OpenAI might currently not be at the frontier of video generation models, but it’s seemingly taking a big bet to change that.
OpenAI is backing an animated feature film that will seek to prove that Hollywood can be disrupted by AI, WSJ reports. Named “Critterz”, the film will have a budget of $30 million, which is a fraction of what a similar animated movie would cost if it were created by traditional methods. Also, the movie will be made in 9 months, as opposed to the 3 years that Hollywood currently typically takes.
Critterz was the brainchild of Chad Nelson, a creative specialist at OpenAI. Nelson started sketching out the characters three years ago while trying to make a short film with what was then OpenAI’s new DALL-E image-generation tool. The movie follows forest creatures who go on an adventure after their village is disrupted by a stranger. Nelson has now teamed up with production companies in London and Los Angeles, aiming to debut a feature-length version of the film at the Cannes Film Festival in May. The movie is expected to release in theaters globally next year.
“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,” he adds. The production team plans to cast human actors for character voices and hire artists to draw sketches, which will be fed into OpenAI’s models to generate videos for the film. OpenAI is betting that if “Critterz” is successful, it will show that AI can deliver content strong enough for the big screen and accelerate Hollywood’s adoption of the technology, Nelson said. OpenAI’s tools also lower the cost of entry, allowing more people to make creative content, he added.
Production houses have already begun using AI to create shots for their movies and TV shows. Earlier this year, Amazon Prime Video’s video House of David had extensively used AI for its scenes. Two months ago, Netflix had said that it had used AI for the first time in one of its shows, when an Argentinian sci-fi show had needed to show a collapsing building. A 2013 Indian movie had been re-released with a different ending created by AI, which had created some controversy after the film’s actors had said that they didn’t approve of the idea. And if OpenAI is actually able to create a whole animated movie and release it faster and cheaper than what Hollywood can manage right now, it could be a watershed moment in moviemaking which could transform the field forever.