When a Singapore drama series lost 40% of its funding just before production, the producers didn't cut scenes. They rebuilt the entire visual effects workflow around AI, cutting costs by roughly a third and opening up shots that would have been financially impossible before.
Crooks, a Singapore drama series, is an early test case for what hybrid AI production can look like when the budget collapses and deadlines don't move. Producer Boi Kwong saw one investor withdraw around the Chinese New Year period, taking about 40% of the funding with it. With grant deadlines fixed, the team spent three months developing an AI-assisted production workflow from scratch.
"It was scary. When we started, we really didn't know what we were doing," Kwong said.
For creatives and industry watchers, the approach is a pivotal shift. AI isn't dreaming up scenes or rewriting scripts. It's doing the expensive, repetitive work - background cleanup, crowd generation, and lighting correction - while the director, cinematographer, and actors stay at the center.
An uncomfortable team is the point
The project brought together two very different skill sets: veteran visual effects supervisor Jay Hong, who spent his career in the traditional film pipeline, and AI researcher Lim Kim Hui, whose background is tech, not filmmaking.
"Put a tech guy and a creative guy together and you get an uncomfortable space," Kwong said.
That discomfort produced the workflow. The pair's first months were guesswork. Lim's core problem is a technical one: AI video models can generate a convincing single shot, but crowds and camera movement throw them off. "If you give it too much information in one generation, it will start to move and hallucinate," Lim said.
The models don't just repaint a background. They change the entire structure of the shot. "The AI starts to change everything, including the director's camera. The angle, the characters, they all change," Lim noted.
Their solution borrows from traditional visual effects layering. Instead of generating complete scenes, they break every shot into parts - backgrounds, lighting, and performances are processed separately before being recombined.
The technical core is a "control net" of guidance signals and seed values. It tells the model what it's allowed to adjust and what must remain untouched. When a shot comes back, Hong repaints lighting by hand in After Effects or Nuke, then sends it back for a final render. "We repaint the lighting roughly in After Effects or Nuke, then throw it to the AI. The AI repaints everything to make it physically correct," Hong said.
Real budget math, real creative wins
The cost savings are concrete. "These are tools that turbocharge your man-hours. What usually took 10 hours now takes one," Lim said.
The biggest wins are for locations and crowd work. A two-storey luxury restaurant in Singapore would cost about S$10,000 a day to rent, and productions may need it for months. Instead, the team photographs real interiors or builds simple geometry, then asks AI to generate a convincing environment. Their lighting work is reduced 50% to 70%, and total outlays for sets, logistics, post-production, and equipment across the show came in around 30% lower.
For a prison sequence, instead of hiring dozens of extras and asking actors to shave their heads, the crew filmed a handful of performers. The rest were AI-generated deductions.
For those who want to reverse the same approach in their own work, the workflow is having a dramatic effect on the cost of each attempt. Early on, Lim needed 30 to 40 AI generations to get one usable shot. It's now down to about six. Simple close-ups go in one or two passes.
Mathart isn't the prize, though. "With hybrid AI, we are no longer restricted to a S$2 million budget, for example. It allows filmmakers to dream bigger," Kwong said.
It changes the producer/department relationship. "We didn't restrict any department. Whatever the director could imagine, we just said go for it," Hong said.
For those in Hong's line of work - visual effects teams who have watched budgets tighten and jobs evaporate - this is more than an efficiency increase. "I went from no job to half a job," he said.
"If we go full AI, the industry will collapse. There is no creativity, no control," Kwong said. The technology is adaptable, not the director.
But there are open questions
AI's talent is a moving target - and Lim says it can be uncomfortable to watch. He pointed to ByteDance's latest video model, unveiled the day before the interview. The realism of human expressions has changed. It is "almost scary" - not because of the content, but because of how it was made possible.
"All the actors are training the AI models. They are giving up their experience to the model," Lim said.
Legal and creative tensions also remain unresolved. AI companies face substantial copyright suits and cease-and-desist letters from Hollywood studios over training data. And the sheer cost of running large video models has pushed some of the best-funded tools offline.
Why this matters for creatives
For artists and directors, the medium's impact seems to fall whether the story holds up. "The 'AI film'" is not unusual to be perfect - once you see it, you nitpick. But if it's an engaging film about people and a story, you won't. "You can't detect the AI", he said, if a film is working the way it's supposed to. If people know it is AI, they go looking for it. "If the story holds, they won't notice".
The takeaway for people who define themselves by plot and performances: the AI tool's skill can be unknown. The Cuban lesson is different. The most flexible skillsets - a visual effects supervisor who can hand-paint lighting corrections, a producer who can collapse a 10-hour effect into a one-hour pass - are worth something deep in an editing system. Knowing how to stand in an "uncomfortable space" between a tech specialist and a creative vision is now a specialist's job. They can help you start with those hybrid skills, but the mindset is the most transferable part. For creatives facing budget cuts or exploding scope, they may be toward that "uncomfortable space": the budget around you gets smaller, but the production's imagination can still dare to be large.
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