Nia Bowers
It started with a short film I saw last week.
Tales of Silver City appeared on YouTube and X without much fanfare, no press, no rollout strategy and a healthy amount of comment skepticism and anti-ai expletives. Six minutes of cyberpunk animation that, if we’re being honest, is pretty cool. The kind of thing you watch once and then watch again trying to figure out how it was made. The credits list a small team under the m00m world banner and reference something called “ST00DIO” described vaguely as a proprietary AI animation software. But how much of what’s on screen is actually AI? Traditional CGI? Some hybrid? It’s genuinely hard to tell. Which, it turns out, might be the whole point.
Digging into m00m world’s socials led to a tweet from last Friday. Jordan Freda, the company’s CEO and co-founder, casually posted that he and “The Scion of Silicon Valley” venture capitalist Adam Draper had shared a croissant for breakfast and then decided they were making a feature film. No big announcement. Just a breakfast and a 10-second teaser clip attached to a tweet.
It’s either nothing. Or it’s worth paying attention to.
A quick dive through both their Twitter histories raises more questions than answers.
Draper is not a Hollywood figure per say, but he’s not someone the industry should ignore when he makes a move either. As the co-founder of Boost VC and board member of Skybound Entertainment, he’s spent 13 years betting on things that looked ridiculous until they weren’t: Coinbase before crypto was mainstream, Radiant Nuclear before anyone took small reactors seriously, Colossal Biosciences before a company could credibly claim to have revived an extinct species. In 2025, Boost deployed 63 investments (m00m world being one of them) and raised an $87 million fourth fund. His entire thesis: funding the “sci-fi future” before it’s fashionable, has a documented track record.
Freda is harder to categorize. He spent eight years in Hollywood visual effects, with credits on franchises like Captain America and Harry Potter, before founding a marketing agency and then building an entertainment IP from scratch. m00m world started as an audio series, became a mobile game with 50,000 players, and spawned a line of physical collectibles that moves a reported 1,000 units a month.
Scroll back through Freda’s X posts and the breakfast announcement starts to feel less spontaneous. He tweets frequently about AI’s role in disrupting visual effects pipelines, a recurring thesis that the technology isn’t a threat to filmmakers so much as a new kind of tool belt. The movie announcement, if that’s what it is, looks less like an impulse and more like a conclusion he’s been building toward publicly for some time.
Which brings us back to Tales of Silver City and the question nobody in the credits has bothered to answer: how much of it is AI?
That question isn’t a technical curiosity, it’s the whole game. The current crop of generative video models, ByteDance’s SeeDance 2.0, OpenAI’s Sora, Google’s Veo, Kling 3.0, can produce a clip that looks plausible for about four seconds before reality bends in ways no editor can fix. Faces drift, hands sprout fingers, continuity collapses at the cut. The gap between an impressive demo and usable footage is where most of the AI cinema hype has been quietly dying. So when a six-minute short lands clean, with sustained character work and coherent world-building, either the tooling jumped a generation with their ST00DIO system, or a lot more human hands touched the frames than the m00m world lets on.
Either answer cuts deep in Los Angeles. VFX houses from Culver City to Burbank are running at half capacity, animation work has thinned, leading soundstages like Quixote sit dark while crews who booked a year out take commercial gigs. Into that vacuum walks every founder with a GPU and a pitch deck, most promising to replace artists rather than equip them. In this climate, a short film that won’t say what made it becomes a Rorschach test.
Hollywood has seen this story before. Tech money arrives with big ideas, underestimates the complexity of creative production, and quietly disappears. That may well happen here too.
But the combination of a VFX brand-builder with proprietary tooling and a VC whose portfolio has a habit of funding the future before it arrives is at least worth a raised eyebrow. The timing with studios still navigating the AI fault lines opened by the 2023-24 strikes isn’t accidental.
A croissant is a small thing to start a disruption over. But then again, so is a six-minute film that leaves you wondering who or what made it.
Beyond a casual tweet, m00m world and Draper have made no other formal announcements regarding the movie.