Hooroo Jackson

Hooroo exposes director Tom Paton and his lies behind ‘Where the Robots Grow’ in a brazen attempt to steal history from early A.I. pioneers. 

Almost all of 2024 was a black hole working on DreadClub: Vampire’s Verdict. I didn’t see any movies, shows, or play any videogames. So coming out of the black hole has been very confusing as I exited into a world different than the one I started in. This is kind of what the world asks of us in a way. I was lucky to make DreadClub, and the universe finds very small ways to reward it (Best Director, 2024 Miami Street Festival, Best Animated Film, 2024 Mindfield) while making clear it is not on my terms.

I can never fully describe the excitement of making Window Seat in 2023, the birth of a bonafide feature film using A.I., materializing for the first time.

When I published the film that July, it was the weekend of ‘Barbenheimer’; I told my friends it was an indescribable spooky feeling, as if I had just put alien technology into the world. They didn’t know yet… but I knew.  

The film caused a lot of attention, good and bad. I was invited on the Black & Brown podcast and gave a television interview marking the occasion of the film’s release. I got a 3/3 score on RottenTomatoes. Then one year later, I released DreadClub: Vampire’s Verdict, the first AI animated film and the first feature length AI anime movie.

DreadClub was even more exhilarating. Betty, Duchamps, Clara, Liam, Felix, Sophie, they were all like my little friends. And if the illusion of a lovable ensemble of machine actors is not evident on screen, it is those moments you are not thinking about film craft that measure its worth. The film placed in five film festivals including Burano and the AI Awards in Venice. It landed me three interviews, and four RottenTomatoes reviews, and became the first AI film to land a major streaming license.

I mention the good here, but I must mention the bad. Releasing DreadClub preceded the worst month of my life during the PR tour. I faced around-the-clock abuse, a mass cancellation attempt led by critic Rafa Sales Ross who sent a twitter army of over 200,000 anti-AI activists against me, all my films getting banned on Letterboxd with the admins claiming they will never restore my films for the rest of time; and to add insult to injury, I had no support in the pro-AI space. I found myself banned on a popular AI subreddit for merely posting the trailer, because it turned out, the moderator had friends making a rival animated film.

By then, I assumed the worst was over, but actually the worst was to come: the theft of the accomplishment itself.

Filmmaking is a marathon. It will come back, and I will make more, but I am in a strange time dealing with the incredible high pressure I place myself under, crossed with the incredible hostility of modern society, that I convince myself is only a snapshot of this moment in time; the truth is, our brutal world has frozen me in my tracks, constantly telling me that this is not my world. 

So imagine the feeling of going through all this, and then reading this in the headlines:

In their own imagination, perhaps.

When I discovered ‘Where the Robots Grow’, was falsely claiming their movie was the ‘first AI movie’ and the ‘first animated AI movie’, I was incensed.

They entered in a space two years in and immediately stole a claim to history belonging to other AI pioneers. The 17th October, 2024 release date of ‘Where the Robots Grow’ damns them on both accounts.

I count several AI feature films released before them. Window Seat (July ’23) stands as the historic first fully AI-generated feature film. Other early AI films include THTHNG: Desolation Unknown (Premiere: April ’23; Wide Release: September ’23) which pioneered a hybrid approach incorporating extensive AI with traditional filmmaking tools, Zeb Haradon’s Eternal Recurrence (Dec ’23) and The Epic of Gilgamesh (Feb ’24), both arthouse fever dreams, The T2 Parody (March ’24) a charming film made by a team of AI filmmakers, The Last Artist Dir. Dustin Hollywood (May ’24) … (I list more toward the bottom of this article.) 

But what further bothered me with ‘Where the Robots Grow‘ was their claim as the first AI animated film. I went through hell and back making ‘DreadClub: Vampire’s Verdict’, I went to extreme lengths to make it 100 % AI. Everything you see and hear on screen is AI, including any text.

Even the creators of ‘Robots’ admitted their film wasn’t fully AI, directly contradicting the first line in the article of being ‘made entirely with A.I. tools’. No, that was DreadClub.

