Variety has profiled VideoGorillas and other Ukraine-based entertainment companies that are still operating despite the brutal Russian invasion.
VideoGorillas, founded in 2009, uses computer vision and artificial intelligence to automate remastering and restoration workflows. The company, which helped restore Orson Welles’ The Other Side of the Wind, has hundreds of credits and working relationships with Netflix, Disney and other studios.
In Lviv, in western Ukraine, VideoGorilla senior developer/chief science officer Andrew Yakovenko is working at his computer, while the company’s senior developer Anton Linevich is holed up in a small village in the center of the country, Variety reported. Developer Aleksey Sevruk, who stayed in Kyiv, has joined the Ukrainian army and is fighting for that city.
Yakovenko noted “this is not the first time that Russia has gathered forces at our borders. They moved a large force for military training there – and then dispersed.”
“It was Putin’s way of applying pressure and trying to scare everyone,” he told Variety. “It’s a political instrument for him, to get what he wants.”
Most of VideoGorilla’s team members are in western Ukraine, although, VideoGorilla’s U.S. partner Jason Brahms told the trade paper that the company’s current base of operations has moved to the country of Georgia.
VideoGorillas and their AI experts were hired by producers Filip Jan Rymsza and Frank Marshall to match the scenes on Welles’ workprint with original negative, which was spread across 1,083 reels of footage.
What would have taken human workers several months to complete, the AI team accomplished in weeks.
Rymsza said at the time, “We were faced with a very unique challenge. We had a 3.5-hour reference cut assembled from various sources, which had to be conformed back to 100 hours of scans, which consisted of 16mm and 35mm negatives and 35mm prints.”
“Traditionally, an assistant editor would have over-cut the reference picture, but some of it was blown up from 16mm to 35mm, or blown up and repositioned, or flopped, or printed in black-and-white from color negative, which made it very difficult to match by eye,” he said. “Without VideoGorillas’ AI technology finding these precise matches this would’ve taken a team of assistant editors several months. VideoGorillas completed this massive task in two weeks. They were a crucial partner in this extraordinary effort.”
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