Beyond the Yellow Brick Road: Inside the AI Engine for the Sphere's 'Wizard of Oz'

To be part of a project that redefines storytelling is a rare privilege. At Viga Entertainment Technology, we are incredibly humbled and proud to have served as a key technology partner on the breathtaking Wizard of Oz immersive experience at the Sphere in Las Vegas.

This monumental achievement was made possible by the visionary leadership of our friends and partners at Magnopus. They owned the project, brought together a world-class team including Google DeepMind, and entrusted us with helping to solve some of the most complex creative challenges in modern filmmaking. It was a true collaboration in every sense. Working hand-in-hand, we were guided by their creative direction and problem statements to help build a bespoke generative AI pipeline that would bring their ambitious vision to life.

Here’s a look into the collaborative spirit and technology that powered the magic.

1. Achieving a Unified Vision: AI for Stylistic Cohesion

In a world as beloved as Oz, stylistic integrity is everything. To meet the project's unique aesthetic, our teams collaborated to develop a custom suite of AI tools fine-tuned under Magnopus's creative guidance.

• Lightweight Style Guides (LoRAs): Our work involved developing a series of Low-Rank Adaptations (LoRAs) for foundational models like SDXL and FLUX. These acted as shared 'digital style guides,' allowing the creative teams to rapidly generate environmental assets and character variations that were always aligned with the film's established art style.

• High-Fidelity Digital Actors (Custom SDXL Checkpoints): For the film's main characters, accuracy was paramount. We supported the production by training full, custom SDXL checkpoints from extensive image datasets, ensuring the heroes of our story could be rendered with the incredible fidelity and control the project demanded.

2. The Evolving Canvas: Agile Scene Manipulation

Filmmaking is a dynamic process. In close partnership with the creative leads at Magnopus, we built custom workflows in ComfyUI that provided the flexibility needed to respond to evolving production needs.

• Intelligent Inpainting & Outpainting: We co-developed robust inpainting and outpainting workflows to address key production challenges. Whether extending a magnificent landscape or seamlessly removing an anachronistic object, these tools provided artists with a powerful and intuitive way to refine and perfect the cinematic canvas.

• Creative Synthesis with Checkpoint Merging: One of the exciting frontiers we explored together was advanced checkpoint merging. This technique allowed us to combine the strengths of different specialized models, enabling the creation of complex scenes that blended distinct characters and environments into a single, cohesive masterpiece.

3. Creativity Guided by Control: Precision Generation

The most powerful creative tools are those that offer precision. A key part of our technical contribution was implementing the ControlNet framework, guided by the compositional needs of the Magnopus directors and artists.

By using structural data from the original movie shots—like Canny edge maps and Depth maps—as a guide, we could steer the AI generation process with incredible accuracy. This ensured that every new element perfectly matched the structure, perspective, and composition of the existing footage, making for a seamless and believable final image.

4. The Finishing Touches: AI-Powered Post-Production

The collaborative AI pipeline extended all the way through the final stages of post-production, enhancing quality and streamlining intensive workflows.

• Cinematic Upscaling with ESRGAN: To ensure the visuals would hold up on the colossal scale of the Sphere, our team implemented an ESRGAN (Enhanced Super-Resolution Generative Adversarial Networks) process. This intelligently upscaled the final frames, adding breathtaking detail and clarity.

• Streamlining Visual Effects with Character Segmentation: To help accelerate the demanding visual effects process, we helped deploy the XMem tracking model. This tool automated the often tedious task of character segmentation (rotoscoping), generating precise mattes that saved the VFX artists countless hours of manual work and allowed them to focus on their craft.

A Partnership Forged in Innovation

The Wizard of Oz experience at the Sphere is a landmark achievement, a true testament to the vision of Magnopus and the incredible collaboration between all partners. We are deeply grateful to them for their trust, their friendship, and the opportunity to contribute to such a groundbreaking project.

From our home in Bangalore, Viga Entertainment Technology is dedicated to being the expert, collaborative partner that can help bring the world's most ambitious creative visions to life.

Are you looking for a technology partner to help you navigate the future of production? Let's talk about building something amazing together.