one point. Yeah. But there was one scene when there was anything physical involving these actors. So yeah, they can look a little younger through the face. But I think there's De Niro, it was like running to a store or chasing someone, but he's still got the 78 year old

Kim Davidson: We can do that. legs and back.

Jim Allan: Well, but they weren't, but it was a little creaky, I have to say.

Kim Davidson: I know, because they didn't spend enough dollars. It's all like, it gets better and better and better. You can't make a dinosaur, then you can make a dinosaur, now you can make two dinosaurs, now you can make thousands, now they can rip cities apart. You know,

Jim Allan: it's just physically recreate the actor.

Kim Davidson: We can track and get rid of a dimple.

Jim Allan: Of course.

Kim Davidson: And then, well, we can do it in a still frame, we can get rid of red eye, and then you just keep on going. So yes, eventually, you know, all the whole wardrobe and all that, but it's just for, it's five seconds, then it's a 10 second shot, now it's five shots in the movie. It just gets better and better.

Jim Allan: At a certain point, you don't need the actor anymore. As you say, Keanu Reeves is in the database.

Kim Davidson: They go into these places, Jim, I don't know if you've seen him, but they're like captured.

Jim Allan: Motion capture kind of thing.

Kim Davidson: it's body capture and a texture capture too. So they light it so that you get like perfect flat lighting so that you don't have any, you can get exactly the skin tone on there. Every lighting situation possible, and you get the whole point cloud of the actor. But then you can change that point cloud of the actor, the surface, and the colour to your liking if you need the young actor. You create the young actor, and you don't have to then track De Niro face in every dark shot. You just have De Niro act, move the 3D thing in the lighting, and it's all computer generated, all computer generated with De Niro maybe doing the voice or the acting, and maybe not even the voice. At some point, you give a pretty good De Niro, and we just change that voice through audio. It's crazy what kind of movies we're going to make, and we can make longer and longer and longer movies. Netflix is blowing the stuff up, right? Just the amount of footage that computer graphics can now touch.

Jim Allan: When you say that, I think of all the animators just working in dark rooms. Do they see the light a day? A typical animator would work how many hours a day?

Kim Davidson: It really depends on the shows you're working on. They love it so much. You can see I get kind of excited talking about the potential and the possibilities. They love it too much, and because there's so few artists and there's so much demand, it's like, hey, we need this show. We need this show. Can you do this? Can you do this? The owners and operators of the service industries that service the few big majors, they don't want to let anyone down. They'll never work in the town. They'll never get another shot, so they push. It all just goes downhill and pushes the poor animators.

Jim Allan: They're all very pale, I know, because they don't go out. They might be working in California, but they never see the sun.

Kim Davidson: Exactly, nor are they working in Bulgaria or Singapore or wherever around the world. That's another beauty that we can do more because the technology has gone around the world and we can work around the clock. I mean, not any one person, although I'm sure some people work around the clock, but the shot can be passed around the world if you like.

Jim Allan: Well, it's interesting. In my world, like YouTubers, you could do a shoot, like in Las Vegas, and you upload it to the internet, and you could hire an editor that's in the opposite time zone.

Kim Davidson: It's exactly the same.

Jim Allan: So while you're sleeping, instead of editing while you're sleeping, someone somewhere else is editing, and in theory it's done when you wake up. So it's this 24-7 world now.

Kim Davidson: Yeah, it's exactly the same. It's exactly what's happening now in creating these shots for these big movies. It's like we'll go where the tax credits are. We'll go where the talent is. We'll go where it's cheaper.

Jim Allan: So cheap and good, right?

Kim Davidson: Yeah, cheap and good. I mean, depending on what you're doing, you can probably get with a TV show of a certain style or thing. You can probably get away with a little less quality, but if you're doing a Marvel movie, you probably want the quality, at least of the computer graphics at the highest level.

Jim Allan: So I don't want to alarm you, but Toronto Star, I love these articles. They just freak everyone out.

Kim Davidson: That's the point.

Jim Allan: Toronto Star reported that half of AI researchers surveyed last summer believe there is a 10% chance AI will lead to human extinction.

Kim Davidson: How many researchers?

