Hooroo Jackson’s A Very Long Carriage Ride is the first dual release in the history of cinema, marking the first AI stop motion animated feature film, and the first AI classic style animated feature film at once, both made completely with AI tools. And like Jackson’s previous films, it was created entirely by one person. No crew. No studio. No compromise.
A Very Long Carriage Ride is a period adventure set in the divided land of Gooseberry. Autumn Watt—a sharp, principled letter-writer—sets off with her best friend, the pragmatic surgeon Dr. Katy Bloom, to attend a weekend of high-society weddings. On the road they learn that Gooseberry’s celebrated philanthropist, Meijor Donaldson, has secretly ruined and abused three women, among them Lady Brandy, estranged daughter of Hopkins Brandy, a once-great merchant now sunk in drink. Autumn joins forces with the broken but still-fierce Brandy and a small gaggle of travelling companions, determined to carry the women’s joint accusation straight to Donaldson’s own wedding. But beneath its wit, magical realism, and romantic swerves, hidden secrets lurk. The film is a simple story about finding the courage to speak when silence is safer—presented in two parallel, first-of-their-kind releases, Jackson calls it, “one film, two ways.”
The $2,000 budgeted production ($1,000 per version) proves the concept from Jackson’s book, “The New Machine Cinema: Foundations in AI Film Theory”, and his essay “The Living Breathing Cinema”—a framework where a film isn’t a fixed object, but a living, changing work. Here, audiences choose which version they want to watch. Both are the same story, same performances, same vision, told through different aesthetic forms.
It was Jackson’s third major milestone in cinema history following the first fully AI feature film ever made (Window Seat, July 2023) and the first fully AI animated feature film ever made (DreadClub: Vampire’s Verdict, July 2024) with 100% of its sound, music, video, and performances created using only AI tools.
The creation of the screenplay, written by Jackson and workshopped with AI-is documented in The Making of ‘A Very Long Carriage Ride’, serving as both a production diary and a complete archive of his dialogue with LLMs during the six month production of the film. Additionally, over 40 hours documenting the complete making of the film in real time were also recorded.
