Staircase Studios will make $500,000 movies using AI to reduce budgets. Its debut, The Woman With Red Hair, has a five-minute preview which is in no way terrifying.
In the near future, directors will be able to produce “near-studio-quality” movies for just $500,000 – all thanks to the advent of AI. This, at any rate, is the bold claim of Staircase Studios AI, a newly-announced company which uses its own software, ForwardMotion, to generate footage. Founded by Hollywood producer Pouya Shahbazian, the company will, it says, be able to make these films for $500,000 or less.
As proof of this, Staircase has uploaded a five-minute preview of its debut movie, The Woman With The Red Hair. The film itself sounds worthy enough: based on a Black List script by Michael Schatz, it’s about a young Dutch woman who, in the midst of the Second World War, joins the resistance.
According to The Hollywood Reporter, which has the story on Staircase, it’ll be directed by Brett Stuart and has some impressive animation industry talent on its credits, including Teddy Newton, who worked at Pixar on The Incredibles, and animator Alfred Gimeno, of Kung Fu Panda fame.
That’s the pedigree, but what about the film itself? You can see the five-minute clip – which includes a minute-long intro from Shahbazian himself – below. All we’ll say for now is that, while the technology is undoubtedly impressive, it still couldn’t pass as actual footage shot by a human crew. Actually, we’ll go a step further and say that, when we’re treated to the central character talking and emoting (her voice is provided by Maya-Nika Bewley), it crosses the uncanny valley into pure waking nightmare territory.
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Staircase has said that it aims to make 30 such projects over the next three or four years, all using generative AI to side-step having to hire too many actors, crewmembers, set-builders and such like. It’s a bold gambit, but on the strength of the above, we’d ask whether anyone in their right mind would sit through a 90-plus minute feature that looks like this. The tell-tale signs of gen-AI are all over the place, from the human figures who are so conventionally good-looking that they all look essentially alike to the gibberish text on printed materials.
“After packaging and selling 150 projects into the studio system over the past 15 years,” Shahbazian says in his statement, “I’ve borne witness to far too much inefficiency to continue the status quo. Over the past year, I’ve dedicated myself to pairing ethical AI usage with our industry’s most underutilised assets – overlooked stories waiting to be produced from fantastic writers and directors.”
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Staircase is also said to be working on a second feature film, an “animated adventure thriller” called Every Living Creature, and has also bought the rights to a number of other Black List scripts for it to adapt, including (per Deadline) Wild Night, described as “Die Hard in a zoo.”
On the strength of what we’ve seen so far, it should also consider the horror genre.
The Woman With Red Hair is scheduled for release this summer according to the trailer above. If it ends up in IMAX cinemas, we’ll let you know.
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