Jim Allan: Half of them, 50%. Half of the researchers believe there is a 10% chance. Again, you're the math major, not me. Half of the researchers believe 10% chance that AI will lead to human extinction. That sounds serious. Is that hyperbole? Are we all going to die because of this?

Kim Davidson: Hyperbole, no. I can't imagine that.

Jim Allan: This wasn't from NAB either, so this is separate from the hype.

Kim Davidson: Where do you get all your information?

Jim Allan: Toronto Star.

Kim Davidson: You're scraping everything.

Jim Allan: The New York Times. Kim, I don't have time to get three sources on this, but I trust the Toronto Star and the New York Times.

Kim Davidson: But see, this is where you go, and it's great you bring that up. The first thing I think of is, okay, how? Why does AI lead to extinction? Are machines building machines that can kill us?

Jim Allan: The machines win.

Kim Davidson: Do they also kill the elk and the deer?

Jim Allan: So are we supposed to trust? Mark Zuckerberg is my question, and Elon Musk and all these people with money.

Kim Davidson: AI changes society the same way having a mobile computer in your pocket changes society, but it does extinction. That's pretty extreme. That means that there's no human beings. To my definition of extinction, that means there's no human beings on Earth.

Jim Allan: That is what that means. The machines win.

Kim Davidson: Look it up in a dictionary.

Jim Allan: The machines win.

Kim Davidson: Well, machines win is different.

Jim Allan: Okay, did you ever see that movie Wall-E?

Kim Davidson: Yeah.

Jim Allan: Remember, that's essentially technology ruining the Earth, and all the humans are fat, right? There's no world left, and we're circling the world, and we're fat, because we don't have to do anything. Is that the future?

Kim Davidson: Yeah. The machines win anyway.

Jim Allan: You can always say no comment. That'll be the quote that's pulled out of this, but anyway.

Kim Davidson: Okay, let me try that. No comment.

Jim Allan: But the neat thing is I have animation software that can... We have to have clean before and after. I have enough audio of you now that I can make you say anything I want, so that's the neat part of being the editor.

Kim Davidson: I really did say no comment for no reason.

Jim Allan: For no reason. It's sort of an exciting topic, because I figure you'd be a good person to talk to, because you've been... Some people have just been around... I just met all these guys in their 30s at NAB, and they look at me and go, oh, someone from your... They think of me as old, and I don't think of myself as old. You've been around long enough, so you see the trajectory, right? So you see what computers could do, and your 386 and your 486, and then your Intel processor, and so you see the trajectory, right? And you see where it came from, you see where we are now, and you probably get a sense of where we can go, like that trajectory, sort of like the stock market, right? So there's dips and valleys, but generally it goes up. So what's the future, in your opinion, with all this stuff? AI, metaverse, whatever you want to call it, because a lot of it's just marketing, mumbo jumbo, right?

Kim Davidson: Anything else you want to say? Oh, by the way, what's going to happen in the future? Yes, yes.

Jim Allan: Well, I'm trying to tell a story. So we start in the beginning, this is the middle, this is the end, right?

Kim Davidson: Yes, first of all, I just want to say the human race will not be extinct.

Jim Allan: Okay, you're on the record for saying that.

Kim Davidson: Yes.

Jim Allan: No one will know if you're wrong.

Kim Davidson: And if we are, it won't be because of AI. It'll be for some other climate reason or whatever. But from a technology future, I think it's all exciting, but usually tech moves a lot faster than society can adapt. So I think that's really what's the scariest thing about technology is people do have to embrace it. They do have to go to NABs. They do have to try to keep young and learn about it so that they just aren't victims of technology. But actually something you don't know is scary, but something you kind of know something about, a show like this that hopefully educates people to go research a couple of these acronyms that we've thrown out or words. I think that's really the trick. Technology will be there, but I think society's going to continue to have a lot of problems adapting to all the changes that are still to come.

Jim Allan: So why are you still, you don't need to be in this anymore. Why haven't you kind of sold and got out? You still love it, presumably.

Kim Davidson: Yeah, yeah. Well, I'm definitely not your prototypical entrepreneur. I was thinking about that coming here. It's like, did you have goals, Jim, when you were little? Like, is this a goal I want to do?

Jim Allan: Not five years out, that's for sure, or 10 years out.

No, you never did. It's always, just the next week.

