How Ready Player One's FX Team Used Its Own AI To Create OASIS Digital Trends

Ahead of the 91st Academy Awards on Sunday, our Oscar Effects series puts the spotlight on each of the five movies nominated for "Visual Effects," looking at the amazing tricks filmmakers and their effects teams used to make each of these films stand out as visual spectacles. Ernest Cline's 2011 novel Ready Player One was once thought to be un-adaptable with its legions of licensed characters from television, movies, video games, and comic books assembling for a sprawling adventure within a virtual universe known as OASIS. And then along came Steven Spielberg to prove the skeptics wrong. Spielberg's adaptation of Ready Player One not only managed to translate the grand scope of its source material, but it also managed to deliver a film jam-packed with the iconic characters and pop-culture references that made the book so popular among a certain generation of readers. It did so with the help of a talented visual effects team led by four-time Academy Award nominee Roger Guyett, who was tasked with not only building a virtual universe populated by a host of familiar and not-so-familiar characters, but also making sure that the digital avatars of the film's lead characters were capable of conveying just as much emotion as their human counterparts. Digital Trends spoke to Guyett about the experience of bringing Ready Player One to the screen, building virtual universes, and finding genuine emotional depth among more than half a million CG creations.