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The Wizard of Oz bewitches Las Vegas o Classic film from 1939 returns, enhanced by AI W HEN The Wizard of Oz at Sphere opens off the Las Vegas Strip on Thursday, audiences

will experience the 1939 film classic in a way its creators probably never thought possible. People will find themselves in the eye of the swirling tornado that rips Dorothy’s Kansas farmhouse off its moorings and hurtles it onto Munchkinland. The film has been enhanced to fill a 160,000 sq ft wall of LED panels that spans three (American) football fields, encircling the audience and reaching 22 stories high, as 750-horsepower fans kick up wind and debris to simulate the twister. The Wizard of Oz marks one of the most significant partnerships between a studio and technology company to use artificial intelligence (AI) to forge a new media experience. “It definitely represents a really meaningful milestone in AI-human creative collaboration. “I think it will set a precedent on how we reimagine culturally significant media,” said CAA immersive arts and emerging technologies agent Thao Nguyen. Bringing classic back Bringing Dorothy and the Wicked Witch (of the West) to the massive Sphere, a globe-shaped entertainment venue featuring advanced technology, took two years. It was brought together by its creative team, Warner Bros Discovery executives, Google’s DeepMind researchers, academics and visual effects artists, which constitutes to more than 2,000 people in all. The development occurred during intense apprehension over AI’s impact on jobs in Hollywood and the desire to preserve human creativity. Some visual effects companies initially contacted to work on the project declined because they were not permitted to work with AI at the time. The Wizard of Oz at Sphere drew

A display of 50-foot-long legs and 22-foot-tall ruby slippers, a promotion for The Wizard of Oz at Sphere , in Las Vegas.

Symbolically, the team chose a classic film that was a technical marvel of its time. While not the first movie to use Technicolor, The Wizard of Oz ’s dramatic transition from sepia tones to hyper-saturated colour marked a cinematic milestone. AI as last resort Before turning over one of the world’s most important entertainment properties, Warner Bros set strict ground rules. Google could train its generative AI models on each major actor to reproduce their performances, but the data would remain the studio’s property.

to be,” said Buzz Hays, a veteran film producer who leads Google Cloud’s entertainment industry solutions group. The project began in 2023 with Sphere executives discussing which project would push the technological boundaries of the venue that had already hosted U2 and Darren Aronofsky’s Postcard from Earth . The Wizard of Oz quickly topped the list as a familiar, beloved film well-suited for the Sphere’s enormous canvas, said Sphere Studios head Carolyn Blackwood. It presented an opportunity to re-introduce the classic to a new generation in a way that would place them inside L. Frank Baum’s world.

upon archival materials from the film, including set blueprints, shot lists, publicity stills and film artifacts as well as some 60 research papers to help deliver the movie in resolution representing a ten-fold improvement over previous work. Rather than exploiting AI to cut jobs, they sought to use it to breathe fresh life into a classic story and create new experiences with existing intellectual property. “Hollywood embraces new technology, and everyone cannot wait to be the second one to use it. “What The Wizard of Oz is doing for us is giving that first opportunity where people go, Oh my god, this is not at all what I thought AI was going

None of the Oz training data would be incorporated into Google’s public AI models. The visual effects team initially tried enlarging images using CGI, which would have created photorealistic animated versions of the characters. That approach was rejected because it would violate the integrity of the original performances. AI was the last resort. AI enhanced the resolution of tiny celluloid frames from 1939 to ultra-high-definition images. It restored details such as freckles on Dorothy’s face or burlap texture on Scarecrow’s face, obscured by Technicolor’s process. AI helped “outpaint” on-screen images to fill gaps created by camera cuts or framing, as when it took a close-up of the Tin Man chopping a door of the Witch’s castle with an axe to free Dorothy and completed the image of the woodman. It took months of repeated fine-tuning and Google’s DeepMind braintrust to elevate consumer-grade AI tools to deliver crisp images with the Sphere’s 16K “super” resolution. Musicians re-recorded the entire film score on the original sound stage to take advantage of the venue’s 167,000 speakers. The vocal performances of Judy Garland and other actors remain unaltered. Despite attention to authenticity, the project has attracted criticism from some cinephiles who object to altering the cherished film. Entertainment writer Joshua Rivera called it “an affront to art and nature”. – Reuters

An animation featuring the Wicked Witch of the West is displayed on the Sphere in Las Vegas.

The Wicked Witch of the West and flying monkeys animation being displayed on the Sphere. – ALL PICS FROM REUTERS