Krystle and Sean’s Blog

The Best Parts of That AI Movie Were Human: For SMEs

—

by

Krystle and Sean

You Don’t Need to Out-AI Anyone — Just Be Better at Being Human

You’ve probably poked at an AI tool by now. Maybe you asked ChatGPT to rewrite your menu descriptions, or tried Canva’s AI to whip up a quick Raya promo graphic. The result was okay. Not terrible. But not really you either. So you closed the tab feeling vaguely guilty that you’re not “doing AI” right.

Here’s a story that might change how you think about that. Higgsfield, an AI filmmaking platform, released an entire feature film generated with AI — Cully Hill Boys. It looks surprisingly close to a real movie. But the more you look at how it was made, the clearer the truth becomes: the best parts were all human. And that’s the exact lesson Malaysian SME owners need to hear.

TL;DR: A human screenwriter wrote the script. Human directors made every creative call. Human actors licensed their faces and voices. The AI just did the execution. For your business, AI won’t replace your judgment, your taste, or your relationship with your customers — it amplifies them.

What This Means, in Plain Language

Cully Hill Boys is a comedy about three struggling East London rappers who accidentally steal a gangster’s cash. The twist isn’t the plot — it’s the production. No actor shot a single scene on set. Instead, streamer Mikyle “N3on” Rafiq, basketball creator Matt Kiatipis, and UFC fighter Israel Adesanya signed likeness licensing agreements so the AI could generate their performances.

The script came from Tim Planagan, a real screenwriter, whose work landed on the Black List, a platform that helps unproduced scripts get noticed. The film was directed by Adilet Abish and Aitore Zholdaskali, who led a team of nine other directors. Underneath them, a stack of AI models did the heavy lifting: Anthropic’s Claude generated the text prompts, Seedance 2.5 created video and speech, and ByteDance’s Seedream plus Google’s Nano Banana handled image and video editing. The creative team even split their workflow into separate AI instances “because the rules of one job poison the other,” according to Higgsfield’s site.

Here’s the tell, though. The action scenes were driven by prompts demanding “GUY RITCHIE COVERAGE” and “DYNAMIC clip-style (Edgar Wright snap.)”. The AI was trained on those directors’ films, then steered by humans who knew exactly what that style should feel like. As The Verge’s review put it: “the best parts of these films are undeniably taken from actual human artists.”

“The best parts of these films are undeniably taken from actual human artists.” — The Verge, reviewing Higgsfield’s Cully Hill Boys

The Human Layer, Layer by Layer

Layer What AI handled What humans handled
Story Nothing — no AI wrote the script Script by Tim Planagan, a professional screenwriter
Direction Generated clips and scenes from prompts 11 directors guided tone, pacing, and style
Performance AI-generated faces and voices Real actors licensed their likenesses
Style Trained on Guy Ritchie & Edgar Wright films Prompts specified “GUY RITCHIE COVERAGE” and Edgar Wright-style edits
Marketing Uploaded online as a showcase Doubled as an ad for Higgsfield’s tools

How This Applies to Malaysian SMEs

Let’s bring this home. You run a bakery in Ipoh, a logistics company in Shah Alam, or a dental clinic in Johor Bahru. You don’t need a Hollywood feature — you need customers. But the same principle governs everything you put out: your Facebook posts, your product brochures, your WhatsApp replies, your Instagram Reels.

First, AI gives you a draft, not a finished product. Planagan wrote Cully Hill Boys without using AI tools in his process — and the film works because of it. Your marketing needs the same human grounding. An AI can generate a post about your durian cheesecake. It can’t know that your regulars come back because you remember their orders, or that your Penang customers respond to humour that wouldn’t fly in Kota Kinabalu. That judgment is yours.

Second, use the right tool for each job. Higgsfield didn’t feed one AI everything. They dedicated separate instances of Claude to prompts, used Seedance 2.5 to generate much longer clips of around 30 seconds than most models can manage, and kept editing on entirely different platforms — all because mixing tasks degrades the result. For you: don’t expect one chatbot to handle customer service, write ad copy, and manage appointments. Pick a tool that’s strong at each job, then have a human review the output before it reaches your customers.

Third, your human touch is your moat. Watch Cully Hill Boys closely and you’ll spot its flaws: characters who lack chemistry, background text that dissolves into gibberish. That’s what pure AI looks like without enough human guidance. Your customers can detect the same in your business — a reply that sounds generated, a promotion that feels copy-pasted from overseas, a “Dear Valued Customer” when a “Terima kasih, Cik Lim” belongs. Malaysian customers buy from people they trust. No algorithm can replace a phone call from the boss who remembers their name.

Fourth, everything you publish is an ad. The film exists to showcase Higgsfield’s Cinema Studio suite. It’s a gigantic ad for its Seedance 2.5 tools — but it works because it demonstrates capability rather than announcing it. Your content is your showroom. A video of how you pack your products, a post explaining how your service works, a quick answer to a customer’s question — these prove your competence better than any “best restaurant in KL” claim.

Practical Takeaways

  • Use AI for speed, humans for quality. Generate drafts, outlines, and options — then let someone who knows your brand make the final call.
  • Split your tools. One for scheduling, one for drafting, one for design. Don’t force a single AI to master every job.
  • Write down your brand voice. A single page describing how you speak to customers makes it easier for both humans and AI to stay consistent.
  • Get consent for real faces and voices. The actors in Cully Hill Boys signed licensing agreements. Do the same before using AI with anyone’s likeness.
  • Prove it, don’t proclaim it. Let your content demonstrate what you can actually do for customers.

By the Numbers