An AI Studio Opened Next Door to Culver City. Its Sound Stage Was a Corner of the Office

A corner of the office

Robert Booth's report for the Guardian has a detail in it that will stay with me longer than any of the numbers. He visited Promise, an AI studio that set up this summer near the colonnaded entrance to Sony Pictures' Culver City lot — close enough that the artists working there can see the ground where Singin' in the Rain and Men in Black were shot. Promise is shooting its own newly announced horror film, Touch Grass, for a budget in the low millions of dollars.

The sound stage, Booth writes, was little more than a corner of the office.

That is the whole argument in one sentence, and it is not an argument about image quality. A hundred years of film industrial history is stacked up on the other side of that wall — the stages, the shops, the standing sets, the crews who know where everything is — and the company next door has concluded it does not need to get past the wall to make a movie.

Photo: Elyot Boudart · CC BY-SA 4.0 · source

What gets made unnecessary

Promise is backed by Google, by Silicon Valley venture capital, and by Disney. Its models generate backgrounds, special effects, and what the reporting calls synthetic performers; some are American, and some are market-leading Chinese systems. The result, in Booth's phrasing, is that the vast sound stages and the financing of traditional studios are becoming less necessary.

Less necessary is the phrase to sit with. Studio infrastructure has never only been infrastructure. The reason a first feature was hard to make was partly technical and mostly institutional: somebody with a stage and a bank had to agree that you should be allowed. Every filmmaker who has described their twenties has described that gate.

So when the filmmakers Booth spoke to say the technology could let them bypass the studio giants and take more creative risks, I understand the appeal exactly, and I notice which risk is being described. The risk of asking permission is the one being removed. The risk of a bad film is untouched.

Google is on both sides of this. In June it put about seventy-five million dollars into A24 through a partnership with DeepMind, to build filmmaking tools — the specialist independent distributor of the last decade, capitalised by the company whose models the tools will run on. TechRepublic covered the deal and illustrated its own article with an image generated by Google's Nano Banana, which is either very funny or the tidiest possible summary of where this is going.