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At Godofprompt, we had the chance to talk with Hooroo Jackson, an AI film director known for creating films using artificial intelligence.
In this interview, he shares how AI plays a role in his creative process, what it takes to bring a movie to life with tech, and the future of filmmaking.
Read on as we ask him key questions about his approach and experiences with AI in film.
Hooroo Jackson's Insights on AI Filmmaking
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I am AI filmmaker Hooroo Jackson, director of the first fully AI anime feature film ever made, DreadClub: Vampire’s Verdict.
My goal is to legitimize AI films and expose the giant talent gap in the film industry by showing it is very possible for independent filmmakers to make high quality films with AI right now.
My goal is for the floodgates to open for the AI filmmaking revolution, which will lead to a cultural and artistic renaissance of the likes we have never seen before.
Because of AI, the best talent in the world will, for the first time, have access to high quality filmmaking tools at a cost of almost zero.
Right now I am standing almost entirely alone as an AI director, which unfortunately has painted me as a target.
I have been attacked mercilessly by the establishment and all its hydras who want to stop AI.
Just remember, there is a standard cycle every disruptive technology faces:
I used almost all of them, the key is not any one technology, the key is to integrate all technologies cohesively to make a movie.
For sound, music and performances I used Speechify, ElevenLabs, Suno, and Udio.
For animation, I used Pika Labs and Luma Dream Machine.
For visuals, I used MidJourney.
For the story, I used Claude AI and ChatGPT.
The MVP of the movie was Luma Dream Machine, which debuted at the 99 % finish line of DreadClub, allowing me to go in and add hundreds of shots with high-quality animation to the entire movie at the very last second.
This made DreadClub: Vampire’s Verdict cutting edge down to the minute of its release.
My first AI movie Window Seat was the first AI feature film ever made.
It was released on July ’23.
It took just three weeks to make.
This is because the video algorithms at the time were spitting out 5-second videos with fully baked-in animation.
The only reason Window Seat was possible was because the platform Runway came in hot with extremely powerful video algorithms.
As I understand, they have cleaned it since then, but at some points during Window Seat you can see the faintest trace of Nicolas Cage or Adam Sandler on screen.
After Window Seat, the AI output was pulled back.
Around this time was when you began to see a flood of anti-AI opposition.
Every single day on my YouTube feed there was a new video titled something like, why AI is a failure.
I won’t pretend to understand the larger motives why, but I can speak to what happened next.
It was still possible to make a film in AI.
It just meant it had to be built with still images instead of 5-second videos.
The downside is this meant it would take five times longer to make a film.
When I worked on DreadClub: Vampire’s Verdict during the six month period between February ’24 to July ’24, the film was made entirely with a still image workflow.
Over 17,000 still images were generated off MidJourney.
Every single image in the movie then had to be animated using AI animation tools.
The making of DreadClub: Vampire’s Verdict is basically a historic level anomaly.
The film stands, for now, completely alone as the first AI anime feature film and the first AI animated film (as in, cartoon) because no one else was insane enough to go through these lengths of building a feature film from still images.
Now as of this interview, new AI tools have been built, such as China’s groundbreaking algorithms bringing that original workflow using 5-10 second video clips.
Some of these include HailuoAI, Kling, and Luma Dream Machine.
The space is moving so quickly that any tools that I mention here might not exist in the near or distant future.
The landscape is changing so rapidly that five weeks after DreadClub: Vampire’s Verdict’s release, the film is already technologically out-dated.
However, I totally embrace this.
From 2023’s Window Seat to 2024’s DreadClub you are already seeing one full year of AI developments.
My vision is beginning to emerge of having a string of films showing the full history of AI in film.
When it was time to bake the visuals, I worked around the clock for weeks on end generating every single image of the movie through MidJourney, until the entire film was assembled front-to-end with stills.
The key to assembling a film is to understand eyelines and the 180 degree rule.
