I looked inside an AI generated movie, and the best parts were all human

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. 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. I looked inside an AI generated movie, and the best parts were all human Higgsfield is using Cully Hill Boys to show you how to prompt up your own movie. 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. The film also functions as a gigantic ad for Higgsfield’s newly added Seedance 2.5 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. 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. Cully Hill Boys’ story was crafted by a human with an understanding of proper pacing. Some of that likely boils down to the way that Seedance 2.5 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. 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. Anthropic’s Claude was used to come up with prompts, which were sent to Seedance 2.5 to create video and speech, while ByteDance’s Seedream and Google’s Nano Banana were used for image and video editing. Per the website, Cully Hill Boys’ creative leads had to split their workflow across different models “because the rules of one job poison the other.” That meant, for example, one instance of Claude had to be focused solely on churning out prompts with wording specifically designed to generate workable images while another was dedicated to doing the same for prompts that would eventually become videos clips. Similar to how Cully Hill Boys as a whole feels like an ad for Higgsfield as one of the many AI filmmaking platforms out there, the company’s transparency about how the film was made comes across as a way to highlight all of the models it gives its users access to. Reading the text prompts - most of which were in English, while some were in Simplified Chinese - you can see how detailed their descriptions are. But when you compare specific prompts to their corresponding scenes in the full movie, it becomes clear that these models aren’t just whipping up impressive shots and camera movements out of thin air. It’s evident there’s an extra bit of human work guiding this project. More than a few of the prompts related to Cully Hill Boys’ zippier, more action-packed scenes reference elements of Wright and Ritchie’s styles of filmmaking. The prompts didn’t contain explicit directions to mimic any specific one of Wright or Ritchie films, but they did include asks for “GUY RITCHIE COVERAGE” and “DYNAMIC clip-style (Edgar Wright snap.)” It’s not unusual for traditional directors to pay homage by replicating one another’s signature filmmaking techniques. But Cully Hill Boys’ is a different sort of beast because its production process seemingly hinges on its underlying AI models having first been trained on Wright and Ritchie’s IP in order to understand when they’re being asked to generate similar footage. As impressive as Cully Hill Boys is compared to other AI movies, it feels more like a (mostly) polished proof of concept than a project that’s ready for the mainstream spotlight. Rafiq, Kiatipis, and Adesanya’s fans might get a kick out of seeing their faves in a feature-length production, but this probably isn’t something that most moviegoers would be keen to watch. Higgsfield likely understands that reality. Cully Hill Boys’ real value is in its potential to further normalize the idea of AI movies in people’s minds. 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