Arcana Labs To Debut AI-Produced Thriller ‘Echo Hunter'

Forbes

21-05-2025

Arcana Labs, the Los Angeles-based AI filmmaking startup founded by Millennium Media veteran Jonathan Yunger, has unveiled its first film, Echo Hunter, a 30-minute sci-fi thriller rendered entirely with generative AI tools. Written and directed by AI filmmaker Kavan the Kid, the film stars Breckin Meyer (Robot Chicken, Clueless) and Taylor John Smith (Warfare, Where the Crawdads Sing). It premieres May 27 with a screening and Q&A in Los Angeles, and will be released for free online.
Set in a dystopian future where clones are harvested for spare parts, Echo Hunter follows a clone hunter who begins to remember fragments of a life he never knew, leading to revelations that challenge everything he believes. Its visual aesthetic, comparable to Children of Men and Blade Runner, was achieved with Arcana's proprietary production platform. While the film looks live action, it is entirely synthetic.
Arcana's platform is not an AI model itself. Rather, it's a modular toolchain built on top of publicly available models like Google DeepMind's Veo, Runway, Luma, and Pika, among others. The company describes it as a 'fit-for-purpose ecosystem,' integrating these tools into a streamlined UI that lets creators storyboard, generate images, animate scenes, and polish them with consistent characters and facial capture—all in one place. 'It's like having every AI video tool in a single studio dashboard,' Yunger explained. 'You can test a shot with four different video models instantly and pick the best result. No more jumping between 20 tabs.'
MIAMI BEACH, FLORIDA - SEPTEMBER 20: Executive Producer Jonathan Yunger attends the "EXPEND4BLES" ... More Miami Premiere at Regal South Beach on September 20, 2023 in Miami Beach, Florida. (Photo by)
Arcana's production process begins with traditional script development and shot listing, followed by training custom LoRAs (low-rank adaptation models) for world-building and character consistency. Once images are generated with the platform's image-to-image tools, animators inpaint and refine character details before passing frames to video generation modules. Final elements like voice and motion capture are layered in to match actor performances. For Echo Hunter, SAG-AFTRA actors performed voice and facial capture, working under union contracts.
While Arcana's platform is model-agnostic, the team has fine-tuned certain workflows to deliver cinematic results. 'The big idea is that the tools should serve the filmmaker—not the other way around,' Yunger said. 'The result isn't just faster or cheaper. It's controllable and repeatable.'
"Echo Hunter" poster.
Built initially for internal use, Arcana's production stack has since been adopted by other creators. The platform supports drag-and-drop functionality, reference image control, lip-sync, score composition, and integration with editing tools like Premiere. It also uses a credit-based pricing system, allowing flexible access for creators at any scale.
Despite Echo Hunter's cinematic finish, the reported budget was under $10,000—excluding actor fees. According to Yunger, it took weeks rather than months to produce. 'This would have cost a million dollars and six months in a traditional pipeline,' he said. 'Instead, three people and some compute time pulled it off.'
Arcana is already planning an anthology series in the style of Love, Death & Robots, combining genres like live-action, anime, and steampunk. Upcoming installments include a project led by Avatar character designer Neville Page, and another featuring Billy Zane and the licensed likeness of Clark Gable.
'Our platform lets us produce ambitious, cinematic work for a fraction of the cost,' Yunger said. 'That doesn't just disrupt the industry—it opens the door for new voices, new stories, and a new era of visual storytelling.'