Dustin Hollywood reports $2,100 in generation costs for The Beginning
Dustin Hollywood reports 756 shots, a 122-minute runtime and $2,100 in image and video generation costs for The Beginning. He describes an agent-run Stages AI production system.
TL;DR
- The Beginning has a reported 756 shots, a 122-minute runtime and $2,100 in image and video generation costs, according to the Scene 02 update.
- Agents prepare production work, while CUE blocks media generation pending human approval in the workflow demo.
- An October 30 showing is announced for ESCAPE's MACABRE & MAYHEM Fest 2026 in the festival post.
CUE turns an explainer brief into a 613-item production ledger, then asks about runtime and voiceover. Its skills menu reaches into Figma design-to-code roundtrips and TouchDesigner show control. Dustin Hollywood, STAGES founder and CEO, pitches his film as “Event Horizon meets Star Wars”.
Image and video costs
Hollywood's reported film-level tally:
- 756 shots
- 122 minutes
- $2,100 for image and video generation
That works out to about $2.78 in generation spend per reported shot. The stated category is “img + vid”; labor and post-production costs are unspecified.
His broader production update describes around 700 completed animated shots for about $2,000, which he attributes to avoiding iteration. He also reports 2 hours and 5 minutes of automated film time across three production modes:
- Text-to-video (T2V)
- Image-to-video (I2V)
- Reference-to-video (Ref2V)
An earlier progress reply described the project as science-fiction horror and put completed footage at 23 minutes.
CUE approval gate
CUE locks media generation until the human approves production scope, the smartest detail in the demo. The shared example processes an explainer brief, with 16:9 delivery first and a 9:16 version planned later.
Four agent tasks are marked complete:
- Matisse: read source material.
- Rembrandt: prepare the production.
- Vermeer: design the training.
- Goya: write the production script.
Before generation, CUE asks three questions:
- Which film should it make from the brief?
- How long should the film be?
- What should the voiceover say?
STAGES also describes project memory and postmortem loops intended to preserve continuity across teams and long production timelines.
Creative software skills
The CUE menu in the production update lists eight workflow entries:
- Blender: reusable procedural nature assets.
- Unity: layered VFX Graph effects.
- Figma: MCP design-to-code roundtrips.
- DaVinci Resolve: multicamera color node stacks.
- Premiere and Resolve: color roundtrips and conform.
- Premiere: multicamera editing and repair.
- TouchDesigner: visitor-reactive projection.
- TouchDesigner: serial sensors and show control.
Hollywood also shared a separate 30-second demo clip.
A separate clip shared in a reply about what his system had made
The Beginning previews
Hollywood's title teasers run about 15 seconds each. In an accompanying story excerpt, he writes of “a liminal state of time and space” as the world burns.
Two other threads pair the film's promotion with a convertible ride and a book-reading still.
Authorship records and the 2028 Oscars
Hollywood says his system now records human authorship and provenance, and that he is assembling a team for the 2028 Oscars. He describes the next 12 months as a push to develop IP and storytelling.
His studio, NAKID Pictures, lists story development/screenwriting and hybrid AI filmmaking among potential roles on its linked recruitment page. For The Beginning, he announces October 30 at ESCAPE's MACABRE & MAYHEM Fest 2026 in the festival post.