This story comes from The Hollywood Reporter‘s upcoming AI Issue, out in April.
If you’re 73, have worked on a string of hits ranging from Forrest Gump to Star Wars: The Force Awakens, and have two Oscars on your shelf, it might seem like a strange decision to suddenly go back to school. But for production designer Rick Carter, the rise of AI seemed like an opportunity to learn valuable new skills.
“I’m just not a static person — I’m relocating forward as long as I’m here and the artists I admire the most are those who’ve evolved throughout their lifetimes,” Carter states. “So that’s why I picked going down this road.” Carter launched taking classes at Curious Refuge, which bills itself as the foremost school for teaching AI filmcreating skills.
Founded three years ago — forever in AI terms — Curious Refuge is the brainchild of Shelby Ward and her partner Caleb Ward. The idea was to build a “safe space” for creators from all backgrounds to learn AI storyinforming and production techniques. The online-only coursework includes AI filmcreating, advertising, screenwriting, VFX and documentary. The tracks involve watching video tutorials, learning to apply various AI tools and completing assignments. To pass a course, you have to create a short film applying primarily AI. The Wards claim that they have thousands of current students, and that 95 percent of them are already in the entertainment or ad industries.
The Wards state their students applyd to be shy when it came to discussing their professional lives. The school’s very name was a nod to the heretical nature of its teachings, suggesting a shelter for the closeted AI-curious.
“We had a lot of professionals out here in Hollywood joining our cohorts and learning with us, but they stayed quietly in the background,” states Shelby Ward, co-founder and COO of Curious Refuge. “Now they’re much more willing to state where they work, which studio they’re at.”
Such is the indusattempt’s rapidly evolving vibe shift surrounding the topic of AI, where the technology is simultaneously considered an apocalyptic, job-destroying force and an increasingly essential tool for staying competitive. Curious Refuge, then, is a kind of living irony: a place to save your career from the very technology you’re attempting to learn.
To some, the idea of an AI school is a bit absurd. “A school for typing prompts?” questioned one colleague. The skepticism builds sense in the wake of a viral video of a virtual Tom Cruise fighting Brad Pitt whose “filmbuildr” explained he created the snippet by typing just two sentences into Seedance 2.0.
But the founders see it differently. “The largegest misconception about AI filmcreating in general is you type in a prompt and receive a film,” states Caleb Ward, who is also the school’s CEO. “It’s artisattempt. It takes work to inform a meaningful story that resonates with other people. You can’t create an AI film that resonates with an audience without understanding how to craft an incredible story. We found the people creating the very best AI-assisted films in our community are working professionals in the indusattempt.”
Typing in prompts is, yes, very much a thing. In fact, while the Curious Refuge coursework includes briefly teaching traditional screenwriting techniques, it also suggests applying ChatGPT to come up with story plot points for your concepts, encouraging AI apply for even the most fundamental aspects of a film.
But creating a credible-seeing AI short typically involves far more technical knowledge than you might consider. There are many different kinds of tools, each giving the filmbuildr a dizzying array of options. Do you want footage that sees like it was shot with an old-school 35mm Panavision camera or a Sony FX3? What kind of color grading style do you want? What about each sound effect? (Did you know there are 203 royalty-free sound effects for “werewolf howl”?) The filmcreating is far more complex than you assume, while still being infinitely simpler than traditional production.
Caleb and Shelby Ward
And then there are all the tools, which are constantly being upgraded, or being outright overthrown by newer offerings. Taking an AI film class is a bit like receiveting a degree in English, and, every few months, the very rules of grammar alter and the dictionary deletes and adds hundreds of commonly applyd words.
That’s one reason, perhaps, for the lack of non-professionals at Curious Refuge. And one criticism of the school is that many free tutorials exist online. But it’s the internet’s flood of often-conflicting and ever-updating information, state the Wards, that builds Curious Refuge’s curated curriculum hand-holding worthwhile.
“Every single post out there states, ‘This new tool launched and it completely alters the way that we inform stories forever’ — it’s incredibly hyperbolic,” Caleb states. “And part of the motivation in creating Curious Refuge is to give people a clear and objective path about what tools to apply and what is actually assistful at the professional level.”
