{"id":283945,"date":"2025-11-26T07:28:17","date_gmt":"2025-11-26T07:28:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/283945\/"},"modified":"2025-11-26T07:28:17","modified_gmt":"2025-11-26T07:28:17","slug":"ai-brings-british-castles-royal-stories-to-life-in-new-series","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/283945\/","title":{"rendered":"AI Brings British Castles’ Royal Stories to Life in New Series"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tEXCLUSIVE: Sky History<\/a> has sent out a Castles SOS. The UK channel has acquired a new AI-powered doc telling the royalty, ruins and restoration stories behind British castles. Will Hanrahan<\/a>\u2019s indie FirstLookTV<\/a> is making the series for the Hearst Networks EMEA<\/a> channel. It will be fronted by British presenter Rick Edwards and is now in post.<\/p>\n

\n\tSphere Abacus<\/a> will sell Castles SOS (WT) globally. It will unpack the work to restore castles, as well as the stories of the people that lived in them.<\/p>\n

\n\tHanrahan tells Deadline about the starting point for the show: \u201cWe asked what we could do to tap into the global thirst for royal stories that was new and different and also gave a sense of historical takeaway.\u201d FirstLookTV decided the way in was looking at castles that are being restored, but also looking at the human stories the castles could yield. \u201cEach time we went to any of these places, we said \u2018What are the royal stories in here that nobody\u2019s told before?\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tThe restoration elements of Castles SOS highlight the work of the The National Lottery Heritage Fund and the series is produced with backing from the UK National Lottery.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe human stories in the three-parter, meanwhile, include a boy-king who nearly died at Fyvie Castle, the queen who cheered carriage races at Lowther, and the king who starved his enemies at Hay. This is where generative artificial intelligence comes into the picture.<\/p>\n

\n\tHanrahan said: \u201cWhat better way of bringing the past to life than with big movie-style reconstruction? There\u2019s going to be battle scenes in the new series and there\u2019s going to be architectural recreations of the castles from the past.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tAs debate rages about the use of AI in film and TV, FirstLookTV said any AI sequences in its series will be created ethically. \u201cWe shoot original material and then train our AI tools to only use that or material that\u2019s been cleared for global use,\u201d Hanrahan said. \u201cWe are feeding the data into AI and seeing what it can come up with, and it\u2019s mind bogglingly good.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tFactual producers are increasingly harnessing generative AI\u2019s capabilities for providing high-quality drama reconstruction. Daniel Korn, VP of Programming at Hearst Networks EMEA acquired Castles SOS for Sky History. He also recently bought Ed Gein: Original Psycho, another doc using AI to power its reconstruction elements.<\/p>\n

\n\tHanrahan makes a wider point about artificial intelligence in production: \u201cAI can do such wonderful things. Why not train it to do it the right way?\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"EXCLUSIVE: Sky History has sent out a Castles SOS. The UK channel has acquired a new AI-powered doc…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":283946,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[554,733,4308,115725,115726,115727,115728,26822,86,56,54,55,115729],"class_list":["post-283945","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-firstlooktv","tag-hearst-networks-emea","tag-sky-history","tag-sphere-abacus","tag-techline","tag-technology","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom","tag-will-hanrahan"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/283945","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=283945"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/283945\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/283946"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=283945"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=283945"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=283945"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}