South African production company DragonStudios.ai has been named a finalist in the Neu Wave AI Film Festival, held as part of LA Tech Week, with its series Mountain of Graves. The series will compete in the Topwave Vertical Films Competition, with winners announced on 14 October in Santa Monica, according to Bizcommunity.
The ten-episode series was commissioned by Buka Africa and written by the studio’s creative leads, Donovan Marsh and Steven Cholerton, together with writer Phuti Lehong Buka. It follows two brothers who try to stop a mining company from taking the mountain where their ancestors are buried. It is presented in a vertical format and was produced entirely on AI filmmaking platforms.
The festival and the competition
The Neu Wave AI Film Festival is in its third year. According to the event page on Curious Refuge, it takes place on Wednesday, 14 October 2026 at 2700 Colorado Avenue in Santa Monica, California, and describes itself as a meeting ground for filmmakers, technologists and innovators exploring how AI is changing storytelling. Companies including ByteDance and ElevenLabs take part through panels and discussions, and an AI Media Career Fair runs in the same week.
DragonStudios.ai will learn the result of the vertical competition on the night. Two of its other projects, Dragon Hunter and Bad Muti, have earlier international selections and are still in development, according to Bizcommunity.
A director who moved to AI
The studio, which has offices in Johannesburg and London, describes itself on its website as a “Studio as a SERVICE” that builds AI workflows for films, commercials and series, from script and storyboard to finished product. Its listed projects also include Terra One, about artificial super-intelligence, and The Bleeding Ground, about a Nigerian activist who confronts an oil company. Cholerton is a London-based writer and producer, and Apteker, who executive produced Jerusalema and Vaya, is listed as a founder.
Marsh is best known for conventional film. He directed South African features including Spud and iNumber Number, and directed the international action thriller Hunter Killer, which starred Gerard Butler and Gary Oldman and was released in October 2018 on a budget of about $40 million. According to Wikipedia, it earned about $31.7 million worldwide. In an earlier TechCentral profile, he said he decided to change course after seeing clips from OpenAI’s Sora video generator. He co-founded the studio with internet pioneer Ronnie Apteker and London-based producer Steve Cholerton.
Marsh has made a bold claim about the economics. He told TechCentral that he could make Hunter Killer, a production of about $40 million that needed 55 shooting days and nearly two years of post-production on roughly 1,000 visual effects shots, for around 100 times less money using today’s AI tools. That is his own estimate, not an audited figure. He also said he uses between eight and eleven different AI tools on each project, and named the Chinese platforms Kling and Seedance as the leading video generators, adding that OpenAI had recently discontinued Sora after finding it lacked a competitive advantage.
In the studio’s statement about Mountain of Graves, Marsh said: “We want to help take African stories and films to international audiences and believe that AI plays an important role in creating new films from scratch.”
What it means for small producers
The vertical format is built for phones, but whether AI-made series can find paying audiences is still unproven; a finalist place is recognition from an AI-focused festival, not a commercial result. Marsh himself told TechCentral that AI has already displaced graphic artists, storyboard artists and composers, which is the other side of the same cost story for South Africa’s creative sector. More technology coverage is in our Tech & Telco and SME & Entrepreneurship sections.
