Amazon Prime Video and the Wonder Project’s “House of David” Season 2 features between 350 and 400 AI-generated images, and showrunner Jon Erwin has advocated for more Hollywood creatives to publicly embrace the technology.
In an interview with Wired published Monday, Erwin said he did not have the budget to practically bring some of the battle sequences, locations and environments in “House of David” Season 2 to life, so he used AI. Erwin’s faith-based production company, the Wonder Project, noted that the behind-the-scenes use of AI in “House of David” increased exponentially between its first season, which purportedly used around 70 AI images, and the show’s second.
“The cost of augmenting those shots is minuscule compared to the time and cost it would have been to generate those with, you know, traditional VFX methods,” Erwin explained. The “House of David” creator went on to compare his use of AI in the Prime Video series to puppeteering.
“Let’s say we only have the money to have a certain scale to the frame,” Erwin said. “You can put a very real camera on a very real actor and direct that actor, direct the camera, and that becomes, in essence, the hand inside a puppet. The puppet itself is this digital world that you create.” The “House of David” showrunner told Wired he has experimented with AI tools created by Runway, Luma, Google and Adobe.
“What we found is there were kind of three types of tools. There were image generators, there were up-res tools, and there were video generators. We found that we could combine those tools in a stack,” he noted. “By the end, we were using 10 to 15 core tools.”
“House of David” has been a hit for Amazon, which only gave it an initial one-season order before quickly renewing it once it rose to the top of the streamer’s charts following its premiere. The Wonder Project reports that it has garnered over half a million subscriptions in the three weeks it has been offering “House of David” Season 2 through its Prime Video subscription channel, which is currently offering a seven-day free trial offer.
Erwin’s open use and promotion of AI has nonetheless arrived at a time when the use of the technology is at the center of not only an ongoing moral and artistic debate in Hollywood, but also multiple copyright lawsuits. Concerns about its environmental impact and the quality of its content continue to rage on as well. Erwin, for his part, says filmmakers should embrace AI as a boundary-pushing new tool.
“What makes it scary for some people and really exciting for others is I’ve never seen technology iterate and evolve this quickly,” Erwin argued. “This is a fundamental change that’s going to happen no matter what your opinion is, and these tools are going to be the basis of a lot of work moving forward.”
Not everyone in Hollywood agrees with Erwin. “Frankenstein” director Guillermo del Toro has made headlines in recent weeks for his anti-AI sentiments and statements. The director told NPR he would “rather die” than use generative AI. Filmmaker Justine Bateman has also made waves online with her previous comments about the dangers of AI.
“It’s presenting itself as a solution if we had a business where we didn’t have enough writers or we didn’t have enough directors or actors or location managers. But we have the opposite situation,” Bateman told Wired about the technology’s place in Hollywood. “We have more workers than we have jobs. So it’s not solving any problem except the problem a CEO might have of not having profit margins wide enough for their liking.”
