Inside a superhero comedy made with the all-new PAI, from scene planning and character development to the final edit.
A girl lands a hopscotch jump and opens a crater in the pavement. A dog takes a drink and drags its owner down the street. At a gas station, a man discovers his arm is on fire.
In Super Powers, a meteorite has hit the city's water supply. Suddenly, ordinary people have superpowers and absolutely no idea how to use them. Filmmaker Matias Collado wanted the short to have the scale of a superhero blockbuster, with the comedy coming from people who were never expecting to be in one.
“I wanted people to laugh, be surprised and want to watch it again.” Matias Collado, filmmaker
Collado brought his screenplay into the all-new PAI, Utopai Studios' Production Assistive Intelligence engine. He used PAI for script breakdown, shot planning, character references and video generation, then edited the film in DaVinci Resolve.
Collado developed the screenplay outside PAI. Once he brought it into the project, he worked with the Production Agent to break the script into scenes and organize the shot list around them.
That gave him a way to manage a story that moves quickly between locations and characters. The gas station needed its own action beats and references. The girl who disappears through a water portal early in the film needed to be recognizable when she returned. Each sequence had its own requirements, while still belonging to the same sunny, chaotic city.
Collado gave the agent production rules and creative notes to work from. As he revised the project, it kept the screenplay, shot list and story notes in sync.
“The main difference was not having to keep track of everything myself. Normally I manage the script, the shot list and the references on my own. Here the agent did it, and every time I changed something, it updated it everywhere.” - Matias Collado
He also described being able to try an idea within one scene without applying it to the whole project. The agent saved his production rules as a note and checked that it was working from the latest screenplay before proceeding. Those details reduced the amount of information he had to track by hand.
Collado had a clear idea of how the film should feel. He wanted a camera that rarely stopped moving, with dolly-ins and sweeping moves familiar from big action films. The performances needed to be slightly exaggerated so that each reaction would register quickly.
That combination suited the premise. Every character is discovering something impossible in the middle of an ordinary day. Their surprise is part of the joke, and the camera needs to keep up with the consequences.
At the gas station, a man pumping fuel sees his hand catch fire. The sequence builds to an explosion and an elderly woman's reaction in the wreckage. Collado used character sheets, his production rules and prompts for individual cuts to develop the scene.
He also gave the agent instructions about how to generate the material. He requested longer takes that could contain several cuts, and asked it to run six or seven generations at a time for different parts of a scene. As the videos arrived, he reviewed them and sent corrections back.
His advice to another filmmaker was practical: establish the rules early, including the length of the takes and how the camera and performances should feel. That gives the agent a clear brief to work from as production continues.
The girl with red curls and a striped shirt appears near the beginning of Super Powers, disappears into a water portal, and returns near the end with white hair. For the return to make sense, the audience needs to recognize her.
Collado created her character reference in PAI, giving her red curly hair, a red-and-white striped T-shirt, denim shorts and sneakers. He then developed a second appearance for her return.
The instruction for that change was specific. Her hair should become silver-white, and her expression calm and serious. Her face, freckles, eye color, body and clothing should remain the same. Even the plaster on her knee was included in the direction.
Those references gave Collado a defined design for each appearance. The striped shirt and distinctive curls carry through to the finished frame, where the change in hair color becomes part of the reveal.
Collado generated all of the film's shots in PAI, then assembled the piece in DaVinci Resolve. He selected the strongest portions of different takes to build the sequences.
For an action comedy, those choices shape how the audience experiences each gag. A reaction needs enough time to land before the next burst of destruction. The cut determines how the separate incidents build into citywide chaos.
Working alone, Collado reached a complete first cut in roughly four days. His workflow combined planning and generation in PAI with the selection and editing work he carried out in Resolve.
For Collado, the Production Agent's most useful contribution was keeping the work organized as the film developed. Changes to the screenplay carried into the shot list and notes. The rules he had set for camera and performance remained part of the project.
“The difference was that I could stay focused on the creative work instead of keeping track of where every document and piece of information lived, or remembering to update everything by hand.” - Matias Collado
At Utopai Studios, we're building production intelligence infrastructure around the demands of making films. That includes the work of keeping a production organized through revisions, so filmmakers can spend more of their attention developing scenes and directing the result.
Super Powers shows how that support fits into a filmmaker's process. Collado brought the story, set the direction, reviewed the takes and shaped the edit. PAI helped him manage the production as he worked through those decisions.
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