Inside Crooks: How a Singapore Drama Rebuilt Its Production Around AI After Losing 40% of Its Funding

Singapore's screen sector has spent the year circling AI — from AI-generated films premiering on National Day to a running public debate about what counts as "AI slop." The nine-episode drama Crooks from B-01 Films shows what the technology looks like when it stops being a gimmick and becomes the very thing keeping a production alive.

Producer Boi Kwong, whose credits include Geylang and Sui Yue: The Days, was mid-production when an investor withdrew around Chinese New Year, taking roughly 40% of the funding with it. Rather than shelve the series, the team spent three months building an AI-assisted workflow alongside veteran visual effects supervisor Jay Hong and AI researcher Lim Kim Hui. Their answer is a "control net" — seed values and guides that tell image and video models what they may alter and what must remain untouched. Actors perform on live sets while AI generates the environments: a two-storey restaurant that would cost about S$10,000 a day to rent in Singapore is recreated digitally, and a prison sequence films a handful of performers while the model fills in the remaining inmates.

The economics are the point. Lim says the team cut the AI generations needed for a usable shot from 30 to 40 in the early stages to about six, with simple close-ups often landing in one or two attempts. "What usually took 10 hours now takes one," he says, with lighting work reduced by 50% to 70% and overall savings of around 30%. For Kwong, the bigger payoff is creative freedom: "With hybrid AI, we are no longer restricted to a S$2 million budget. It allows filmmakers to dream bigger."

The workflow lands at an awkward moment for the industry. Hong, who says Singapore's visual effects scene has shrunk to "no job to half a job," sees AI as a possible lifeline for a struggling sector — but the legal ground is shaky, with Hollywood studios suing AI companies over training data, and Lim admits the advances are unnerving. "All the actors are training the AI models. They are giving up their experience to the model," he says. Kwong's line in the sand: "If we go full AI, the industry will collapse. There is no creativity, no control."

Why it matters for Singapore: Crooks is a test case for how a small, cost-sensitive production market can use AI without surrendering the human craft that defines it. While policymakers push model governance and AI literacy into the mainstream, this production shows local studios quietly building their own layered, controlled workflows — deciding for themselves where the machine helps and where it must not touch.