Hollywood Veterans From Sharknado and Doctor Who Are Now Making AI Films

Jamie Magnus Stone directed eight episodes of Doctor Who for the BBC. Micho Rutare spent years engineering the tonal precision that made Sharknado a B movie institution at The Asylum. Both have now signed on to write features for Promise AI, a Los Angeles startup pairing established Hollywood writers with AI filmmakers. The appeal, for both, is speed of iteration at a cost conventional production cannot match.

What Promise AI Is Building

Promise AI was founded by YouTube veterans and is run by Tyler Mitchell, a former Imagine Entertainment executive who heads development, and Dave Clark, the company's chief creative officer. The company pairs AI filmmakers including Guillaume Hurbault and digital artist Metapuppet with experienced Hollywood writers who bring story craft and proven commercial instincts.

Funding is entirely internal. No outside financing is required unless a project adds live action elements. Investor connections include North Road, the production company founded by Peter Chernin and recently sold to Mediawan. Rick Carter, a veteran cinematic artist, has attended Promise's AI film school.

The Writers and Their Track Records

Stone directed eight episodes of Doctor Who during Seasons 12 and 13. He is writing Everything Is Within Tolerance for Promise, a thriller about scientists conducting secret experiments in a bunker.

The Iteration Argument

Rutare's reason for joining Promise AI goes directly to the economics of tone in genre filmmaking. "That was an exercise in tone, a Goldilocks hybrid of earnestness and ridiculousness," he said of Sharknado. "Experimenting with things like tone and pioneering new microgenres will become less of a crapshoot and more of a science."

Traditional genre productions succeed or fail based on how precisely a creative team can calibrate register across dozens of production decisions. Capturing that calibration by reshooting and retesting is expensive and slow. AI compresses those decisions into an earlier, faster stage. A writer who has spent years learning what works at the margins of genre can apply that knowledge without the cost of reshooting.

Mitchell drew the same point from a different reference. "Look at what Pixar does, constantly putting things up on a feed and rewriting them over and over again. But that's really expensive. AI can do it much faster and cheaper."

What Veterans Bring That AI Cannot Generate

The working premise at Promise AI is that experienced writers carry something the tools cannot produce on their own.

"People who work on AI films have a mastery that very few people have — you need to learn dozens of tools. And a [traditional] writer can bring in all their talent," Mitchell said.

Rutare described a varied response among his peers. "In my conversations with fellow screenwriters, there is some fear of the unknown, but there's also a sense of excitement around what opportunities these new tools will unlock."

The company is not pursuing outside financing for its current slate. "We want to be among the first to make great stories with this new technology," Mitchell said. "At the end of the day that's how we will be judged."

Story First, Tools Second

Promise AI's hybrid model sits in a different position from the solo creator approach that Ash Koosha brought to Odysseus: The Fall, his 135 minute AI generated feature produced for a budget in the mid five figures without a physical crew or distributor. Where Fountain 0 builds from a single creative director outward, Promise AI recruits experienced writers and directors first and provides the AI filmmaking infrastructure around them.

The bet is the same in both cases. Story craft built across years of produced work is the resource AI cannot generate. The tools can be learned. The instinct for when a scene earns an audience's investment cannot.

Explore text-to-video and image-to-video tools used in AI productions at the AI FILMS Studio video workspace.

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Sources

The Hollywood Reporter