# Singapore Drama "Crooks" Cuts Post Costs 30% With Layered AI Workflow After Losing 40% of Funding

_General · published 2026-08-09_

When a key investor pulled out of Singapore drama series Crooks around Chinese New Year — taking roughly 40% of its budget with it — producer Boi Kwong and his team had three months to engineer a way forward. The solution was a carefully constrained AI-assisted post-production pipeline, developed with VFX supervisor Jay Hong and AI researcher Lim Kim Hui, that ultimately reduced post costs by around 30% without ceding creative control to the technology.

Rather than generating complete scenes with AI, the team applies a traditional VFX layering approach — splitting shots into backgrounds, lighting, and performances and processing each individually before recombining them. A "control net" of guides and seed values limits what the models can alter, while Hong manually repaints lighting in After Effects and Nuke before a final AI render pass. The discipline paid off in efficiency: the number of AI generations needed per usable shot dropped from 30–40 in early trials to around six, with simple close-ups sometimes achieved in one or two passes. "These are tools that turbocharge your man-hours," Lim says. "What usually took 10 hours now takes one." Producer Kwong is explicit about the philosophy driving the approach: "If we go full AI, the industry will collapse. There is no creativity, no control."

## Sources
- [theedgemalaysia.com](https://theedgemalaysia.com/node/813755)
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