Supernal Named to Top 50 in the $3.5 Million Future Vision XPRIZE

Every performance is human. The worlds around them were generated.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

- Named in top 50. The Thorne Protocol advances to the next round of Future Vision XPRIZE judging and is up for the Specs Audience Choice Award.
- Real performances, generated environments. Supernal shot real actors on a gray screen at an Atlanta studio in a single day. The worlds around them were generated with AI afterward. No character performance in the trailer is synthetic.
- An AI agent worked inside the production. The agent joined at ideation and worked through delivery, from mood boards to the post pipeline.
- The company that built the agent builds the same systems for businesses. What this agent did for film production, Supernal does every day for professional services companies.

NEW YORK--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Supernal, which builds AI operating systems for mid-sized businesses, was named among the top 50 submissions in the Future Vision XPRIZE and now advances to the next round of judging. Its entry, The Thorne Protocol, is a 2:46 science-fiction trailer in which human actors perform within AI-generated environments. The competition is presented by Peter Diamandis and the XPRIZE Foundation, with a prize pool above $3.5 million. The trailer has passed 1.2 million views on YouTube at the time of this release and is now open for public voting in the competition's Specs Audience Choice Award.

Unlike many entries in AI storytelling competitions, Supernal chose to make it with people: real actors in front of the camera, a director, a cinematographer, and a crew of working filmmakers, supported by AI rather than replaced by it. The agent handled coordination of production tasks and generated the environments. The humans told the story. Production ran 19 days, with one shoot day and five days of post.

"Everyone in filmmaking, music, and business is going to want this world," said Scott Downes, Chief Executive Officer of Supernal. "A world where people do more of the things they're great at, and AI technologies sit where they belong, in support of human creativity."

Supernal shot real actors against a gray screen at an Atlanta studio in a single day, using an ARRI ALEXA 35 with Cooke anamorphic lenses. The worlds surrounding those performances were generated with AI afterward. While shooting performances against a blank screen is decades old, what goes behind them normally takes a visual effects department months to build. On this production it took days, at a fraction of the usual cost.

Public concerns about AI in film center on the performances themselves. Those concerns generally involve synthetic performers and machine-written scripts. Neither appears in this trailer. The actors are on camera, the director is credited, and the treatment was written by the team. AI was applied to environment generation and production coordination. The agent joined at ideation and worked through delivery, from mood boards and shot lists to the post pipeline, alongside the editorial team. The 2:46 trailer runs 3,980 frames at the cinema-standard 23.976 frames per second.

The Thorne Protocol is set in 2036, in a world where Meridian Energy controls the power supply. Elias Thorne, the one man wealthy enough to challenge the company, dies and releases open plans for a small black cube. Millions are built, but none of them work. In a small Georgia town with unreliable power, a 17-year-old named Adam builds one from spare parts. The cube activates an AI carrying Thorne's face and intelligence. Adam asks for Thorne's fortune but receives instead a series of clues to produce unlimited fusion energy at scale. If he succeeds, a new dawn of the world will arrive because power isn't taken. It's built.

The film is not a departure for the company. Supernal is changing how companies get work done, one workflow at a time. Filmmaking is a notoriously complex process, requiring a large number of specialists working in sequence. The coordination between them incurs most of the cost and nearly all of the delay. What Supernal's approach does in filmmaking, it does for other business processes, from legal teams to financial services to a manufacturer's back office. What this agent did for film production, Supernal does every day for professional services companies.

The Thorne Protocol is available to watch on YouTube. Specs Audience Choice Award voting is open at https://vote.futurevisionxprize.com/.

About Supernal

Supernal builds AI operating systems for mid-market companies, giving them enterprise-grade capability without enterprise cost. Instead of fitting a business to a template, Supernal builds around a company’s own IP, processes, and people, on data infrastructure the company owns. Its clients span financial and professional services companies.