NABShow 2025: The Future of Cinema and the reality of production

Phil Rhodes reports back from NAB, with AI dominating the discussions at the Future of Cinema conference and Ron Sim of Simmod Lens proving that humans still have valuable contributions to make.

Every year at NAB we find the Future of Cinema conference, which usually turns out to be a seminar track about the ways in which movie theatres can give people better pictures. For the vast majority of us who will last a whole career without working on a production that goes anywhere near a screen that big, it’s still fun to keep an eye on what the gold standard is doing, at least if we consider cinema to be the gold standard in the age of the influencer. This year, all that remains true - but there’s also something else going on, and if it has the potential to distract even NAB attendees from their traditionally inveterate pixel-peeping, it’s probably a fairly big deal.

It’ll be no surprise to discover that this particular disruption is brought to you by the letters A and I, with a presentation by Eric W. Shamlin of Secret Level, the company which generated the Coca-Cola commercials which attracted so much, er, attention around the end of 2024. Since then the company’s technique has visibly improved, with a presentation of a wonderfully 1970s-style martial arts trailer generated entirely with Google’s Veo.

We still need actors

Stone-faced stoicism in action

Anyone who’s sufficiently aware of AI to care about this is also aware it’s possible. The question is whether it’s any good, and to this the answer has to be a very carefully-qualified mostly. A brief discussion with Shamlin afterward confirmed that the stone-faced stoicism of the genre’s heroes and antagonists was a definite help, with the phrase “we still need actors” coming up several times during the discussion. Problems with fine camera positioning and other aspects of shot selection also came up. The experience can probably be summed up as emulating that of a director who likes to give the crew lots of latitude to make creative input.

Some directors like to work like that with regard to some aspects of the production, although it’s rare for anyone in the big chair on a film set to give every other department on set the sort of autonomy that Veo likes to take. Like so many AIs, we discover, it can do what it can do, and it can do that quite well. Shamlin’s work certainly involved some spectacular environments, with isolated architecture on a frozen lake and an interior with flame more convincing than most 3D rendering systems can currently generate. Meanwhile, it’s clear that trying to force this sort of AI to do things which are outside its comfort zone leads to frustration, a lack of control, and mediocre results.

And, of course, there’s the problem with making AI characters emote without generating the sort of rubber-faced monstrosities which are likely to appear behind our eyelids at 3am. It seems likely that we will revisit these issues again and again at this and upcoming trade shows, but the claim is often that these problems are solvable and that wonderfulness is imminent. It is not currently wonderful, and people have been claiming that it will be wonderful soon for a while now. It seems increasingly possible that linearly better results will require exponentially more resources, which might limit how fast cast and crew become obsolete. As to if or when…

The man in the fighter jet movie said it best.

Still here, still relevant

Much of the rest of the NAB show seems confident that real-world production is likely to continue for at least long enough to keep radio links and pixel tube lights relevant for a bit longer. For the hardcore camera enthusiasts, the estimable Ron Sim of Simmod Lens is here with his ever-expanding range of ways to make unremarkable still photo lenses into cinema production workhorses. Sim has long offered mount conversion kits and custom-engraved front rings, to bring a lens about as close as possible to a custom-converted cinema tool without the staggering expense of a full rehousing. His range now includes mounts with threads to take conventional screw-on photo filters as rear filters, as well as a magnetic system based on (and reportedly compatible with) ARRI’s Impression system for its Signature Primes.

People looking closely at Ron Sims' lens mounts include Rodney Charters, ASC

Ron Sim is full of good ideas and the proven ability to bring them to fruition. Some might consider this sort of thing parochial in the context of ascendant AI and other alien technologies which occasionally burst forth from the skunkworks of various manufacturers. Still, until AI makes it over the hill it seems perpetually sentenced to climb, we’ll need cameras and lenses. Given the crowd attending Sim and his latest brainwaves at any event, perhaps in the same way that people still paint with oils we’ll choose to keep needing these things for a while yet.