Ta-Chien Sun on AI Transforming Visual Effects

A shoe commercial was projected onto the screen in the middle of the Techsauce Global Summit 2026 stage, featuring fluid motion, consistent facial expressions, and details indistinguishable from live-action footage. The speaker announced that the entire piece was generated from a single photo and a short prompt in under 10 minutes. The person who played the video was Ta-Chien Sun, Ph.D., CEO of Digital Vizen and Managing Director of Digital Domain, the visual effects studio behind Titanic and Thanos in the Avengers universe, speaking at the session titled AI in Entertainment: Where the Blockbusters Are Really Being Made, moderated by film critic and JUSTดูIT founder Thagrit Sombunnanont.

The core message emphasized by Ta-Chien was not about tool speed, but a concluding statement: technology should never become the story itself, but should help us tell stories. Every topic discussed afterward built upon this conclusion. Before entering the film industry, Ta-Chien spent 14 years as a member of Taiwan's Legislative Yuan, explaining simply that politics in Taiwan was boring and he transitioned to entertainment when the opportunity arose. When asked about his favorite projects, he mentioned several, including Avengers: Doomsday and the new Spider-Man films.

Stock photo for illustration only, not from the actual event

While many view politics and technology as entirely separate worlds, Ta-Chien noted significant similarities between the two fields. A key lesson from 14 years in parliament is that transformation is decided not by who has the best idea, but by people. That lesson was applied when Ta-Chien drove the AI transition at Digital Domain, a three-year process far more difficult than anticipated. The obstacle was not technology, but an organization filled with Oscar-winning artists who believed they outperformed AI models. Persuading them required an approach entirely different from installing software. Furthermore, the organization included producers, executives, and clients, each viewing AI differently. Ta-Chien adopted a legislative strategy: understanding differing interests, communicating with dissenters, building consensus, and translating ideas into actionable reality.

The culmination of three years of persuasion was the decision to spin off Digital Domain's AI and virtual human teams into a new company named Digital Vizen, aiming to build upon Digital Domain's 30-year legacy while introducing specialized AI agents for content production. Distinguishing between models and agents, Ta-Chien explained that an AI model awaits prompts to generate outputs piece by piece, whereas an AI agent receives a high-level goal and autonomously executes multi-step workflows. The next horizon is physical AI, or world models. Using the shoe commercial example, the client provided a single photo while AI agents handled the rest, highlighting character consistency and facial expressions that rival feature film standards, unlike low-quality AI slop.