Do we follow the tall, stilted, morally questionable man in cargo pants? It’s the question up for debate among the collection of four teenagers leading Jason Zada’s “Terrarium,” a found-footage style story about the group that takes shelter underground following some unspecified catastrophic event. It’s a late Wednesday morning in September at Hollywood’s BLT Studios, and I’m on the set of “Terrarium” during one of its final days of production.
Three of the characters — Tim, Devin and Reese, with the fourth, Lila, represented by the camera — are panicked, worried the strange-looking man is leading them to some abject horror. What road are they venturing on? Where, indeed, is this man taking them to?
It’s unclear because, as I gaze at the monitor in front of Zada, I see no road, because there is no road. There is also no set of a road. Instead, the actors in this film are filming on a well-lit soundstage, flanked by black tarps to hide the film’s 26 crew members from view, against nothing.
There are no props, no Volume-like screens displaying an ominous setting. Nearly everything, save for the humans themselves, will be generated using AI. The snack-filled convenience store the characters check out?
The dark, eerie underground tunnel the ragtag group finds themselves in? Even how the foursome is positioned in the film is done using AI, with Zada having each actor perform against an individual camera and piecing together composites of the group, making it appear like they’re staged in a scene together. The film was announced in May following Amazon’s AI on the Lot event, a co-production between Zada’s Secret Label, an AI-driven entertainment studio, and the AI production platform Artlist, which is financing the film.
The film is executive produced by Steven Schneider, a native producer in the horror genre whose credits include “Paranormal Activity,” “Insidious” and last year’s “The Long Walk,” and its cast includes the likes of “Stranger Things” and “Starship Troopers” actor Jake Busey, “Love Island USA” season seven personality Ace Greene and relative newcomers Kylee Levien and Austin Willard. Zada aims to complete the project by next week, and the film is still seeking a distributor. Amid fears in Hollywood that AI will kill jobs for actors and crew members, “Terrarium” represents a test of whether the technology can really provide the cost savings long envisioned while maintaining the traditional production workflow.
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