While Higgsfield AI‘s most recent project, the fully AI-generated absurdist action sci-fi film “Hell Grind,” found some plot in a combination of ethnically vague heroes and monstrous villains, the company’s next project is set in the realm of Central Asian folklore. “Kök Börü,” a 15-minute animated short film, marks the studio’s first effort since it premiered “Hell Grind” during May’s Marché du Film, the Cannes Film Festival’s marketplace. The latest project will premiere Wednesday at the SIGGRAPH conference in L.A. “Kök Börü” takes its name from the traditional Central Asian horseback game, where mounted teams try to earn points as they try to drag a goat carcass across a goal line. In the film, nomadic mother Ana tries to find a daughter she lost to a wolf pack years ago after the pack cornered both of her children.
The project, co-directed by Shakhnazar Borboev and Amira Ömirjan, employed a 10-person animation team to bring “Kök Börü” to life within two weeks, a marked difference from the production of “Hell Grind.” The team included three animators, two screenwriters, three sound producers, a sound supervisor and a color artist, while the company hired native Kazakh actors to voice the characters. A combination of Higgsfield tools and Nvidia graphics served as the technical backbone of the production, with animators blending traditional animation techniques with AI.
Popular on Variety
It’s a film that Borboev and Ömirjan don’t believe would have been greenlit by a traditional studio due to its Central Asian focus, a barrier they believe AI can help break.
“As artists from Central Asia, this is the kind of story we grew up with but almost never see on screen,” Borboev said in a statement. “Films like this don’t always get the chance to be made, so being able to bring ours to the screen means everything to us.”
“Stories like ‘Kök Börü’ rarely make it to the screen because they’re often seen as too niche or too risky,” Ömirjan added. “As artists from Central Asia, being able to bring our culture and folklore to audiences means everything to us. AI helped us move faster, while artists remained at the center of every creative decision. This hybrid approach made a film like this possible for a small team like ours.”
The short film represents the latest effort in AI-focused studios employing hybrid models of production, days after Utopai Studios revealed its upcoming adaptation of “The Most Serious Fart, which will use AI as an assistive tool instead of generating entire visuals. Following the “Kök Börü” premiere at the L.A. conference, the team will lead a panel walking conferencegoers through the production process.
“Showcasing this film and the pipeline behind it will demonstrate what’s already possible today,” Higgsfield CEO and co-founder Alex Mashrabov said in a statement. “The goal was never to replace artists, but to give more of them the means to tell stories at this level.”