Trust Umang Bedi to make an entrance.
On Wednesday evening at Mumbai’s Grand Hyatt, he pulled the wraps off Spark Station, his new AI creative platform, with Google Cloud in his corner. Pooja Bhamra did the honours as presenter. The glitz came as standard.
Bedi opened with a history lesson. Every time video technology has taken a step forward, he said, the old guard has turned up its nose. AI is getting the same treatment. It is already shaking up entertainment around the world, and plenty of legacy creators, producers and writers are frowning at it.
“AI is here to stay,” Bedi boomed at the VerSe event. He called it “just an additional tool” that lets creators do things that were once too expensive or simply out of reach. It is not meant to replace human taste or direction, he insisted.
The room stays glued
The guest list read like a who’s who of the screen trade. Director Ken Ghosh was there. So were former Applause boss Sameer Nair and his son Rahul Nair, who is fast making a name as a director and writer.
Rajkumar Hirani, Shakun Batra, Kunal Roy Kapoor, Ramesh Sippy, Manmohan Shetty, Abhimanyu Singh, Namit Sharma, Siddharth Roy and Prahlad Kakkar were in the room too, along with many more industry leaders. They stayed glued to the screen right through the demo. The oohs and aahs came thick and fast.
One platform, every role
What Bedi showed was a film studio packed into one platform. A creator can start with an idea, sketch out characters and then turn them into virtual characters. From there Spark Station can build series bibles and cut trailers. It can edit, generate alternative scenes and add music and voice. It can even spin out comics.
In short, Bedi said, you can make a film and all its spin-off products end to end, at a fraction of what rival platforms charge.
The money side is built in as well. Budget estimates for scenes can be drawn up on the fly, so producers can decide on the spot whether a shot is worth the spend.
Prompt-phobes can relax. There is no need to write complicated prompts, because drop-down menus cover almost everything.
The tagline does not undersell it: “Every role on set. Played by one platform.”
“The platform offers you your story crew, the team for the production part, post production, and finally for distribution,” said Bedi. Anyone with an idea, he added, can now turn it into a feature film, a short film, a series, a microdrama or simply good video content, at very affordable rates and at scale.
The real test
The demo wowed the room. Many in the audience, though, were itching to get their hands on it and put it through its paces on their own computers.
One senior industry veteran summed up the mood: “Its success will, however, depend on the output it gives.”
Pricing starts at US$9 for the basic package and goes up to US$44 a month for the pro version.
Bedi has set the stage and sold the dream. Now Spark Station has to deliver on the big screen.
