From the Film
An American story, told in warm light.
Aurora unfolds across small farms, town halls, mobile clinics and the mission ops of a public-compute republic — from a rural pilot to the fight for the compute layer itself.
A civic intelligence, held in the public trust — and the billionaire who wants to own it.
In 2040, the creator of a revolutionary civic AI must stop the billionaire who controls its compute layer from turning America's most hopeful public technology into a private operating system for power.
Every recommendation Aurora surfaces is drafted by machine and executed by consent. No autonomous action. No sealed data. No private key to the republic.
What we build in public, we must also hold in public. Aurora was never a product. It was a promise — signed by a nation, running on compute we still had to ask permission to use.— Elena Vale · Aurora, Act I
Aurora unfolds across small farms, town halls, mobile clinics and the mission ops of a public-compute republic — from a rural pilot to the fight for the compute layer itself.
Aurora extends into the film's production ethic. Chewy — a real Burbank doodle — licensed his likeness to the film and to the in-world platform. Every time his face renders on screen, he earns. Every reuse across titles requires a new opt-in. It's how we think acting should work in the age of generative production.
Chewy · Burbank, CA · wirehaired doodle Reference set for the character "Chewy" in Aurora. Every on-screen appearance renders from these frames only. Chewy's household is paid $0.42 per render-minute, in perpetuity, revocable at any time.
Every extra, every stunt double, every voice bed, every animal — signed, priced, and paid. Where a performance is generated, it is generated from a real person or animal who agreed and is paid, not from a scraped internet. The residual runs for the life of the render.
A near-future arc — from a small municipal pilot to a federally chartered civic intelligence, and the fight to keep its compute layer out of private hands.
Aurora is submitted to the FutureVision XPRIZE as a feature-length narrative film about the year 2040 — dramatizing the fight to keep civic AI in public hands. The story is told through people, not systems: a farmer, a nurse, a candidate, a dog.
A feature-film submission to the FutureVision XPRIZE — an XPRIZE competition for narratives that imagine a hopeful and specific 2040.