WHAT'S THE WORST THAT COULD HAPPEN?
Being Steve is a short comedy about identity crisis and how seemingly minor decisions can bring lasting consequences.
“While grabbing a bite with a friend I was intrigued by his use of a fake name when ordering. For a few moments we joked about how something like that could go wrong but in the days following the lunch the notion stuck with me.
I began obsessing on what such an innocent ‘coffee house’ name could lead to and what the worst possible outcomes would be (death, destruction and murder), and then I scaled it back it back to something a little lighter. I set to work on the script and in one sitting I emerged with a lighthearted rom-com. I decided to write ‘story first’ and ignore budget heavy scene restrictions. It was the dawn of AI filmmaking and I felt that a medium that doesn’t care about scale could help get this story on screen.”
- Scott Barrett
The script that was born from a real event seemed like a perfect candidate to put the emerging AI tech to the test. Being Steve is not a movie with outer space explosions, robots from the future or portals to other dimensions (all that stuff was cut out) but the sheer amount out crew moves and location setups for short scenes or even single shots would make this beyond the scope of what would be afforded to a short film without a studio-backed budget.
REAL ACTORS, REEL PERFORMANCES
All of the characters in Being Steve were voiced by humans. Mark Strohman, Kimberly Moriarty, Maria Brogna, Kerry Kirkpatrick, and Scott Barrett provided voices for all of the characters while ElevenLabs revised those recordings to sound like a larger cast.