Also it is important to play with composition.
An image on its own is useless, but a collection of images working together is how to tell a story.
This is likely going to go down as the most interesting component to the making of the film.
AI is not at a point yet where it can bake out fully animated visuals from a still image.
This means every single thing you’re seeing on screen in DreadClub is animated with artificial intelligence in pieces.
Meaning I will animate the image as an anchor, then I will go in and animate the background, I will animate the eyes, I will animate the lips.
Every shot consists of 5-6 different parts.
At one point, a one second shot in the film consists of 13-different pieces.
It is not happening on its own, but it is such a joy when you see it come alive.
It is what I do and what I have always done.
I first started as a Hollywood director with 2015’s Aimy in a Cage.
Aimy made noise as the work of a modern provocateur.
It was recently rated as one of the most polarizing films ever made.
At the time, I assumed we millennials would form a new cinema movement ala the enfant-terribles of New Hollywood in the 70s or Gen X in the 90s.
Instead, we entered a ten year period of extreme propaganda, CGI sequels, reboots and the streaming wars.
All the nepotism was worse than any other time in history.
Millennial filmmakers did break out, but only if they fulfilled very rigid ideological purity tests, or rode up through horror films thinly disguised as arthouse.
I illustrate this to depict the eight years of trouble working with Hollywood after making Aimy in a Cage.
There was one fallout after another, one producer disagreement after another, often over the smallest disagreements.
Point is I did not hesitate to take to artificial intelligence in filmmaking; you will see other AI filmmakers finesse this and claim that they don’t like the technology as an attempt to appease the establishment.
That is not me.
From the very beginning I have embraced AI as the most vital, beautiful and necessary change in the history of cinema.
I have no doubts about the technology, and I stand behind Window Seat and DreadClub: Vampire’s Verdict 100 %.
DreadClub is a forbidden vampire love story, going back and forth between college student Betty Gray and his court trial where a prosecutor is attempting to prove he’s a murderous vampire.
Is he a vampire or isn’t he?
That is the question you will be asking to the very end.
The film is my most critically acclaimed film ever and is currently standing at a 75 % fresh rating. It was recently released on Amazon and Blu-Ray and already screened in two film festivals.
The fact we got a major streaming licence is also a huge breakthrough in the space.
It is important to remember that DreadClub: Vampire’s Verdict is top down utilizing anime style and tropes.
I say this because a professional critic who watched the movie had no familiarity with anime, and he began to think the conventions of anime: hyper-stylization, irreverent sense of humour, and fun characters, all represent a flaw compared to serious dramatic movies.
I have had the thought that this may be the golden age for AI film already; that AI is never allowed to blossom for independent filmmakers.
For now DreadClub asserts its copyright like any other film, but let’s explore this.
Let’s say it comes out that any AI being trained on copyrighted content is now illegal.
This would put studios at a huge advantage with their private libraries.
Suddenly Hollywood will have these tremendous tools, and filmmakers will have the equivalent of public access TV.
My hope is the other possibilities will play out, ala Napster leading to Spotify.
How would that play out?
If AI can quantify what it is recalling numerically, and pay out a fraction of a cent each time your data is called, well, if your data is at the top of the algorithm and it’s called up millions of times, there’s money in it.
To illustrate, this might mean every time DreadClub is played, a couple of cents would go to Studio Ghibli, or whatever anime it took from in the training data.
ChatGPT and Claude AI were extensively used in the production of DreadClub: Vampire’s Verdict.
I have published these entire dialogues in the book (Artificial Imagination: The Making of “DreadClub”), so that it will exist on the record forever and people can look back and see exactly how I made this.
This book is an almost bigger deal than the movie itself because it is the most thorough possible archive.
It catalogs the entire six month production.
In the final section, would the reader have bonded to the experience of the book, I warn them, the things I went through in promoting the film will crush them.
AI is perceived in an extremely unusual way.
