Particle6 to Make Feature Film Starring AI Actor Tilly

2026-07-11

Britain's Particle6 has begun making a feature film starring a fictional actor generated by AI. While the use of AI trained on human acting may help keep production costs down, concern over its impact on jobs is rising in Hollywood.

Film Project Begins

Tilly Norwood, the AI actor developed by Particle6, is characterised by wavy brown long hair and large eyes, and was unveiled in 2025. Although created by AI, it has shown behaviour reminiscent of a Hollywood actor and has continued to post on social media.

The company is now extending the use of AI characters, previously limited to video distribution for social media, into film production. The work is titled 'Misaligned' and will be a comedy drama set in a fictional digital world with Norwood as the protagonist. In the script, Norwood, who has no childhood memories, meets a character from the dark web, and the story follows her as she develops desires and ambition and moves closer to becoming human.

The characters will be created by AI, but human staff will handle directing, writing and other roles. The release timing has not been announced.

Hope for Lower Costs

AI characters have so far been used mainly in advertising and short social media videos, but their use in film could expand further. Feature films are more expensive to make than advertisements, and actors' appearance fees also tend to be higher. In productions contracted with the US actors' union SAG-AFTRA, even low-budget films must pay principal cast at least $834 a day, or about 130,000 yen. With an AI lead, production companies can cut costs.

Particle6 is a production studio in London that works on video production using AI. It has produced programmes and advertising content for BBC television in Britain and for Amazon Prime Video, the streaming service. From 2025, it stepped up development of AI-generated characters including Norwood.

In response, a US industry magazine reported that several talent agencies were considering signing Norwood, and resistance to AI actors has spread in Hollywood. Chief Executive Eline van der Velden said, 'You cannot make a film with AI alone. Human experience, skill and judgement are essential to a good work,' stressing the importance of human involvement.

Copyright and Compensation

The film industry has adopted new technologies such as computer graphics, but when creating human-like characters with CG, contributors providing source material have been paid through motion capture and similar methods. By contrast, AI ingests and uses performance and work data from many real actors, while there is in principle no compensation paid to the actors whose work is used in training.

This structure has sparked backlash in parts of Hollywood. In a statement in September 2025, SAG-AFTRA said the creation of Norwood had used 'the work of many professional performers without permission or compensation' for training, and argued that 'Tilly Norwood is not an actor.'

Chris Colemen, a production designer in Los Angeles in the western US, said, 'Even if people know it is AI, they will still go to see it.' Because films using AI actors can be made at lower cost than conventional works, he added that 'if production companies realise the profitability, many people could lose their jobs.'

The presence of AI-assisted films is also growing. At the Tribeca Film Festival held in New York City in June, 'Dreams of Violets', an AI-made film based on Iran's civil resistance movement, was screened. AI was used not only for the cast but also for camera work and the filming process, and production costs were reportedly held to about 2,000 dollars, or about 320,000 yen.

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