Every day, we have ideas for stories to film. And they sit forlorn in their various digital homes—slide decks, scriptwriting programs, PDFs, Google Docs. Some (the very rare few) we have even begun filming. Terabytes of interviews and B-roll, teasers and rip reels, fill up hard drives locally or somewhere in the cloud. But most are still waiting for the day they might be picked up and worked on once again.

The truth is that the vast majority of them will never, ever see the light of day. They just won’t make it beyond the stage they’re at. Whether it’s time, expertise, access, people, or funding—all it takes is one missing piece of the production puzzle, and it’s not going to happen. That’s the unfortunate reality for anyone who tries to tell stories through film.

But what if that weren’t the case? What if AI could help save some of our stories from oblivion? What if it’s not just here to “take our jobs,” replace our women with “digital waifus,” and “destroy the very fabric of what once made this country great”? Is AI really that big of a threat, or are we all just a bit xenophobic towards it? Who knows? But maybe we can find out together.

What we do know is that it’s an exciting and scary time for our industry. This new wave of technology is about to wash over us and change the world—just like so many technological waves before it. From agriculture to the internet, from the printing press to the industrial revolution. The only common factor in all those waves? In general, the Luddites don’t fare too well.

So while we try to figure it all out, we’re going to keep doing what we’ve always done: go out and film, on real cameras, in real places, with real people, telling real stories—while also exploring this new technology and hopefully bringing our otherwise unfilmable ideas to life. We hope you’ll join us on the journey.

And in the grand modern style of discourse, we can hurl abuse at each other on social networks as we go along.

Yes, seriously! We made a film with AI. But we also gave ourselves some guidelines before we started:

1. It had to tell a genuine story.
2. It could not be a tech demo or a collection of shots edited together from the best bits of all the mucking about we did. And no sci-fi themes for this particlar project. Everyone’s using AI video for sci-fi, and the people we know personally who are doing it are much better than us anyway, so we’ll leave that to them.
3. It had to be a story that nobody would give us any money to make. A story as niche and as expensive as possible if produced traditionally. The kind of thing no one funds anymore because it just doesn’t make any money.
   • Easy. Make it a period piece about a real but obscure (if you’re not into ancient history and philosophy) Greek philosopher who lived over two thousand years ago. Everyone knows period productions are bloody expensive. And when was the last time you saw a film about an ancient Greek philosopher?
   • Also, let’s get voice actors whose accents would immediately disqualify them from having anything to do with a production like this in a traditional setting. You can almost feel the investment money being magnetically deflected away from a production like this just thinking about it.
4. It had to be educational. Both for us—as we learned what the various AI platforms could do—but more importantly, for the audience.
   • Apart from learning whether this could be done and what works (and what doesn’t), we also had to make sure our audience came away having learned something. (Ian here—I forced this bit in because I love history. Hopefully, it works, and I don’t look like an idiot.)
5. It couldn’t put us or anyone else out of a job or even replace the type of project we could make in our free time with the resources we have (or could blag/coerce other people into giving us).
   • Unfortunately, we don’t live in Greece or have local access to a remotely similar landscape. So we can’t just pop out the door with our gear and mates and film it ourselves. Also, we don’t know anyone with the right accent for the VO, so we’d have to hire someone. And for that, we’d need money—likewise for actors, costume hire, design, extras, etc. (See point 3 above.)
6. The concept had to be strong enough to be repeated. We wanted to find an idea with legs—something that could become a series if received well.
   • Only time will tell, but we’ve been working on the second and third scripts. So if enough people are interested, we’re going to keep going… unless…
7. The minute someone offers us the money to make this traditionally, we will stop using AI to make it.
   • Feel free to call us if you love history and have a couple of hundred grand lying around to invest in a series about obscure figures from ancient history. We’d love to hear from you.

Your incredulity is getting boring now, but if you must know…

The AI tools we used:

• ChatGPT – For discussing the concept and initiating script development.
• Midjourney – For character design, storyboarding, and generating the first frame of each shot for the image-to-video process.
• HailuoAI – For animating those opening frames and bringing each shot to life.
• ElevenLabs – For the VO.

The non-AI tools and resources we used:

• DaVinci Resolve – For the edit, grade, and sound mix.
• Musopen.org – This is an amazing resource for royalty- and copyright-free classical music. It’s where we found and fell in love with the wonderful Nocturne in B-flat minor, Op. 9 No. 1 by Frédéric Chopin (most definitely a source of inspiration for the Succession soundtrack).
• Our own bank of SFX – To bring the sound of each scene to life.
• Finally (and least importantly), Ian’s voice.
  • Although we used ElevenLabs to bring the accent to life, text-to-voice isn’t good enough yet (in our opinion) to really carry a story like this. So Ian kindly provided the acted vocal performance, which was then voice-modified in ElevenLabs to produce the final VO.

Thanks for asking!

Hopefully, more of this—more stories from the ancient past told with (possibly) inappropriately accented VOs.

But next time, using new technologies and methodologies. Everything is changing so fast, it’s hard to keep up. In the three weeks between starting and finishing this project, the technology moved so fast that some of what we used is already outdated and redundant.

Overall, we just want to keep pushing, experimenting, and—most importantly—telling the stories we care about, the ones that otherwise wouldn’t get told.

And hopefully, we can keep doing that until someone makes us (or pays us) to stop!

Sorry we haven’t had any good ideas for kids stories yet.