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Other/The Verge AI/July 21, 2026 at 10:06 PM

Neill Blomkamp’s new zombie AI ‘film’ is just slop warmed over

On Monday, District 9 and Gran Turismo director Neill Blomkamp unveiled his latest project: a 13-minute sci-fi short titled Nightborne that's loosely based on Peter Watts' 2014 novel Echopraxia. The short comes from Blomkamp's new AI startup / production company, Barley Studios, and features characters whose voices and faces are modeled after human actors. But […]

Other / The Verge AI
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On Monday, District 9 and Gran Turismo director Neill Blomkamp unveiled his latest project: a 13-minute sci-fi short titled Nightborne that's loosely based on Peter Watts' 2014 novel Echopraxia . The short comes from Blomkamp's new AI startup / production company, Barley Studios, and features characters whose voices and faces are modeled after human actors. But every single one of Nightborne 's shots was made with ByteDance's Seedance 2.0 text-to-video generator . In an X post about the short , Blomkamp described it as a "test start" meant to demonstrate what generative AI is capable of, and he said that he wants "to tackle a full feature in th … Read the full story at The Verge.