With all the flashbulbs, fashion, and starpower on the red carpet, you could be forgiven for not spotting Sean O’Kelly and Sami Arpa at this year’s Venice Film Festival. But together, the business partners are getting plenty of notice behind the scenes, with an innovative platform designed to simplify how movies and series get made.
O’Kelly is the executive chairman of Brilliant Pictures, a London-based production company and distributor behind such movies as Sangre del Toro, a documentary about the Oscar-winning director Guillermo del Toro, which premiered in Venice this summer. Arpa is a filmmaker-turned-computer scientist and the founder of Largo.ai, which builds software that translates the data-driven language of companies like Netflix and Amazon into tools that independent producers can use to their advantage.
“We saw how the major streamers were relying on technology to order the right content,” Arpa says. “But their tools weren’t available to the rest of the industry. Our motivation was to give those same insights—about audience size, demographics, and emotional reactions—to everyone else.”
Brilliant Pictures’ growing roster of feature films and documentaries includes La Damnée, Jericho Ridge, and Sangre del Toro.
Brilliant Pictures
That pitch resonated with O’Kelly, who says the hardest part of filmmaking is no longer the creative side, but the financial one. “Whenever you’re talking to banks, equity investors, or pre-sales platforms, you want to package a project so it feels risk-free,” he says. “With Largo, we can run a script scene by scene and demonstrate that an audience won’t just relate to it—they’ll stay tuned. That’s invaluable when you’re talking to ad-driven platforms that need to know people will hang in there.”
Together, they’ve built what O’Kelly calls “one of the world’s first 360-degree production, sales, and finance platforms,” designed to help producers and writers make key decisions sooner rather than later. One prime example of this is a system that replicates focus groups. Instead of weeks of testing, filmmakers can get quantitative and qualitative audience feedback in a day. “It fully replaces traditional focus groups,” Arpa says. “You can ask these simulated audiences anything about your content, and get the same confidence level as a live test—at a fraction of the time and cost.”
Still, both founders are keen to stress what the technology is not. “We’re not looking to replace actors, writers, or directors,” O’Kelly says. “That magic, that core creative, is irreplaceable. What we’re doing is making the process smarter, faster, and better.”
Their first collaborative test case is The Crane, a disaster thriller about a father-daughter team of crane operators caught in an earthquake. The project has already run through Largo’s full suite of analytics, which generated its sales materials, casting insights, and even teaser visuals informed by AI. The partners brought the concept and debuted their partnership at this year’s Cannes Film Festival. The Crane got plenty of interest. “There’s a huge appetite,” O’Kelly says. “It’s a timely, mainstream commercial piece.”
Sami Arpa, center, and Sean O’Kelly with a guest at an event to promote Sangre del Toro at this year’s Cannes Film Festival.
Luca Fazzolari/Brilliant Pictures
The hope is that by giving independent producers the same predictive edge as the streaming giants, more films will make it to larger audiences worldwide. “We’ve seen producers triple their chance of getting greenlit by using Largo,” Arpa says. “It’s about leveling the playing field.”
But it’s also about giving anyone who uses these tools a level of confidence that’s been hard for all but those at the top of the film industry to access before now. “Rather than second-guessing, we’re finally speaking the same language as the platforms,” O’Kelly says. “That gives us, and the films we believe in, a fighting chance.”
