In hindsight I’m not sure why I was surprise when in early 2018 I was approached by a defense contractor to build a real-time digital human.

Entertainment, technology and defense have always been intertwined.

As I had done on Call Of Duty, entertainment, and science fiction in particular, has for the last century been envisioning what near and future conflict might look like. Pitch decks for Silicon Valley defense start-ups look no different from decks pitching movies and video games. I expected that the pioneering work would catch the attention of entertainment studios but the defense industry was quicker to jump in with R&D dollars. In many ways it’s the US government and tax payer dollars that is advancing entertainment and technology through defense spending.

I had a long history with SAS, SEALs and Delta Force operatives. For this project I got to work with defense officials who had worked in the White House directly under the US Secretary of Defense. Weirdly, you know you’re doing pioneering work when the Pentagon calls as they did in 2020. It was at the height of the pandemic lockdown and I had just staged the Real-Time Shorts Challenge to prove how we could use remote production and crowdsourcing to insulate production against disruption. They were very interested in developing this workflow to build real-time 3D simulation of autonomous weapons. My heart is in Entertainment so I declined their offer.