The only IT analysis that dares to ask the question, “whether actors would follow professional drivers as future casualties of artificial intelligence,” Wikibon CTO David Floyer’s “Case Study: Creating a Digital Innovation Culture” profiles CGI leader Weta Digital Ltd. of Wellington, NZ,  as a model for creating a digital business culture and platform.

Weta Digital, winner of five Academy Awards for computer-generated imagery (CGI), was created by Producer Peter Jackson and partners in 1993 to support film production in New Zealand, starting with Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy based on the books by J.R.R. Tolkein. Since then it has done award-winning CGI work for the three Peter Jackson films based on Tolkein’s The Hobbit as well as King Kong, Dawn of Planet of the Apes and Avatar.

CGI involves generating huge amounts of visual detail in real- time. Weta has made a specialty of simulating things like realistic fur movement on very large numbers of animals such as crowds of apes. Supporting the needs of Weta’s creative artists for interactive development and revision of the scenes requires real time handling of terabytes of data. IT cannot get in the way. As a result, Weta has state of the art networking and storage equipment.

The nature of its business demands that it stay on the bleeding edge of CGI, so Weta depends on its IT group to write many of the advanced simulation applications its artists use to constantly push the envelope past the competition.

Film creation may appear to be an application of IT that’s outside the mainstream, but Floyer found that Weta depends on close partnership among the IT group that creates the tools on which the company’s business depends, the artists who create the product and the business executives who sell those services. This is exactly what companies need to create the digital platforms on which they will reinvent their businesses.

Wikibon Premium users can read the full analysis, and learn the answer to the question of whether actors are in danger of obsolescence, here. To learn about subscribing to Wikibon Premium, look here.

Image courtesy Weta Digital Ltd.