<\/p>\n
\n\t\u201cSquid Game<\/a>\u201d creator Hwang Dong-hyuk<\/a>\u2018s Firstman Studio has made a $3 million investment in entertainment-focused AI tech company TwelveLabs<\/a>.<\/p>\n \n\tCo-founded by Jae Lee and Soyoung Lee, the San Francisco-based TwelveLabs is partnering with studios, streamers, creators and broadcasters to offer a system that \u201cindexes and enriches video metadata down to the scene level, enabling editors, directors, and producers to work with unprecedented speed and precision while maintaining creative control.\u201d<\/p>\n \n\t\u201cStorytelling is becoming more global, more visual, and faster-paced,\u201d Hwang said in a statement Thursday. \u201cThe creators who can adapt will shape the future of entertainment. I believe technology like TwelveLabs will be essential for turning ideas into finished stories at the speed audiences now expect.\u201d<\/p>\n \n\tHwang added: \u201cAI tools are opening up new ways to create the power of cinema that we couldn\u2019t have imagined just a few years ago. For me and Firstman Studio, it\u2019s about giving filmmakers more time to focus on the art, the emotion, and the magic only they can bring to life.\u201d<\/p>\n \n\tTwelveLabs differentiates itself from companies using generative AI to \u201ccreate entirely new content,\u201d and emphasizes its product\u2019s \u201cfocus on enhancing what already exists.\u201d<\/p>\n \n\tPer TwelveLabs, \u201cFilm and television archives contain billions of dollars\u2019 worth of untapped footage. In many studios, less than 5% of that material is ever reused, largely because finding and preparing it for production is slow, manual, and fragmented. TwelveLabs\u2019 video foundation models can search across hours of footage by visual, audio, and contextual cues simultaneously \u2014 making it possible to locate a specific scene, verify rights, and deliver usable files in a fraction of the time.\u201d<\/p>\n \n\t\u201cSome of the most valuable footage in the world goes underused because it\u2019s too time-consuming to search, retrieve, and prepare for production,\u201d TwelveLabs co-founder and head of GTM Soyoung Lee said. \u201cWe make video instantly searchable and ready to use at scale, so media companies, enterprises, and creators across industries can unlock more value from every frame they own.\u201d<\/p>\n \n\tSee below for Variety<\/em>\u2018s Q&A with TwelveLabs CEO and co-founder Jae Lee about the company\u2019s mission and partnership with Hwang.<\/p>\n \n\tDirector Hwang has always been drawn to innovation, whether in the way he tells stories or in the tools that help him bring them to life. When we connected, he was curious about how video AI could actually understand the emotional and narrative flow of a scene, not just surface-level cues like objects or dialogue. That depth of understanding resonated with him as a filmmaker. As he explored what our technology could do, he saw clear value for creators like himself, who want to spend less time bogged down in technical friction and more time focusing on the heart of the story. That alignment of vision is what ultimately led him to invest through his production company, Firstman Studio.<\/p>\n \n\tAt the core, our mission is to index every video in the world and make it as easy to understand as text. More than 90% of the world\u2019s data today is video, yet most of it remains locked away\u2013 whether in Hollywood archives, sports vaults, or corporate libraries. We want to change that.<\/p>\n \n\tBy giving machines the ability to understand not just what\u2019s in a video but also the context \u2014 the tone, pacing, or emotion, we make it possible for humans to focus on what really matters: the creative decisions. Over time, we believe this shift will turn video from a passive archive into an active, living resource that fuels storytelling, discovery, and entirely new kinds of experiences.<\/p>\n \n\tFor filmmakers like Director Hwang, time is the scarcest resource. Hours are often lost cataloguing dailies, restoring archival shots, or verifying rights before an idea can move forward. TwelveLabs\u2019 technology uniquely reduces that friction, surfacing the right scene faster, flagging potential issues earlier, and clearing the path so creators can focus more of their energy on emotion, framing, and story arcs.<\/p>\n \n\tThis is supercharging the creative process. It\u2019s giving storytellers more time for the magic only they can bring\u2013 things like deciding what moves people, what lingers in memory, and what defines a story. For someone like Director Hwang and his production company, that means less overhead and more freedom to focus on what he does best.<\/p>\n \n\tMost of the fear comes from generative AI tools that try to replace human creativity by making net-new content from scratch. That\u2019s not what we do.<\/p>\n \n\tTwelveLabs is about working with the material creators already have. We build models that index, search, and understand footage so editors, directors, and producers can move faster and smarter. The decisions about what to use, how to frame it, what story to tell, that\u2019s still all human.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n \u2018 The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n \u2018 Some details of this article were extracted from the following source variety.com \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" \u201cSquid Game\u201d creator Hwang Dong-hyuk\u2018s Firstman Studio has made a $3 million investment in entertainment-focused AI tech company TwelveLabs. Co-founded by Jae Lee and Soyoung Lee, the San Francisco-based TwelveLabs is partnering with studios, streamers, creators and broadcasters to offer a system that \u201cindexes and enriches video metadata down to the scene level, enabling editors, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2064371,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[25172],"tags":[385564,103580,385565],"class_list":["post-2064370","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-entertainment","tag-hwang-dong-hyuk","tag-squid-game","tag-twelvelabs"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/10\/Squid-Game-Creator-Makes-Major-Investment-in-AI-Company-TwelveLabs.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2064370","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2064370"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2064370\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2064372,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2064370\/revisions\/2064372"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2064371"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2064370"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2064370"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2064370"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n\t\tHow did Director Hwang get involved in the company? What led to the investment?\t<\/h5>\n
\n\t\tWhat is the long-term mission for TwelveLabs?\t<\/h5>\n
\n\t\tHow do you see this technology benefitting creators like Hwang?\t<\/h5>\n
\n\t\tWhat are you doing to quell any fears about creators working with AI-focused companies?\t<\/h5>\n