ILM's 50th, Cannes, TechX, SpatialScore, Jenga & AgenticSeek

This week brings together monumental milestones and cutting-edge innovations: ILM's 50th anniversary, Jafar Panahi's triumphant Palme d'Or at Cannes, Cinesite's new ethical AI initiative, and breakthrough research in spatial AI benchmarking and video diffusion acceleration.

🎬 ILM turns 50: From a hot warehouse to AI

Exactly 50 years ago on May 26, 1975, George Lucas and John Dykstra shook hands in a hot warehouse in Van Nuys. That handshake started Industrial Light & Magic.

The story goes that Lucas first wanted Douglas Trumbull for Star Wars after seeing his incredible work on 2001: A Space Odyssey. But Trumbull was already working with Spielberg on Close Encounters, so he pointed Lucas to his assistant, John Dykstra.

Dykstra pulled together a small team—college students, artists, engineers—and set up shop in that warehouse. Lucas noticed the location was zoned as "light industrial," which inspired the company name: Industrial Light and Magic.

They built the Dykstraflex, the first digital motion control camera. This massive thing weighed over 650 kg, but its precision made those iconic Star Wars dogfights and fly-bys possible. The film won the Best Visual Effects Oscar in 1978, the first of ILM's 15 Academy Awards.

Fast forward to today: Rob Bredow, Lucasfilm's Senior VP of Creative Innovation, recently shared in a TED Talk that ILM is actively using AI. They're already using it for face swapping to de-age Harrison Ford in Indiana Jones, and they're exploring generative AI for future projects. From physical models to neural networks in 50 years—what a journey. Happy birthday, ILM!

🏆 Cannes 2025: When filmmaking becomes an act of resistance

The Cannes Film Festival wrapped up last Saturday with a powerful statement. The jury awarded the Palme d'Or to "Un simple accident" (It Was Just An Accident) by Jafar Panahi.

Here's what makes this incredible: Panahi is banned from making movies for 20 years by the Iranian government. He's banned from traveling and was convicted of "propaganda against the system." But he still managed to write, direct, and shoot this film without any permits.

Sometimes we get so caught up in our daily work that we forget why we fell in love with filmmaking in the first place. Panahi's win brings it all back—the raw humanity of storytelling, the need to create despite everything.

(Side note: Tarantino opened the festival on May 13th and, as you'd expect, made quite an appearance.)

🤖 Cinesite launches TechX: A thoughtful approach to AI

Cinesite just launched TechX, their GenAI exploration unit. They're committed to safe, ethical AI that empowers artists rather than replacing them.

TechX operates completely separate from active shows with its own infrastructure. The team reports to the Group CTO and will explore GenAI applications with filmmakers. It's good to see another major studio investing in AI thoughtfully. Worth keeping an eye on this one.

🧪 Research spotlight: Making AI actually useful for VFX

đź“Š SpatialScore: Does AI really understand 3D space?

Everyone claims their AI model is "spatially aware" or "physically aware," but are they really? A team of Chinese researchers decided to find out.

They created SpatialScore, a benchmark with 28,000 samples testing various spatial understanding tasks. They also built a multi-agent system using 9 specialized tools for spatial understanding.

Why does this matter? If we want AI to work in VFX pipelines, it needs to understand 3D space consistently. We can't just hope it occasionally generates a nice picture—we need physical accuracy every time.

⚡ Jenga: Making video generation actually practical

Jenga just dropped on May 22nd, and it's making waves. Simply put: it makes open-source video models 4 to 10 times faster on a single GPU, without any training required.

How? The key insight is that early denoising steps don't need high resolution, and later steps don't need to pay attention to everything. So Jenga:

  • Uses block-wise attention to focus only on what matters
  • Gradually increases resolution during generation
  • Puts compute power where it actually makes a difference

It already works with HunyuanVideo, WAN 2.1 support is coming, and ComfyUI integration is on the way. This is the kind of practical optimization that makes AI tools actually usable in production.

đź’» Tool of the week: AgenticSeek

AgenticSeek is getting attention as a 100% local AI assistant. Think of it like Manus, but running on your own GPU with no security concerns or monthly fees.

Everything stays on your machine—files, conversations, searches. It can:

  • Browse the internet on its own
  • Write and debug code in Python, C, Go, Java
  • Automatically pick the right tool for your task
  • Respond to voice commands

You choose your own reasoning model (like Qwen or Deepseek). There's a cloud API option too, but that defeats the whole "local" purpose. For studios exploring agentic VFX pipelines, this could be a solid starting point.

🚀 The bigger picture

50 years ago, ILM started in that hot warehouse with bold ideas and a giant camera rig. Today, the open source community is as vibrant as ever, pushing technology and helping craft the next chapter. The passion is the same, but we're doing it in the open, together.

Remember: AI can be used as a medium or as a tool, but at the end of the day, it is just a means to tell a story.

Be kind, be creative, be curious, be human. See you in the next episode of AInVFX news.

đź”— Sources & Links

🎬 ILM 50th anniversary:

🏆 Cannes film festival:

🏢 Industry news:

đź“š Research papers:

đź’» GitHub repository:

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