Supernal's 19-day AI-assisted film took third in the XPRIZE
Real actors filmed on a grey screen for one day, AI environments built around them, and a finished trailer in under three weeks.
Key takeaways
- Supernal said on October 2, 2026 that its AI-assisted film The Thorne Protocol placed third in the Future Vision XPRIZE and third in the separate SPECS Audience Choice vote.
- The film was chosen from more than 2,500 submissions and reached the final five, presenting at Moonshots LIVE in Los Angeles.
- Real actors were filmed against a grey screen in Atlanta in a single shoot day, while AI generated the environments around their performances; Supernal says no character performance in the trailer is synthetic.
- The team explored roughly 500,000 generated frames to arrive at the 3,552 used in the finished trailer, and finished the production in 19 days.
Supernal said on October 2, 2026 that its AI-assisted science-fiction project The Thorne Protocol took third place in the Future Vision XPRIZE, and third place in the competition's separate SPECS Audience Choice award, decided by public vote.
The competition itself has already been covered here when Jeff Synthesized's The Gifted won the grand prize. This is the production story behind one of the films it beat.
The Thorne Protocol advanced from more than 2,500 submissions to the last five, then presented at Moonshots LIVE in Los Angeles to a judging panel that included the astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, the novelist Neal Stephenson, Google's vice president of technology and society Mira Lane, Salesforce chief brand and creative officer John Zissimos and Roddenberry Entertainment chief executive Rod Roddenberry.
The method is the interest. Real actors were filmed against a grey screen at an Atlanta studio in a single shoot day, and AI generated the environments around their performances. Supernal says no character performance in the trailer is synthetic. One day of filming plus five days of post-production produced a finished trailer in a total of 19 days.
An AI agent worked alongside the human crew from ideation to delivery, Supernal says, handling mood boards, shot lists, production coordination and parts of the post-production pipeline. The team generated roughly 500,000 frames and kept 3,552 of them for the finished trailer, about one frame in every 140.
"AI didn't make this film. People did. We just were able to make it faster, with AI as a tool," said Scott Downes, Supernal's chief executive and an executive producer of the film.
The result is a useful data point for anyone weighing a hybrid pipeline. The expensive part of a speculative trailer is not the performance, which still needed actors on a set; it is the world around them, which is exactly the part a generative model can now supply. Supernal has not said whether The Thorne Protocol becomes anything longer than a trailer.
The finished trailer is public through Supernal; the company has not announced a longer version.
Sources
- finance.yahoo.com - Business Wire release with all production and result figures
- xprize.org - the competition's finalist list and judging panel