“La P8stée” (2027) starring Bobcat and P8stie

AI catastrophic risk communication today is dominated by research papers, policy briefs and short explainer videos. There's still a wide audience that doesn't know about it. We are trying to reach that audience through the power of images and impress the idea of x-risk into the minds of people in the same way that Threads, The Day After and The War Game scared people (and policymakers) into thinking about how to prevent nuclear war.

Nuclear risk had its films. x-risk from AI does not. What exists is either blockbuster-style distortion (robopocalypse tropes that make the real threat models easier to dismiss) or educational material for the already-converted. I have worked inside AI companies on trust and safety. This includes foreign interference by state actors, which is the exact layer the AI 2027 scenario runs on. The film stays faithful to those threat models, not movie logic.

Within the x-risk portfolio, narrative cinema is an essentially unfunded channel, and the minimum amount of funding ($50,000) ships a complete film. We expect three audiences and three effects:

• Festival programmers and art-cinema viewers. To people not convinced of any x-risk or p(doom), x-risk registers as hype from the people selling AI products. Festival selection is legitimizing: programmers, critics, and other filmmakers treat it as a serious subject rather than a sales pitch, and their audiences follow. These viewers are also disproportionately the people who make more culture (writers, academics, journalists, curators), and so the idea propagates.
• Researchers and policy staff. The safety field has PSAs but no cinema: no film to hand a colleague, a parent, a staffer, a minister that makes people feel the weight of the scenario in under half an hour. A 28-minute film is meeting-length, screening-length, seminar-length. It is a shareable answer to "what should I watch to understand this," a question that currently has no definitive answer-- because it lacks definitive images-- and so it gives the people already doing this work a hammer they do not have.
• Online publics. The La Jetée grammar (still images, montage, narration) is a natural fit for the units social platforms run on: every frame is a poster, every sequence cuts into a clip. Stills and excerpts go out on X, where P8stie's 76,000 followers and the AI conversation itself already live (AI 2027 went legitimately viral on X), and on Instagram. The full film lives free and permanently on YouTube: no paywall, a high-production-value entry point that keeps being discovered for years after release.

Distribution is layered rather than staked on one channel: festival submissions for legitimacy, the permanent free YouTube release for reach, stills and excerpts for X and Instagram where the audience already lives. This is an option-value bet on an empty channel with a documented historical mechanism.

This is a 12-month full-time production. The two figures below are the minimum that makes the film happen and the ideal that funds the best version of it.

Minimum ($50,000): the leanest budget that still ships a complete film.

• Director/writer/animator labor (Bobcat), 12 months: $30,000.
• Mariè (P8stie), lead performer, likeness, and reference work: $5,500.
• Palmer Jarvis, English narration, ADR, and pickups: $3,500.
• Sound design and final mix (contracted): $4,000.
• Festival submission fees, distribution deliverables, and press materials: $2,000.
• Asset and plugin costs (UE5 marketplace, Character Creator and iClone content, plugin licenses): $2,500.
• Contingency: $2,500.

At this tier the film ships as a complete 28-minute English-language short for the festival circuit and free release on YouTube, produced on existing hardware, without multilingual narration, an original score, or the companion essay.

Ideal ($77,000): the full version, with the costs the minimum leaves out.

• Director/writer/animator labor (Bobcat), 12 months at $3,500/month: $42,000.
• Mariè (P8stie), lead performer, likeness, reference work, and creative collaboration on the dream-woman character's visual treatment: $7,500.
• Palmer Jarvis, English narration plus French and German alternate-language tracks, ADR, and pickups: $4,500.
• Sound design and final mix (full Pro Tools session, custom Foley and ambient layers rather than library elements): $6,000.
• Original score (composer fee, 4 to 5 original cues across the runtime, in the lineage of Trevor Duncan's score for La Jetée): $4,000.
• Render workstation (NVIDIA RTX 5090, 64GB RAM, high-capacity NVMe): $5,000. This replaces an aging GPU that currently crashes during render and forces quality compromises. Current US pricing for a 5090-class render build runs roughly $4,500 to $5,000 because of the ongoing GPU and DRAM shortage, so this reflects real market cost rather than a high-end spec.
• Festival submission fees, distribution deliverables, and press materials: $2,500.
• Companion essay by Bobcat (5,000 to 8,000 words on AI 2027, La Jetée, and the cinematic stakes of the project, intended for placement at Asterisk or a similar venue): $1,000.
• Asset and plugin costs (UE5 marketplace, Character Creator and iClone content, plugin licenses): $2,500.
• Contingency: $2,000.

At this tier the film ships with multilingual narration (English, French, German) for European festival reach, an original score, custom sound design, a reliable render pipeline, and a published companion essay. It reaches three audiences the minimum cannot serve at once: art-cinema viewers, AI safety researchers, and European-language publics.