Kim Davidson: And I didn't either, but a lot of my friends had goals. And I guess I think by nature, I lived in the present. And I kind of do what's cool and what I think's cool. And one of the things that drives me is just being curious. Like, how does magic work? How does a bike work? How do I build this? How does a computer work? And so it's always been just one foot in front of the other. And as the side effects was, I was actually happy working at this company where computers could make art. I go, this is cool. Well, this is cool. I took architecture, but it was only cool for a little while. It's like, what else is out there in this world? And that's the thing I like most about this is there's always something to be curious about and something to discover and something to learn. And as the company was growing, I remember it's like, you have to give vision to this company. What's your goal? And I said to my mentor, I said, oh, I don't know, just have fun. Well, that's not really a vision. That's not a purpose. I guess it's a purpose, but it's not really one that a company would be the sole value of a company, just to have fun. You'd have to have a few more values thrown in there. Anyway, it's what drives me. I'm in a place where I've got a lot of smart people who keep me young and help me and teach me. And that's what I always love. If I leave that, I'm going to learn, do something really cool, but I'm going to do it in slow motion because I don't have this very, very dynamic company that I sit in, in a very dynamic industry. So I think that's really what keeps me going.

Jim Allan: Is that your mantra? I read that somewhere else. Stay curious. Is that kind of your personal mantra?

Kim Davidson: Yeah, it was a way for how do kids get into this. And I say, be curious. But then I got thinking about it. It's like, well, not everyone is. So I thought, well, maybe I'm just talking to myself. I think a lot of advice people are talking to themselves because different advice for different people. But yeah, I think it's a bit of a mantra. It's like, how does this work? I've always sort of thought about that and then taken the time to figure it out. Obviously, you can't be... It's directed, obviously. You could be curious about a lot of things, about the plants on this earth and things like that. But what I've got most curious and the things that change the fastest is technology.

Jim Allan: Yeah, plus every new project that comes up, I guess it's about something potentially new or different or not that you're writing movies or anything, but you're exposed to them, right? So there's always some new ideas coming along. Hopefully, right?

Kim Davidson: We created something called Flip, which we do all sorts of tests on. It's a piece of test software which was created in Houdini and is used for all our tests, and you see it showing up. But one thing we did do was we actually got Flip and we created a little giveaway. So I just want to give you, Jim, your own little Flip, which is our test object out of Houdini.

Jim Allan: Wow. Should I take it out of the plastic bag?

Kim Davidson: Yes, please do. It's a little squeegee thing. So when we go around... There's the camera. There it is. Yeah, look at that.

Jim Allan: Cool.

Kim Davidson: So I didn't bring you a Houdini t-shirt. I didn't figure you needed one of those or a Houdini ball cap. I gave you a little...

Jim Allan: You probably don't make them in my size

Kim Davidson:. ...a little squeeze toy.

Jim Allan: Oh, it makes noise?

Kim Davidson: Well, it's a worry. The worry thing. Squishy. Squishy.

Jim Allan: Especially when we're faced with extinction as a race.

Kim Davidson: So you can put that alongside the Jim Allen trophy there.

Jim Allan: Yes, my Hall of Fame trophy.

Kim Davidson: That's all I want.

Jim Allan: Well, Kim, thanks for coming. You're very generous with your time. I appreciate the trip out here.

Kim Davidson: It's been so much fun. So much fun.

Jim Allan: Has it though?

Kim Davidson: Yes, it absolutely has. Some of the great conversation that we had during... Your excitement with all your equipment got me going. Yeah. I don't expect you to do that with everyone.

Jim Allan: You know what? I give them a bit of a dog and pony show, but when I start talking about frame rates and stuff with you, I'm not expecting people to know... I think you could relate to 24 frames a second and stuff like that. Most people... Yeah. No. But a lot of people are just impressed with all the buttons on that one black magic device that I don't touch, of course. You know how I control it all? Software. You never touch the actual equipment. It's done on software.

Kim Davidson: Well, if they're impressed, just get some more things that do nothing with buttons.

Jim Allan: Yes. Just like me. Anyway, again, thanks for coming by. I do appreciate it. And again, thanks for making the trip out here, which I know isn't easy. Thank you.

Kim Davidson: Thank you.