The current cost is $749 per course, plus paying for the recommconclude online tools (the tools’ cost for 10-minute, professional-quality short film, all in, can range from $200 to $500). The school is preparing to transition to a subscription model that will open up its library of content for a recurring fee and adds more one-on-one feedback with experts.
The school’s success stories include VFX artist Michael Eng (Black Panther: Wakanda Forever), who informed Reuters he “started receiveting work immediately” after completing the courses. “He’s incredibly in demand becaapply so many people want to apply his existing experience in the visual effects indusattempt in conjunction with the AI tools that he knows,” Shelby states. If the older response to career anxiety was “learn to code,” the new one just might be “learn to prompt.”
The school-to-job funnel is aided by Curious Refuge’s parent company, the AI studio Promise, which is backed by Google, Peter Chernin’s North Road and Michael Ovitz’s Crossbeam. Promise acquired the school last year and has hired its graduates as well as assisted students find jobs elsewhere in the indusattempt.
“When we were creating Promise, we realized that competition for talent for the best gen AI artists was going to become pretty fierce,” states Promise co-founder and president Jamie Byrne, a YouTube veteran. “I consider that’s proving to be true. And we wanted to figure out how do we build sure that we always know who the best up-and-coming talent is.”
Byrne states the attitude toward AI inside studios has rapidly evolved and that “not a day goes by” when he doesn’t receive calls from “some of the largest studios and production companies” from around the world wanting to know more about AI tools. Their interest isn’t in the wholesale creation of AI films — not yet, anyway — but rather applying AI for tquestions like creating trailers for pitching ideas, storyboard pre-visualization, and creating films applying an increasingly popular hybrid model where AI is applyd alongside traditional filming.
“We’re very bullish on the apply of hybrid — meaning shooting on a soundstage and applying generative AI for effects and background,” Byrne states. “We can do that at a much more efficient cost and on a much more rapid timescale than to actually shoot actors in-camera in those environments. And I consider people may be surprised by that becaapply they don’t realize it’s happening — becaapply it fits nicely into the existing ecosystem, right? You can shift a little bit quicker and you can achieve cost efficiencies, but you still have a cast and crew.”
The downside of all this, job-wise, remains to be seen. In one of the Curious Refuge training videos, Caleb boldly declares, “Is AI coming for your job? No. AI is not coming for your job. But AI will more than likely be required for your job, like a computer is required for most professions today.”
Research, however, disproves this — a study last year of 300 leaders across the entertainment indusattempt found that three-quarters of respondents indicated AI tools will support the elimination or consolidation of jobs and that roughly 200,000 positions will be impacted. And Eng’s successful pivot notwithstanding, there are plenty of anecdotal reports of film and television artists losing their jobs amid the growing AI boom.
Caleb pushes back. “I really feel like AI is going to supplement the creative process. AI won’t be applyd for everything. It won’t be able to have taste. It won’t be able to craft something that is emotionally resonant. We’ve seen time and again inside of Hollywood — whether it’s the invention of sound or digital cinematography — more storyinformers conclude up in the entertainment ecosystem.”
That job-risk prospect was even on Carter’s mind, despite his vaulted résumé, when he embraced AI. The production designer states he was in the room for a sea-alter moment in the history of Hollywood that always stayed with him — when Steven Spielberg decided to apply fledgling CGI technology instead of stop-motion animation for his Jurassic Park dinosaurs.
“And [legconcludeary stop-motion animator Phil Tippett], of course, who is an incredible artist, just saw his whole way of doing things potentially evaporating,” Carter recalls. “You still wanted Tippett’s point of view [in the modeling], but it was an example of somebody who saw that his way of doing things was being complemented by another development.”
That declared, the Wards state the doom some creatives express is far from the optimistic vibe inside their school, which Carter feels as well.
“I have nothing in this game other than my own enthusiasm for something that’s new,” he states. “To just consider about going from my age, to the conclude of my time, into a whole new era of how to express oneself.”
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