When AI Eats the Budget: The $400K Compute Behind a Feature Film

Indigon Radio’s Deep Dive examines how generative AI is reshaping film and media production: massive cloud compute costs, agentic editing tools, multimodal models, and the growing need for verification and likeness rights. Using recent industry case studies and events, the episode explains the new production stack and why creative labor has shifted from sets to server farms. Takeaway: creators must treat AI as a skilled crew—designing prompts, protecting identity with cryptographic metadata, and keeping a clear human point of view at the center to build durable creative value in this changing landscape.