The feature-length animated film “Critterz,” which was supposed to showcase how OpenAI’s video-generation technology could revolutionize cinema, didn’t make its Cannes Film Festival debut as planned after the AI company shut down its Sora tool, forcing the film’s creators to look for another AI partner.
The feature-length animated film “Critterz,” which was supposed to showcase how OpenAI’s video-generation technology could revolutionize cinema, didn’t make its Cannes Film Festival debut as planned after the AI company shut down its Sora tool, forcing the film’s creators to look for another AI partner.
The film's co-director and OpenAI creative strategist Chad Nelson, along with producer James Richardson, gave an interview live from the festival. They said that they plan to release the film in the first quarter of next year, and that this year's film forum was spent looking for a distributor. As a reminder, the annual festival in the south of France, which is both a platform for screening new films and a marketplace for their distributors, ends this Saturday.
Nelson originally wrote and directed a short animated film of the same name in 2023 about talking forest animals. The five-minute film was created using DALL-E, an OpenAI tool that generates static images based on text prompts and predates Sora. The feature-length version was to use Sora's video generation to tell the story of an animal searching for its long-lost brother.
"'Critterz' is an independent film created by filmmakers who experiment with OpenAI tools as part of their creative process. OpenAI is neither a financial sponsor nor a producer of this film," a company spokesperson said.
Using generative artificial intelligence to create scenes and characters means the film can be made much faster and cheaper than traditional animation, producer James Richardson said in an interview at the festival.
"It would normally take three years and a crew of 300 people or four years and 200 people to make a film like this. We're making it in nine months with just 15 people," Richardson said. The producer declined to give an exact budget, as the filmmakers are still looking for distributors. Last year, The Wall Street Journal reported that the film's budget would not exceed $30 million. For comparison: the budget for the Walt Disney animated film Toy Story 4 was $200 million.
In March, OpenAI announced the closure of its video generator Sora — just six months after its big launch. At the same time, the company ended its partnership with Disney. The decision to eliminate the tool coincided with OpenAI’s desire to streamline its product line. Recall that Sora allowed users to create video clips based on text prompts, mix existing videos, and also view the work of other creators.
Nelson and Richardson said that the character designs, plot, and storyboards for Critterz are already in place, which they called the most difficult part of the project. According to Richardson, once they have chosen the technology to replace Sora, the creation of the cartoon itself will move quickly, although the creators are still in talks with AI developers.
British studio Vertigo Films is creating the animated film “Critterz” using its own software called Woven. The production system is capable of integrating several different artificial intelligence models and is designed to combine traditional filmmaking methods with AI technologies. Vertigo and its owner, Federation Studios, plan to commercialize the tool in the future.
“Certain models are better at handling acting and character emotion, while others provide higher sound quality and better simulate audio effects,” Nelson explained. “So you can choose one model or another depending on the needs of a particular shot.”
