Amazon-backed Showrunnner announced on Friday a new AI model designed to generate long, complex narratives — ultimately building toward feature film length, live action films — for its platform completely dedicated to AI content that allows users to create their own episodes of TV shows with a prompt of just a couple of words. Over the next two years, it’ll be utilized to re-create Welles’ follow-up to Citizen Kane, a chunk of which was lost after studio executives burned the footage.

Showrunner’s endeavor will deploy a fusion of AI and traditional film techniques to reconstruct the lost footage. This includes shooting some sequences with live actors, with plans to use face and pose transfer techniques with AI tools to preserve the likenesses of the original actors in the movie. Extensively archived set photos from the film will serve as the foundation for re-creating the scenes.

Helping to spearhead the project is Brian Rose, a filmmaker who’s spent the last five years re-creating 30,000 missing frames from the movie. He’s rebuilt the physical sets in 3D models, using them to pinpoint camera movements to match with the script, set photos, and archive materials. By his thinking, he’s reconstructed the framing and timing of each scene, which will serve as the foundation for the re-creation.

How did you incorporate James Gunn’s own dog, Ozu, into Krypto’s design? Were there specific elements of her behavior or appearance that were reflected on screen?

Loic Mireault: Krypto is based entirely on James Gunn’s dog Ozu. Like many dog lovers, James had tons of clips of his dog on his phone. So when we asked him for video references of Ozu, he sent us close to an hour of Ozu’s footage in many different contexts, which was essential to capture the essence of Ozu’s behavior and personality.

James was clear from day one: he wanted Krypto to be Ozu. Our goal was to ensure James would recognize his own dog in Krypto’s performance. We basically interpreted those Ozu’s references as if they were an hour long Krypto movie, with the goal of mimicking Ozu’s specific facial gestures, behaviors, right down to matching his iconic asymmetric ears!

It’s worth mentioning that Krypto was a fully keyframe animated character. No Motion Capture was involved in the process, and there was no real dog, puppet or animatronic on the original footage to base our animation on. Since we had nothing to match from the plate, Krypto’s performance was developed and designed from scratch by the animation/postvis team in post-production, with obviously, the crucial creative input from James Gunn.