In the book, you will see this divide between what I am doing and what people assume I am doing.
Those are of course bad faith critics of the technology.
The more open-minded people seem to want to be both blown away by something unimaginable, and they want to be scared by the hypothetical machine future.
It is sort of a carnival rollercoaster response.
My assumption is that a lot of people do not fully have the language to express their fear, so I am dealing with a collective fight or flight response.
So I tried to calm this collective fear by making a fun, crowd pleasing anime.
This is the hardest part of the experience by far.
You look at art censors across history and you wonder how they could possibly exist, what drives someone to be this evil?
And the answer is always, it has nothing to do with art, but with the corrupting nature of power.
It began when the anti-AI groups began to organize against me.
I am talking about a wide-scale social media harassment campaign, notably when a professional critic—a person with major publications behind them, posted an exchange they had with me in public.
I then had hundreds of thousands of people cursing my name and the ground I stood, mocking me, my name, and my films.
I had people around the clock emailing me the most hateful things I have ever read.
For me, history is no consolation, I have to live through the pain of being persecuted for the tools I make my films with and having zero recourse.
I have to live with never knowing whether my films will return.
I wondered if these people had a conscience about what they’ve done, and then I found out, in fact, they feel extremely proud about what they’ve done.
A part of me can only appeal to a higher power and take solace that the evil I have dealt with is so dark, that I do not have to be troubled by it.
I have faith that in the end all things will be made right.
As I said, just weeks after DreadClub: Vampire’s Verdict, the technology that I used is already being replaced with newer, powerful algorithms.
In the old system, this might bring someone a sense of despair: how could I have wasted my time for six months only to be beaten by new technology?
Well the answer is that I myself will be using this new technology.
So I have begun production on a superhero comedy film called “My Boyfriend is a Superhero!?” that will be done in the CG-Pixar animated style.
With this new film, I do not expect to be the first CG-animated AI film ever made.
Continually this distinction of “first” has become a burden for me, and an item of provocation.
So it is not a priority.
However it is becoming possible that what ends up upstaging the accomplishment of DreadClub: Vampire’s Verdict in the field of feature length AI films, will be my own follow-up. Still, whether Superhero will be the first or not, it will be the best.
Since making original films is so extensive, I’m just having fun.
Between features, I can work on experimental crowd pleasers, like Beetlejuice in AI, Star Wars in AI, or Godzilla in AI.
The Beetlejuice AI sequel trailer was extremely popular:
I am a huge fan of Beetlejuice, not just the movie, but the cartoon.
When I saw the sequel in theaters, I could not enjoy it.
All I thought about was what I would have done differently.
In the future, if you don’t like a movie, you can go in and make your own.
Chances are, it might even surpass the film playing in the theaters.
That trailer was made entirely with HailuoAI Mini-Max, so it is the first time a lot of people are seeing believable live action AI in a film, and they can hardly believe their eyes.
It is free, so why not just put everything in a blender?
This is my way of just showing that the future of cinema can be anything we want it to be. Directors like Woody Allen, Quentin Tarantino, or even like the SpongeBob SquarePants show, were often mixing live action with cartoons.
I thought maybe I should take it a step further and blend every possible style.
Yes. Do not be discouraged by my difficulties.
It will get easier and better, and the more of us do it, the less they can do to stop us. Gatekeepers are often consensus driven, and will bend with the smallest amount of pressure. They are very simple in this regard.
I always say that the gatekeepers shutting us out are actually shutting themselves in, and when they realize they are missing out on an entire new generation of films, they will have no choice but to start embracing us.
AI filmmakers are the future, this is all for us, and the technology is only going to get better.
This is the opportunity of a lifetime.
Follow Hooroo Jackson:
Instagram, YouTube
Watch DreadClub: Vampire’s Verdict:
Available on Amazon and Blu-ray
Read the Making Of:
Artificial Imagination: The Making of "DreadClub"
