Sept. 3, 2026
While Hollywood is fighting a culture war over the use of AI in film and TV, in Asia, filmmakers aren’t spending much time debating the topic. Instead, they’re plowing full steam ahead into what they see as the next iteration of modern filmmaking. The latest example comes from Singapore via a local TV series called Crooks.
Promoted as an AI-hybrid drama, the series uses real actors performing on mostly empty sets that are then filled with realistic environments using generative AI. Produced by Boi Kwong’s B-01 Films and BYKAI, along with Jay Hong from WOWFX Studios, the series is based on the true story of an ex-con who uses his freedom to pursue his dream of being a chef. The nine-episode series is directed by Hong Kong filmmaker Lemmon Wong (Triad Wars, Lesson in Love) and stars Singaporean actor Christopher Ming-Shun Lee (Port of Lies, Dive, Q18 Quantum Dice).
“Rather than replacing traditional VFX and post-production techniques, we looked at AI as another tool within the creative process—helping us explore ideas faster, tackle challenging visual requirements, and create more possibilities when developing each scene,” the WOWFX team said in a post on LinkedIn. “For our team, Crooks was also a valuable opportunity to learn, test, and understand how AI can work alongside the skills and workflows we already use.”
The idea of replacing the backgrounds of real actors using AI is something that is fairly common now, as demonstrated by Los Angeles-based AI creator Jon Finger and his many viral AI VFX videos. But Crooks is unique in that the commercial series was launched from the outset with the intention of using AI-hybrid techniques.
And unlike many AI-hybrid videos circulating on social media, the final results of the approach on Crooks are stunningly convincing, which you can see in the behind-the-scenes video shared by WOWFX Studios. In the video, an empty white room becomes a bustling shopping mall, a man on a hospital gurney is transported to a fully equipped medical facility, and two actors having a conversation on a barren sound stage are teleported to a glass elevator as a gleaming city is shown in the background.
Most film fans have become accustomed to seeing behind-the-scenes outtakes from Marvel films and the Lord of the Rings franchise showing actors performing in largely empty greenscreen studios, allowing entire worlds to be added in post-production. Therefore, this kind of AI use in filmmaking, which doesn’t remove the craft of human acting or human directing, will likely be embraced by Hollywood’s creative community…eventually. Notably, The Bourne Identity director Doug Liman is already betting on this technique for his new film Killing Satoshi, starring Casey Affleck and Gal Gadot.
Like Crooks, Killing Satoshi uses an array of empty sets that are slightly modified so that AI tools can help seamlessly add immersive environments in post-production. Liman’s film hasn’t been released yet, so Wong’s Crooks is one of our best peeks at what this workflow looks like when done by a full team of professionals, and it’s impressive. The ranks of AI refuseniks in Hollywood continue to swell, but it will be difficult for many of them to deny how similar this AI-hybrid technique is to the greenscreen sets they’ve already worked on for decades. If AI is about to take over Hollywood, it will probably be through this specific production approach.
Cover: a behind-the-scenes look at the AI process in ‘Crooks’via B-01 Films/BYKAI/WOWFX Studios
