Filmmaker Gary Hustwit and artist Brendan Dawes aspire to change the way audiences experience film. Their startup, Anamorph, has launched with an app that can reassemble different versions of the same film. The app debuted with “Eno,” a Hustwit-directed documentary about the music iconoclast Brian Eno that premiered in January at the Sundance Film Festival, where every “Eno” showing presented the audience with a unique viewing experience. Drawing scenes from a repository of over 500 hours of “Eno” material, the Anamorph app would potentially be able to generate what the company says is billions of different configurations.

In addition to interviews and archival footage, the source repository included animated visuals and music. Although the Sundance variations were playbacks of prerecorded HD files, Anamorph’s software is capable of live, real-time assembly, a feat the duo showcased at an October 2023 Venice Biennale installation.

Though Hustwit, who is best known for films about architecture and design, and Dawes, a digital artist, were collaboratively developing the transitive editing technology for the past five years, they officially launched their company Anamorph last week, positioning it largely on the strength of their proprietary AI film tech.

“Anamorph creates generative media platforms that are helping shape the future of cinema,” the company website explains. Dawes notes that while Anamorph’s system is generative, it is not powered by artificial intelligence.

The two built the software from scratch, according to TechCrunch, which says they combined “patent-pending techniques and the team’s own knowledge of storytelling.” To create the Anamorph app, the duo did not use a model that was “trained on anyone else’s data, IP or other films.”

Deadline calls “Eno” “the world’s first generative cinematic documentary,” and says that like a live concert, even though the material may be the same, the performance is unique each time. Hustwit said he was initially skeptical about whether the reassemblies would make sense, but concluded that “the purpose of the generative system isn’t to deliver films with a ‘chronological arc,’” according to TechCrunch.

“You can still have an engaging narrative arc in a film, sort of what we expect when we see a [normal] documentary … even if the scenes, footage, music and the sequences change,” he tells TechCrunch, with Dawes adding that the primary challenge was building a system that “could process potentially hundreds of 4K video files, each with its own 5.1 audio tracks, in real time.”

NAB Amplify writes that “there are certain scenes pinned to the same time slot in each version, including a scene where Eno discusses generative art.”

It will likely be years before the Anamorph system is implemented commercially, because there is “no existing streaming platform that can support this type of tech. However, the company says it wants to develop the capabilities in-house for major streamers to use,” per TechCrunch.