I looked inside an AI generated movie, and the best

What happened

Imagine a trio of bumbling, English lads who fantasize about becoming megastars while knocking back a few pints in a grimy pub somewhere in London. Picture the guys chortling and trying to one-up each other’s idealized visions of the future with a series of increasingly glitzy fantasies in which their fame leads to access to groupies and lavish parties on luxurious boats.

After establishing the boys’ interpersonal dynamics, the film zooms out to show us more about who they are individually. Oli’s mom insists that he gets a real job, Cal’s ex doesn’t believe he can be a good father to their daughter, and Horace doesn’t have a lot going on outside of being the group’s designated driver.

Cully Hill Boys establishes all of these details in its first few minutes with a series of scenes that flow together with a tonal and visual smoothness that you seldom see from AI films regardless of their length. 5 is capable of churning out much longer (about 30 seconds) clips than other video generation models.

With films created with AI video models that only generate a few seconds of footage at a time, you can usually see and hear exactly when clips have been stitched together as a way to work around the technology’s limitations.

There’s still some of that in Cully Hill Boys, but many of the project’s scenes unfold at a pace that feels much more organic and closer to what you might expect from a traditionally made feature.

Watching the movie, I got the sense its plot’s general cohesion was a reflection of Zholdaskali and Abish — who led a team of nine other directors, according to Higgsfield — closely following the beats of Planagan’s script.

Planagan has said that he doesn’t use AI tools in his writing process, and it definitely feels like Cully Hill Boys is a stronger film than Hell Grind because its core narrative was crafted by an experienced, human storyteller with an understanding of proper pacing.

There’s a clear logic to characters’ dialog, and the avatars have a passable emotiveness that speaks to how Higgsfield created them using photos and audio clips provided by real people.

Why it matters

Imagine these men are actually characters in a film — one filled with hyperkinetic smash cuts to action sequences in which they’re fighting or running from armed goons. This movie might be the sort of feature you’d expect from directors like Edgar Wright or Guy Ritchie. But all of this actually comes from Cully Hill Boys, the latest project from the AI filmmaking platform Higgsfield.

Cully Hill Boys is one of the few AI movies out this year that comes anywhere near close to looking and feeling like a traditionally produced feature. A large part of the movie’s strength is almost certainly rooted in how much Wright and Ritchie’s style has been baked into it, and it’s not just visual inspiration.

In addition to posting Cully Hill Boys online, Higgsfield published many of the prompts that were used to make it. Several of those prompts mention Wright and Ritchie by name, which, along with a script written by a real screenwriter, underlines how the best parts of these films are undeniably taken from actual human artists.

Cully Hill Boys tells the story of three struggling rappers from East London whose lives are turned upside down when they accidentally steal a crime lord’s money.

The project is codirected by Adilet Abish and Aitore Zholdaskali — who also helmed Higgsfield’s Hell Grind feature — and is based on a script that was initially written by Tim Planagan before it landed on the Black List screenplay submission service for unproduced projects.

After acquiring the script’s AI production rights, Higgsfield tapped streamer Mikyle “N3on” Rafiq, basketball content creator Matt Kiatipis, and UFC fighter Israel Adesanya to “star” as its leads. Though none of Cully Hill Boys’ actors shot any scenes on set, each of them signed licensing agreements with Higgsfield for their likenesses to be used in the project.

And while Planagan gave Higgsfield the ability to adapt this story using generative AI, he still retains the rights necessary for it to be produced traditionally.

Rather than trying to release Cully Hill Boys in theaters, Higgsfield — another service that sells access to various AI models — uploaded the film and most of its constituent prompts online in order to showcase what’s possible with its Cinema Studio suite of AI filmmaking tools. 5 functionality, and to highlight new ways that studios can collaborate with digital creators.

What’s most striking about Cully Hill Boys as you begin to watch it is the way its story moves much in the same way most direct-to-video action / comedies usually do. We’re introduced to Cal (Kiatipis), Horace (Rafiq), and Oli (Adesanya) as a trio of longtime friends who just can’t figure out how to realize their dreams of becoming well-known musicians.

What to watch

But when you pay close attention to things like incomprehensible text in books and the way that characters often have a distracting lack of chemistry, it’s easy to clock that most of the movie was made by feeding prompts into various generative models.

Scrolling through Higgsfield’s official Cully Hill Boys page, it’s actually fascinating to see how many different iterations of individual shots the film’s creative team generated using text prompts.