AI tools are making high-end VFX accessible to individual creators, traditional VFX workflows need more sophisticated controls than just text prompts, and the future of filmmaking will blend AI efficiency with human creativity rather than replacing one with the other.

Speaking with us at AI on the Lot for our Inside the AI Studio series, Edward Dawson-Taylor brings a unique perspective to AI's role in visual effects. As the founder of CG Pro, one of the top Unreal Engine and VFX educational platforms, he's been training professionals for years and now teaches them how AI changes everything.

Watch the full interview here:

Edward's journey reflects the industry's evolution. CG Pro started as a virtual production training company during COVID, working with productions like Jungle Book and Lion King to define what virtual production could become. According to Edward, "We became what was a premier—it is now a gold—Unreal authorized training center. About a couple of years ago, we were the only one in North America."

Now they're expanding beyond entertainment, training everyone from NASA to entertainment professionals on AI integration. "AI is something that touches essentially every industry and is now injecting into most of them," Edward explains.

At AI on the Lot, Edward demonstrated how Gaussian Splats can create photographic volumetric backgrounds using just a phone and laptop. But are they ready for final pixels?

"They're quite easy to make. They are very photographic by nature. They give you not only parallax when you change camera position, but you also get lighting shift too."

Edward breaks down the trade-offs clearly. While Gaussian Splats offer photorealistic results and easy creation, they're harder to edit and less controllable than traditional 3D assets. "They're not really relatable typically, although there are some hacks to being able to do it," he notes.

But the technology is evolving rapidly. Edward showed examples of animated Gaussian Splats in Houdini, where "you can have 4D splats—the fourth dimension being time. You can animate splats, you can deform them."

When it comes to generative AI in film production, Edward identifies two critical challenges: control and copyright. The control issue particularly resonates with his VFX background.

"In the world of movie making, usually I come from seeing dailies on Jurassic World with a VFX supervisor giving notes about the wrinkles on a pilot's shirt that I can't see through eight pixels of broken glass and fire."

According to Edward, that level of scrutiny requires more than text prompts. "We need more sophisticated instruments than just word input. Words being the only input doesn't work with a team of world-class artists."

He sees the solution in multi-modal AI interfaces: "We're trying to get more and more inputs for the AI so we can explain ourselves better and ask for what we want more specifically."

Edward takes a pragmatic view of AI's role in filmmaking. Rather than rushing to make entire films with AI, he believes the focus should remain on making good content.

"I don't think the goal is to make everything with AI. The goal is to make stuff that's good. Whether we need to use AI or nothing—I'm not black and white about it."

He's particularly excited about how AI empowers individual creators. "My hope is that it allows all of my community—the visual effects community that has made things for other people their whole lives—to now make their own stuff for the first time in mass."

At a recent alumni event, Edward found his students embracing AI tools: "This whole group were all saying about how it enabled them to do things that they couldn't have done before—they couldn't have done without funding, without a ton of people, without corporate injection."

Edward brings a refreshingly honest consumer perspective to AI filmmaking. As someone with limited time due to running a business and raising children, he's skeptical of personalized AI content.

"I don't want to have any agency in it at all. I don't want to be in it, and I don't want to have anything to do with it being made at this point in my life."

According to Edward, the real test for AI-generated content isn't technical sophistication—it's whether people will invest their time watching it. "The risk is not just financial. If I spend time watching something, I don't want to waste that time. The risk is time."

Edward's vision for AI in filmmaking isn't about replacement—it's about augmentation. Traditional VFX companies are "rampantly researching how AI works, how it can inject into the traditional process and empower it or make it more efficient."

The future he envisions combines the best of both worlds: AI tools that give creators unprecedented capabilities while maintaining the human storytelling that makes content worth watching. As he puts it, "Maybe this is the solution that's going to allow originality through again."

For professionals looking to navigate this transition, Edward recommends getting educated on AI tools while maintaining focus on the fundamentals of good storytelling. The technology may be evolving rapidly, but the goal remains constant: creating content that connects with audiences and makes them want to invest their time.