Isabelle Bousquette of The Wall Street Journal exclusively reported that: “‘Hell Grind,’ a 95-minute fully AI-generated film, premieres this week at Cannes“.
Well, sort of.
Frank Landymore of Futurism quickly countered with: “Cannes Film Festival Says the Wall Street Journal Is Wrong: It’s Not Debuting an AI-Generated Feature Film This Week“.
He quotes a Cannes representative:
““We can confirm that ‘Hell Grind’ was not screened as part of the official Festival de Cannes program.””
Davide Abbatescianni of Screen Daily elaborates:
“The 95-minute feature cost under $500,000, with most of the budget going on computer costs. The first 25-minute segment required 16,181 video generations to produce 253 final shots, a 64:1 curation ratio. The film was produced by a team of 15 directors, cinematographers and editors, most of them working in person from Almaty, Kazakhstan with some collaborators joining remotely. Alex Mashrabov, CEO and co-founder of Higgsfield, explained that the execution phase took around two weeks, although the underlying idea and script had been developed by the filmmakers over several years.”
Back to the WSJ for some technical details:
“Every prompt had to be extremely long and detailed. Each one would typically start with a prefix that defined requirements like style (8k IMAX, photorealistic), lighting (natural light only, “contre-jour” backlight, camera on shadow side) and the type of camera it should look like it was being shot on (“cine lens,” 180-degree shutter motion blur). The lighting was key to avoiding the AI sheen that typically gets branded as “slop”. AI-generated video tends to over-light scenes in an unnatural way. That prefix would also have to remind the AI to obey the laws of physics with wording like: “gravity and inertia respected—mass has real weight, correct contact shadows, no floating props.” The individual prompts were, on average, 3,000 words each.”
My take: It seems Higgsfield made a 22-minute short a month ago and then decided to extend it to feature-length. Seriously impressive — no wonder they decided to go for it.