Electric Sheep, an AI visual effects startup, has closed an oversubscribed pre-seed funding round of half a million dollars. The round was filled by AI focused VCs, led by Dasein Capital (US), and backed by Spatial Capital (US) and Look AI Ventures (Czech Republic).
Electric Sheep is developing a system for automating precise background removal for TV and film. This process, known as rotoscoping, is essential before adding new environments and background effects. Currently, the only way to deliver the detail needed for cinema screens is to manually cut around foreground elements frame-by-frame.
According to Electric Sheep, this process can take about 6 hours for 1 second of footage and costs the industry around $1.5 billion per year. The company also said that its cloud-native software, Spotlight, is 360x faster, processing 1 second of footage in less than a minute.
Steven Sullivan, Partner at Spatial Capital and former Senior Technology Officer of LucasFilm said that Electric Sheep's cloud and AI platform is in a position to revolutionise several core VFX workflows. “They're taking a smart and pragmatic approach to accelerate some of the most tedious post-production tasks,” he commented.
Electric Sheep’s decision to use a cloud-native approach intends to align with MovieLabs – a joint venture research lab run by Paramount, Sony, Universal and Disney – that advocates for the industry to become fully cloud based by 2030 in their whitepaper.
Electric Sheep will use this capital injection to build and enhance Spotlight, among the first AI rotoscoping tools capable of the detail needed for Hollywood. Spotlight accommodates industry workflows by outputting an editable layer that allows VFX artists to make key adjustments, or splines.
“We are excited to partner with three investors with considerable experience in AI, VFX and building at scale,” said Gary Palmer, CEO at Electric Sheep. “Flawless background removal negates the need for onset green screens, empowering creatives to capture the energy of the scene without compromising the final image.”
Electric Sheep aims to simplify and ease post-production workflows to allow artists to return to what they do best – telling stories through creative, stunning and impactful visual effects. electricsheep.tv
