Here’s the thing nobody tells you when you generate a jaw-dropping AI shot for your film: the shot is worthless to a distributor if you can’t prove where it came from.
Micro-budget films don’t usually die on set. They die at the distribution desk. A distributor who takes your film needs errors-and-omissions (E&O) insurance, and E&O runs on chain-of-title paperwork: who owns the script, who released their likeness, where every frame came from. “I generated it on some app” is not an answer an insurer accepts. No paper, no policy. No policy, no deal.
AI footage makes this worse, not better — unless the paper exists by design. That means: a record that the script was reviewed and approved. A signed likeness release for every real face that appears — covering not just the likeness itself, but what’s done with it (violence? nudity? a synthetic voice?). A log showing a human reviewed each delivered file, when, and cleared it. That stack is what turns “AI footage” from a red flag into a line item.
If you’re doing this yourself: get releases signed before generating, not after; keep them with the production files; and write down what was generated, when, and from what. Future-you at the distribution desk will be grateful.
Or use a pipeline where the paper is the product. Every file delivered through Greenlit Dark carries the full stack — script approval, release-backed faces, human review log — because we built the machine around the paperwork instead of bolting paperwork onto a machine. Here’s exactly how it works.