AI makes a feature film in 14 days: Higgsfield shares its $500,000 filmmaking process with creators
Higgsfield AI has released the full production pipeline behind its 95-minute AI-generated action film, allowing creators to access the prompts, character models and workflows used to make the movie. The startup says it completed the film in 14 days for $500,000.
By releasing every underlying prompt, character model seed, and raw generation file, Higgsfield is offering independent filmmakers an unedited blueprint for feature-length AI cinema.
Co-written by Cannes-lauded filmmaker Adilkhan Yerzhanov and directed by Aitore Zholdaskali, Hell Grind follows four street thieves whose heist goes awry when an ancient artefact drags one of them into a mythological underworld.
While traditional Hollywood studios routinely spend between $50 million and $150 million on CGI-heavy action blockbusters, Higgsfield completed Hell Grind in just 14 days for a total budget of $500,000.
Budget Breakdown:
Total Budget: $500,000
Cloud Compute Costs: $400,000 (80%) spent on GPU processing via high-performance cloud infrastructure.
Labour & Editorial Crew: $100,000 (20%) across a 15-person crew of directors, DPs, and editors.
Also Read: OpenAI, Anthropic AI agents implicated in new security breaches
3,000-Word Prompts and Workflow Scale
Generating a coherent 95-minute narrative pushed generative video beyond standard short-form clips. To overcome “AI character drift”—where faces, lighting, and clothing mutate between shots—Higgsfield deployed proprietary actor-locking tools (Soul Cast and Soul Cinema) alongside video generation models.
Prompts averaged roughly 3,000 words each, detailing specific lens choices, lighting setups, camera trajectories, and explicit physical constraints. For the film’s first 25-minute segment alone, the team generated 16,181 preliminary video clips to harvest just 253 final usable shots.
Higgsfield engineered custom automated systems to translate standard screenplay pages directly into multi-thousand-word machine prompts.
The Cannes Screening
Hell Grind drew widespread media coverage partly due to its technical ambition, and partly due to press surrounding its premiere on the French Riviera.
Initial headlines reported that the film premiered at the Cannes Film Festival. Official festival representatives clarified that Hell Grind was not part of the official festival competition line-up. Instead, Higgsfield rented a commercial theater (Cinéma Olympia) in Cannes during the festival weeks to screen the film for market buyers and press at the parallel Marché du Film.
What the Open-Source Release Means
Despite mixed reviews regarding narrative pacing and AI actor performances, the open-sourcing of Hell Grind marks a major technical milestone. By publishing its raw prompt libraries, shot lists, and character-consistency seeds online, Higgsfield has effectively released the source code for AI feature filmmaking. Independent directors no longer have to guess how to maintain character fidelity across a long-form story, they can clone Higgsfield’s framework directly.
Also Read: Samsung Electronics launches next-generation AI memory technology
Original source: https://www.cnbctv18.com/entertainment/
