OpenAI is backing a new animated feature film 'made largely with AI' to prove it can make films 'faster and cheaper' than Hollywood
A Wall Street Journal report says OpenAI is backing the creation of a new animated film called Critterz that will be made "largely" with AI, in hopes of convincing Hollywood that it's time to go all-in on AI content creation tools.
Called Critterz, the film follows forest creatures who embark on an adventure after their village is disrupted by a stranger—a fairly generic setup for a Pixar-esque tale of talking wildlife where it doesn't belong.
But the real purpose of the project, according to a press release from production company Vertigo Films, is "to prove that generative artificial intelligence can make movies faster and cheaper than Hollywood does today." Critterz has a budget of less than $30 million, far below what animated films like this typically cost—Toy Story 4, released in 2019, had a budget of approximately $200 million—and is expected to take only about nine months to make.
Critterz was initially conceived by Chad Nelson, a "creative specialist" at OpenAI, and made its debut in a 2023 animated film based on images—"every character, every background... basically the entire Crittzer world"—generated by OpenAI's Dall.E image generation tool, which were "handed to a talented team of Emmy award-winning animators in order to bring it all to life!"
The Critterz feature film aims to sort of flip that script by hiring artists to draw sketches that will be fed into OpenAI's tools. Human actors will also be hired to provide voices for the characters, and the script was written by some of the team behind the 2024 film Paddington in Peru.
"OpenAI can say what its tools do all day long, but it’s much more impactful if someone does it," Nelson said. "That’s a much better case study than me building a demo."
The presence of humans in the production is expected to serve a purpose beyond merely ensuring that the film isn't complete gibberish: Nik Kleverov, co-founder of production company Native Foreign and a co-creator of Critterz, said AI-generated content can't be copyrighted, but the use of humans to create the images and voices the film's creatures will be based on should make it eligible for copyright protections.
OpenAI isn't playing a direct role in the production of the film—for now, it's just "lending its tools and computing resources" to the project—and it's reportedly undecided at this point whether it will play any sort of role in marketing. But while "a box office release of an original animated film is a risky bet," the potential payoff, separate from whatever money it makes, is significant: If Critterz is a success, "it will show that AI can deliver content strong enough for the big screen and accelerate Hollywood’s adoption of the technology," while lowering the cost of productions and "allowing more people to make creative content."
That presumably excludes the artists and animators who make creative content now, but will be pushed out of work by C-suite types who think that slop spewed out by content recycling machines is good enough as long as it saves a buck.
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