This story comes from The Hollywood Reporter’s upcoming AI Issue, which publishes on March 31. Check out further stories throughout the week and the complete issue next week.
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 moving forward as long as I’m here and the artists I admire the most are those who’ve evolved throughout their lifetimes,” Carter says. “So that’s why I picked going down this road.” Carter began taking classes at Curious Refuge, which bills itself as the foremost school for teaching AI filmmaking 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 make a “safe space” for creators from all backgrounds to learn AI storytelling and production techniques. The online-only coursework includes AI filmmaking, advertising, screenwriting, VFX and documentary. The tracks involve watching video tutorials, learning to use various AI tools and completing assignments. To pass a course, you have to create a short film using 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 say their students used 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,” says Shelby Ward, co-founder and COO of Curious Refuge. “Now they’re much more willing to say where they work, which studio they’re at.”
Such is the industry’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 trying to learn.
To some, the idea of an AI school is a bit absurd. “A school for typing prompts?” asked one colleague. The skepticism makes sense in the wake of a viral video of a virtual Tom Cruise fighting Brad Pitt whose “filmmaker” explained he created the snippet by typing just two sentences into Seedance 2.0.
But the founders see it differently. “The biggest misconception about AI filmmaking in general is you type in a prompt and get a film,” says Caleb Ward, who is also the school’s CEO. “It’s artistry. It takes work to tell 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 making the very best AI-assisted films in our community are working professionals in the industry.”
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 using ChatGPT to come up with story plot points for your concepts, encouraging AI use for even the most fundamental aspects of a film.
But making a credible-looking AI short typically involves far more technical knowledge than you might think. There are many different kinds of tools, each giving the filmmaker a dizzying array of options. Do you want footage that looks 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 filmmaking is both far more complex than you assume while still being infinitely simpler than traditional production.
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 getting a degree in English, and, every few months, the very rules of grammar change and the dictionary deletes and adds hundreds of commonly used 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, say the Wards, that makes Curious Refuge’s curated curriculum hand-holding worthwhile.
“Every single post out there says, ‘This new tool launched and it completely changes the way that we tell stories forever’ — it’s incredibly hyperbolic,” Caleb says. “And part of the motivation in creating Curious Refuge is to give people a clear and objective path about what tools to use and what is actually helpful at the professional level.”
The current cost is $749 per course, plus paying for the recommend 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 which 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 told Reuters he “started getting work immediately” after completing the courses. “He’s incredibly in demand because so many people want to use his existing experience in the visual effects industry in conjunction with the AI tools that he knows,” Shelby says. 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 helped students find jobs elsewhere in the industry.
“When we were creating Promise, we realized that competition for talent for the best Gen-AI artists was going to become pretty fierce,” says Promise co-founder and President Jamie Byrne, a YouTube veteran. “I think that’s proving to be true. And we wanted to figure out how do we make sure that we always know who the best up-and-coming talent is.”
Byrne says the attitude towards AI inside studios has rapidly evolved and that “not a day goes by” when he doesn’t get 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 using AI for tasks like creating trailers for pitching ideas, storyboard pre-visualization, and making films using an increasingly popular hybrid model where AI is used alongside traditional filming.
“We’re very bullish on the use of hybrid — meaning shooting on a soundstage and using generative AI for effects and background,” Byrne says. “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 think people may be surprised by that because they don’t realize it’s happening — because it fits nicely into the existing ecosystem, right? You can move a little bit faster 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 industry 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 job amid the growing AI boom.
Caleb pushes back. “I really feel like AI is going to supplement the creative process. AI won’t be used 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 storytellers end up in the entertainment ecosystem.”
That job-risk prospect was even on Carter’s mind, despite his vaulted resume, when he embraced AI. The production designer says he was in the room for a sea-change moment in the history of Hollywood that always stayed with him — when Steven Spielberg decided to use fledgling CGI technology instead of stop-motion animation for his Jurassic Park dinosaurs.
“And [legendary stop-motion animator Phil Tippet], of course, who is an incredible artist, just saw his whole way of doing things potentially evaporating,” Carter recalled. “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 said, the Wards say 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 said. “To just think about going from my age, to the end of my time, into a whole new era of how to express oneself.”
