The film industry and its Staircase Studios AI has announced the ambitious project to produce 30 films entirely generated by artificial intelligence over the next four years.
A bold goal aimed at transforming the way feature films are made, drastically reducing costs and leveraging new technologies to create high-quality productions on a budget.
The studio’s first experiment is called The Woman With Red Hair, a thriller that tells the story of Johanna “Hannie” Schaft, a Dutch Resistance fighter during World War II.
Directed by Brett Stuart and based on a 2016 screenplay by Michael Schatz, the project features the contributions of notable artists such as storyboard artist Teddy Newton and Spanish director Alfred Gimeno, an Emmy-winning animator.
Staircase Studios was founded by Pouya Shahbazian, known for the Divergent film franchise, who decided to embrace artificial intelligence to overcome the inefficiencies of the traditional Hollywood system. With the help of Huffington Post co-founder Kenneth Lerer and producer Lorenzo di Bonaventura as a consultant, the company developed ForwardMotion, a generative AI software that promises to create studio-quality films for less than $500,000.
Shahbazian stated that their mission was to combine the ethical use of artificial intelligence with the most underutilized resources in the industry, such as neglected stories and undiscovered talent. The goal is to produce content that the industry desires but often fails to finance due to its low tolerance for risk.
Despite the enthusiasm of its creators, the experiment has not received the expected reception. The first five minutes of The Woman With Red Hair, published online, sparked mostly negative reactions. Viewers criticized the unnaturalness of the animations, the “unnatural” eyes of the characters, and unconvincing lip-synching. This signals that despite technological advances, AI still has a long way to go before it can fully replace the human sensibility in the industry.
The film company, however, will not stop and already has Every Living Creature in the works, an animated adventure thriller directed by American director Bernie Su, which tells the story of rescuing animals trapped on Montserrat, a Caribbean island in the Lesser Antilles, after the volcanic eruption of 1997.
It remains to be seen whether the public and industry professionals will welcome this new era of cinema, or if skepticism towards advanced digital tools will prevent them from taking off. The debate remains open, although the future of cinema seems increasingly headed toward the unexplored boundaries of this new frontier.