The damage was done. They had a couple press connections at Forbes and various YouTube outfits, and went forward with the lie(s) regardless of who they were stepping on. Now you would think a major publication like Forbes would run a two second Google search to fact check their article and find it prominently on AWS, IMDB, RottenTomatoes, and Amazon Prime. So I reached to the Forbes’s corrections department.

To sum it up, 1- ‘Where the Robots Grow’ is not even an AI movie, it is a CG movie with some AI elements. 2- It is not the first AI feature film by 15 months. 3- It is not the first AI animated film by 4 months.

As is always said, it is not what you know but who you know, and they knew Forbes. So this lie and false claim to history will be an incredible headache not just for me but for the entire space of AI filmmakers in the longterm who faced hell going at it without friends in the press. Now does all this matter? If it didn’t matter, they wouldn’t make the claim. It matters.

Perhaps most comically, and what bothers me most, is their company wasn’t even founded until July 2024; four weeks after DreadClub: Vampire’s Verdict had already premiered.

So my movie made its history they are claiming for themselves before their company even existed.

As I said in my recent interviews, ‘first’ claims are nothing but a headache, but I also never realized how much I would have to safeguard my work from so many snakes, and in the process, protect the true history of AI in film. It is perhaps a necessary headache, but one I have no choice to get into.

DreadClub: Vampire’s Verdict was one man vs the elements; not a team of eight with a $10,000 budget like ‘Robots’. My budget was $400. I did it all on an old Macbook. I had no press agents at Deadline or Forbes. Every bit of press I got on DreadClub was on the ground, not pay for play.

Meanwhile, I am wrestling with life. I still have to live my life and dedicate myself to my work. For whatever reason I can’t do that right now and it is thankless, painful, and constant. A few times a day I think, why am I not making my fourth and fifth films right this second? Something is stopping me. I know we can’t wait until the time is right, it has to be now, we have to embrace this snapshot in time because it will never come again. It is both fleeting and eternal.

But the road back from DreadClub is a harder road than I anticipated. Somebody said that art has nothing to do with the artist; it comes from society, as in, a healthy society will create healthy art… and right now we are in a sick society producing nonsense art. My dilemma has been that I have to go on as if we are in a different world than the one we’re in, hoping it will follow. So I am going to keep trying to make a vibrant and healthy sort of cinema as if we’re in that other society; and in the future when it came to be, they may believe it was always that way. That can be our gift to them.

As always you can read my production diary about the making of “DreadClub”, the first AI animated feature film. It covers the entire production from February to July 2024 as well as the brutal press tour in August. 

* Other feature length A.I. films: Ryo Nakajima’s Who Said Death Is Beautiful? (Dec ’23) a mocap animated film with some A.I. in its workflow, notable for being banned at Annecy… Dragon, Dir. Sebastion Sommer (March ’24) a medieval motion comic primarily done with stable diffusion… Victory is in the Grave, Dir. Aston Walker (April ’24, a sci-fi black superhero movie, 60th Venice Biennale Arte 2024), Next Stop Paris (unreleased, but its trailer captured headlines; also falsely claiming it as the first)

POST-SCRIPT: Director Tom Paton came out explaining why he is falsely claiming ‘Where the Robots Grow’ is the first A.I. movie. To paraphase, he said, “Only my movie counts because it is so much higher quality than the ones that came before it.”

Just imagine this level of arrogance for a second, coming into a space that has already had two years of history and milestones, and loudly proclaiming, “None of your films count! Ha-ha-ha! Only MY film counts!”

Tom should know we are not living in Christopher Columbus’s colonialist era where history could be stolen by force; the historic record is timestamped and set in stone. He may have used his privileges to get this far, but, this “great quality” he spoke about, reviewer Thaddeus Howze disputes: “It’s historically bad… in ambition, it fails spectacularly, reminiscent of Ed Wood’s disasters.” If what Paton claims, that being first doesn’t constitute being first, but being high quality is what constitutes being first, then even in his own scenario the claim remains a lie. 

CONCLUSION: 

I thought that I would forever be one of those internet comments screeching about some injustice, to no avail, but fellow pioneering AI filmmaker Tasha Caufield immediately came out like a superhero defending the history of the space and all of us in the process. It just so happens she is a history nut who specializes in avant-garde docufiction bios, check out her work.