Hollywood
Sony Pictures Animation to release ‘Open Season: Scared Silly’ in Spring 2016
MUMBAI: Sony Pictures Animation will be releasing Open Season: Scared Silly, the fourth installment in the titled series in Spring 2016.
This latest production brings back Elliot, Boog and all of the beloved woodland creatures in a new comedy adventure, with David Feiss directing and John Bush producing.
Feiss said, “My affection for these characters has only grown since we introduced them in Sony Pictures Animation’s first feature. We’re having a lot of fun bringing them back for a new adventure—it feels like a big party with old friends.”
Most recently, Feiss directed four mini-movies for the home entertainment release of Sony Pictures Animation’s Cloudy With A Chance Of Meatballs 2, entitled Steve’s First Bath, Super Manny, Attack Of The 50ft Gummy Bear and Earl Scouts.
Open Season: Scared Silly opens with Elliot telling a campfire story about the legend of the Wailing Wampus Werewolf that lives in Timberline National Forest. Domesticated Boog is terrified by the story and decides to “chicken out” of their annual summer camping trip until he knows the werewolf is gone. Determined to help Boog overcome his fears, Elliot and their woodland friends band together to scare the fear out of Boog and uncover the mystery of the Wailing Wampus Werewolf.
Canadian computer animation and design company Rainmaker Entertainment, Inc. is serving as the animation facility for the production of Open Season: Scared Silly.
Hollywood
Utopai Studios partners Huace to deploy PAI for long form content
Deal includes revenue sharing as Huace adopts AI engine across global ops
MUMBAI: Lights, camera… algorithm, the script just got a silicon co-writer. In a move that signals how storytelling itself is being re-engineered, U.S.-based Utopai Studios has partnered China’s Huace Film & TV Co. Ltd. to bring artificial general intelligence into the heart of long-form content creation.
At the centre of the deal is PAI, Utopai’s cinematic storytelling system, which Huace will deploy as a core engine across its production pipeline from development and creative iteration to global localisation. The partnership includes a large-scale annual usage commitment from Huace, alongside a usage-based revenue-sharing model, underscoring both ambition and commercial confidence on both sides.
For Huace, one of China’s largest film and television companies, the bet is not on automation alone but on scale with control. With distribution spanning over 200 countries and a presence across more than 20 international platforms, including Netflix and YouTube, the company brings a vast content ecosystem where even marginal efficiency gains can translate into significant output shifts. Its extensive TV IP library further positions it as fertile ground for AI-assisted storytelling workflows.
The choice of PAI follows what Huace described as a rigorous evaluation of existing AI tools, many of which remain limited to fragmented use cases such as video generation or editing. What tipped the scales, according to the company, was PAI’s ability to handle long-form narrative complexity maintaining continuity, structure, and creative coherence across entire story arcs rather than isolated clips.
Utopai, for its part, is using the partnership to anchor its international expansion strategy, pitching PAI as an enterprise-ready system built for customisation, privacy, and regulatory adaptability across markets. That positioning becomes particularly relevant as global media companies increasingly scrutinise how AI integrates into proprietary workflows.
The timing is notable. Earlier this month, Utopai upgraded PAI to support three-minute 4K video generation and advanced multi-shot sequencing features designed to tackle one of AI storytelling’s biggest hurdles: consistency across scenes.
What emerges is not just another tech collaboration, but a glimpse into how the grammar of filmmaking could evolve. Because if stories were once crafted frame by frame, the next chapter might just be coded scene by scene.
