CRXSS: Integrating AI into our workflow.

For many reasons (elections, inflation, cost of living) 2024 was a challenging year for us all and the “survive to 25” felt real; yet it was the pervasive fear of AI and how it was going to steal all our jobs in the creative industries that was front and centre of our minds.

As with so many things, a lack of knowledge, insight and understanding drives fear and uncertainty so at CRXSS, we decided to delve deep into AI and investigate to see how we could integrate AI in a meaningful and sustainable way into our workflow.

One thing that we are clear on is that we want to use real people as the basis of the work. Since September 2024, we (Sam Barker, Alexander Khokhlov, William Cornelius, Kelvin Murray and Wilson Hennessy) have been shooting integrated personal projects with real people and seeing how we can augment AI to complement our workflow.

First up was Sam Barker who wanted to use AI to create short films proving a world of limitless destinations that can be created here in London in a single day. We wanted to push the output of what can be achieved and then run a comparative cost should we want to do this all for real. Sam imagined a hospital and a desert scenario. Two wildly different destinations and narratives. We treated this production like we would any short film: storyboard, pre-vis, cast, styling, green screen shoot and VFX.

CRXSS have teamed up Little Shadow to facilitate our VFX and AI workflow and also Luke Ryan (Malcolm Ryan Studios) because in a virtual world, it’s important to know where you are going to go and shooting repeatedly at their pre-lit green screen has helped streamline our production.

Over the next few weeks, I’ll be sharing some of the other projects and the lessons learned; but without further ado here is “Desert” by Sam Barker.