Innovation Heroes: Creating movie magic with automation and artificial intelligence

On the latest episode of Innovation Heroes, a podcast by SHI, host Ed McNamara meets with Ruslan Khamidullin, Chief Technology Officer of Filmustage – a technology startup that’s transforming the business of making movies. Filmustage uses neural network and natural language processing technology to automate one of the most time-consuming and costly parts of pre-production.

“The concept is pretty simple,” says Khamidullin. “The script breakdown process is when you start to write down all the possible categories of items you need in your film – from cast to lighting, props and costumes. Most productions do this manually using spreadsheets, which can take anywhere from a couple of days to a couple of weeks to input every single item. But this is actually the perfect task for machine learning. So, we created a data set based on a bunch of existing screenplays and trained our neural network to understand the context and format of scripts to be able to break them down automatically – in a couple of minutes.”

Khamidullin explains that while many creatives fear artificial intelligence taking over their jobs, this is not the goal of Filmustage. The film industry has always relied on technological innovations to push the medium forward, and Khamidullin considers his startup to be part of an ongoing process of creation and collaboration.

“Part of our mission is to democratize the film industry,” says Khamidullin. “We want to give amateur and professional filmmakers the easiest and most powerful tools, so they don’t have to do everything on their own and to save time and money on processes that can be made simple.”

To learn more about Khumadullin’s journey to founding Filmustage and his plans for the company’s future, listen to the full conversation.