The Kannada film Love You is a musical cult love story with a cast of 15 and a dozen songs. Except that no human is part of the cast. Nor have the songs been produced in the traditional manner. When Love You releases later this month, it will be India’s first film fully created using artificial intelligence. Its writer-director-producer S. Narasimhamurthy and graphic artist-turned-AI technician Nuthan set out on this ambitious venture almost a year ago and finally got it certified by the Central Board of Film Certification (CBFC) on April 22 for a theatre release. Nuthan, 38, sifted through hundreds of AI tools and shortlisted 30 to produce the film. The duo spent Rs10 lakh to license them, with Nuthan writing the film’s songs.
Love in the time of ai: A still from the film Love You.
Interestingly, Murthy, 50, is a hereditary priest at Bagalgunte Anjaneya Swamy Temple in Bengaluru, and has previously worked on the experimental movies Garudaksha (2022) and Container (2024), a 24-hour thriller about a labourer who gets trapped inside a shipping container. “I was enamoured by AI and wanted to make the world’s first AI feature film,” says Murthy. “Making a mythological film using AI is easier as it can create a battle scene with elephants, horses and one lakh costumed soldiers within a few seconds. But to create a realistic movie with a contemporary story is challenging, as AI technology cannot produce exact lip sync or convincing emotion. But we decided to take up the challenge and attempted this emotional theme.”
Nuthan
Murthy, who did alankara shastra (priest training), belongs to a priest’s family from Sidedahalli. However, his passion for films started early as his father’s elder brother, Pandit Ramanujaacharya, was a film producer who has produced films like Tabbaliyu Neenaade Magane (1977), Chaduranga (1985) and Tappida Tala (1978).
As a filmmaker, Murthy is keen on making movies that are technically superior with moral values. “I decided to do a fully AI movie as there are many films made using VFX. Technically, I have marvelled at movies like Avatar and Avengers. But I also realised AI had limitations,” says Murthy. Fate brought him together with Nuthan, who was researching AI as a medium for filmmaking and had made eight songs using it. But when he ran out of money, Murthy agreed to collaborate. “We first shot 12 songs and developed a storyline, and then it was a mad-house when we started production using AI tools for image generation, video generation and voice modulation,” says Nuthan, a law graduate who turned to film editing and worked on Kannada films and ads. “The research to find the right tools took six months and then we were good to go.”
The faces of the 15 characters, including the lead actors, were selected from the 10,000 images generated by AI to the given text prompt. “For instance, the hero was picked from the images generated to our command: ‘A 30-year-old man speaking Kannada’,” says Murthy. “We could give specifics like hairstyle, skin tone, eye colour, height and fine-tune our character. But AI had a major glitch: it was difficult to maintain consistency in the images and sometimes the hero looked different in different shots. Today, AI tools are much more advanced than what they were six months ago.”
When the first song ‘Ninna Preetiya Jaaladalli’ released on YouTube, the viewers and later, the CBFC and the makers themselves noticed the limited voice modulation and many inconsistencies in the characters’ appearance. This was a challenge but not a deterrent to the duo. Nuthan strove hard to get the imaging right. “I used several cinematic AI tools for image generation (Midjourney, Leonardo), video generation (Minimax, Luma), lip sync (Runway) and voice-over (ElevenLabs), besides open-source software. The voice-over seemed to lack emotion,” recalls Nuthan.
Today, Nuthan is confident of making an AI film in one or two months. According to him, VFX will soon be redundant with AI being adopted in a big way. He is now working on two projects―Kempe Gowda (based on the architect of old Bangalore city) and Immadi Pulakeshi (based on a Chalukya king). “In today’s digital era, story-telling has become easy and we must keep the audiences engaged and retell our history and heritage,” says Nuthan, who is inspired by American epic films like 300 and the home-grown KGF.
Murthy explains how AI had to be “tamed” to get a desirable outcome. “We had to give a text prompt for any action like walking, running, or dancing,” he says. “For that we had to fix the speed of the movement. For the voice command we had to fix the scale to prevent a drag or to get the emotion right. That was a lot of work. Today, the technology is much more advanced as AI is constantly evolving. I would like to experiment with an artificial general intelligence (AGI) movie next.”