Artificial intelligence is poised to fundamentally transform the creative industries in the near future, permeating every aspect of TV and film production, both behind-the-scenes and on-screen, and playing a major role in everything from advanced editing tools to the creation of hyperreal digital characters.
Leading the charge is Particle6, an AI-first production studio founded by Eline van der Velden, who first came to the UK with ambitions of becoming an actress, before pivoting to physics and studying at Imperial College London.
“Throughout my 20s, I was acting professionally, and I then set up a production company and made a lot of shows for the BBC,” van der Velden explains. “I was always playing characters. That was really my favourite thing, comedy characters. Then, about three years ago, I started getting interested in AI, and I thought, this is where the future is going to go, and I want to know everything about it.
“I thought, if we’re making AI content, then we also need to understand AI characters and the technology behind them. When I started using AI, I was shocked by what it could do. I was just blown away by it, so I felt compelled to show it to the creative community in the UK.”
This led to the creation of AI influencer Tilly Norwood, who first appeared on Instagram in July 2025. Initially, says van der Velden, the reaction to Tilly in the UK was “relaxed. [People] were like, well, yes, this is coming, we’re used to having smaller budgets and whatever we can do to bring more value on screen.”
When Tilly debuted at the Zurich Film Festival in September, Hollywood took notice and “people lost their minds and thought I was going to kill all actors and the end of the world was near, which it’s not.” However, she stresses it’s important for the industry to “not bury our heads in the sand” over what AI could mean.
Creating Tilly
Tilly was generated using a combination of publicly available tools. Van der Velden is keen to stress that she has not been trained on any proprietary data. “I wanted to create an original character. I didn’t want to infringe on anyone’s likeness, so I didn’t want to do a deepfake or anything like that.”
A year ago, the consistency of AI engines wasn’t quite as advanced as it is now, which meant it took almost 2000 iterations to get Tilly right. “I remember that moment where I was like, yes, that’s her!”
It was important that Tilly both looked British and had a name that matched. “She is an extension of me in a way,” muses van der Velden. “What’s funny is, when meeting lots of these AI influencers, I realised that all of them are just creating extensions of themselves in the digital world. It’s really fascinating, people are bringing all their skills and experience into this AI world that’s coming.”
In fact, Tilly is such an extension of her creator that van der Velden will often use performance capture to bring out the best of her model.
“There are two ways of bringing performance to an AI character and I do both for Tilly,” she explains. “You can either prompt Tilly on what to do, and you might get lucky and get a good performance. You might also get unlucky and not get a good performance. The second route is performance capture, that’s where I act, and she’s overlaid. Think Avatar. We use a hybrid in order to get the best performance out of her. But that performance capture was only recently introduced, probably three months ago.”
The biggest issue for many in the industry is the idea that their content could be used to train AI models. Van der Velden states that even though Tilly was created using publicly available software, all of her content—imagery, videos, and voice—is protected by copyright.
“You could use an image of Tilly and upload it into Veo 3 [Google’s AI video generator] and use it as a reference, but you’re using a copyrighted image,” she adds. “The way the tools shape a face is by using billions and billions and billions of pieces of data, and the neural network learns how a female face is shaped, and then it de-noises and goes down more and more pixels to get to a higher grain. That is the reason why there’s copyright, because of the human effort that goes into that process.
“If you just have a one-click AI model that’s spitting out an AI image, then you’re not putting any human creation work into it. We spent months getting to the final version of Tilly, and then months more creating who she is as a person, her backstory, name, look and everything.”
All of the above might lead you to think that AI actors aren’t going to help broadcasters and production companies to meet their sustainability targets, but van der Velden argues that isn’t so. “I studied nuclear fusion because I wanted to get a green energy source out in the world, so I do comparisons all the time in order to check the carbon footprint of a production, whether it’s using AI or a traditional production.
“What we find is that AI actually has up to a 99 per cent lower carbon footprint than traditional production. You have to think about it as going straight into post. You’re skipping all of the pre-production, the flights, the catering, the generators on set, you name it. The carbon footprint is so much lower. I always say to people, one flight across Europe, from Paris to Denmark, for example, is about a million AI prompts. You’re better off not taking the flight and making an AI product.”
The future
While Hollywood’s reaction to Tilly can be described as somewhat sceptical, van der Velden says there are already plenty of creatives who are queuing up to work with her. “We’re really passionate about retooling and reskilling the workforce in the creative industry. Everybody needs to learn how to work in the new AI space, so we’re working with directors, production designers, costume designers, DoPs, everyone.
“We welcome anybody who’s really keen to work with these new tools to come and play with Tilly, whether it’s a short scene or part of a longer story.”
Tilly will continue to evolve, with the team at Particle6 already working on a “prompt terminal for her brain”, which will allow creatives to interact with her autonomously. Van der Velden likens the development process to raising a child from newborn to 18 in a couple of months, then setting them free with the hope they’ll be a decent human being. “We have to craft everything, her personality, how she responds, etc. It’s quite a long process, with guardrails in place so she doesn’t talk about certain topics.”
“I think people underestimate how much work goes into producing high-quality AI content. We’ve all seen AI slop. That’s not the business we’re in. We only want to produce best in class AI content. It can take quite a long time to produce traditional film and TV, we usually say that AI is about half the time, half the cost.”
Van der Velden says that for the moment, she expects humans to continue to be involved in content creation, adding that there is still a lot of “human work” being invested in Tilly. “Sometimes, people just think, oh, it’s AI, so there’s no humanity behind it. I would say the opposite. We’re hiring lots of people, and all the experience and skills translate.”
However, in the future, she doesn’t rule out a film being created at the click of a button, adding that she believes at some point the TV and film industry will use either a mix of humans and AI, or full AI. “In a year, there’ll be almost no production without a little aspect of AI in it, whether that’s using ChatGPT to check something. Every single person will use AI somehow. It’s going to be unavoidable, like WiFi or electricity.
“Every single studio going forward will need to become an AI production studio, and they’ll need the best talent,” she continues, adding there are big plans for Particle6 going forward: “Right now, the ambition is to grow into a bigger studio. Tilly is my Mickey Mouse, and I am building the next Disney.”
- This article originally appeared in the March issue of TVBEurope, available to download here.
