AVisualHistoryofAIFilm&Video

Generating Photorealistic Video with AI

Jon Warlick

A wedding videographer from North Carolina creates what may be the first AI-generated video. Using NVIDIA's GauGAN, a tool that turns simple color-coded sketches into photorealistic landscape images, Warlick paints a landscape in GIMP, animates a camera movement through it in After Effects, exports every single frame, feeds each one individually through GauGAN, then reassembles the AI-transformed frames back into video. The result is flickering, dreamlike, and unmistakably alien. Three years before CogVideo, one person with patience and ingenuity found a way to make AI move.

Video Enhance AI v1

Topaz Labs

Topaz Labs releases Video Enhance AI, the first commercially available AI-powered video upscaling tool. Using deep learning models trained on thousands of video pairs, it can upscale footage up to 8K while adding genuine detail rather than just interpolating pixels. The tool quickly establishes Topaz Labs as the dominant player in AI video enhancement. While not a generative video tool, Video Enhance AI sets a critical foundation: when AI video models arrive years later with their low resolutions and noisy outputs, this is the tool creators will reach for to make that footage usable.

Make-A-Video

Meta AI

Meta's research team demonstrates that text-to-image models can be extended to generate video. The technique leverages what AI already learned about images and teaches it how things move. Never released to the public, but the demos circulate widely among researchers and signal that every major tech company is now racing toward AI video. The implications for creators are clear: if this works at scale, anyone will be able to direct scenes with words.

Deforum Stable Diffusion

Deforum Community

Weeks after Stable Diffusion goes public in August 2022, Deforum launches as a Colab notebook that turns text prompts into animated video. Building on the lineage of Disco Diffusion, VQGAN+CLIP, and PyTTI, Deforum adds Stable Diffusion's dramatically improved image quality to the animation workflow. The signature technique is 'prompt travel': schedule different prompts at different timestamps and watch the AI morph between them, creating dreamlike sequences where one world melts into another. Camera controls let creators zoom, pan, rotate, and fly through AI-generated landscapes. Quickly evolves into an Automatic1111 WebUI extension, making it accessible to anyone who can run Stable Diffusion locally. Deforum animations are projected at concerts worldwide, synced to music. The tool becomes the creative backbone of a generation of AI artists who will later move into AI filmmaking. Many of the aesthetic signatures of early AI video, the morphing transitions, the surreal prompt travels, the infinite zooms, originate here.

Topaz Video AI v3

Topaz Labs

Topaz Labs rebrands Video Enhance AI as Topaz Video AI with a major v3.0 rewrite featuring improved stabilization, faster processing, and new AI models for denoising, upscaling, and frame interpolation. The timing proves prescient: as generative AI video models begin producing short, low-resolution, noisy clips, Topaz Video AI becomes an essential part of the creator pipeline. Filmmakers submitting to early AI film festivals and contests like Gen:48 rely on it to upscale and clean up their AI-generated footage, turning rough model outputs into something presentable on the big screen. For a community pushing tools beyond their limits to make longer-form work, Topaz bridges the gap between what the models can output and what audiences expect to see.

My Top AI Video Animations of 2022

enigmatic_e

It's hard finding longer-form AI generated video from 2022, but this curated compilation by enigmatic_e (one of the early pioneers) touches on some great examples from this era. A time capsule of the raw experimentation that what was possible before major generative AI video tools existed.

The Dog & The Boy

Netflix Japan / WIT Studio

Netflix Japan and WIT Studio release a short anime with AI-generated background art, making it the first time a major studio openly credits AI alongside human artists in a commercial release. The backgrounds were AI-generated, but the craft was human. It sparked a heated debate in the anime community about where the line should be drawn, but it also offered a glimpse of what was coming: AI as a production tool, not a replacement.

Runway Gen-1

Runway

AI video leaves the research lab. Runway Gen-1 is the first commercially available AI video tool, letting creators upload real footage and transform it with AI — applying new styles and visual treatments guided by text or reference images. Not text-to-video yet, but the moment AI enters the creative workflow. Thousands of filmmakers, designers, and artists get their hands on it immediately.

Runway Gen-2

Runway

A quick follow-up to Gen-1, Gen-2 improves upon the initial video-to-video capabilities with higher-fidelity video generation — and makes the leap to text-to-video. Type a prompt, get a 4-second video clip. The quality is rough, the clips are short, and the physics are wrong. None of that matters. What matters is that for the first time in history, anyone with a browser can generate original video from nothing but words. Runway Gen-2 creates the AI filmmaking community overnight. The experiments begin.

Digital Deity

Uncanny Harry

An early AI short film created in the raw days of consumer AI video, when the tools were limited and the aesthetic was defined by surreal artifacts and dreamlike distortion. Uncanny Harry crafted a piece that felt intentional rather than accidental — an early signal that creators were finding artistic voice inside the noise.

When CZ meets Schwarzenegger

Framer

A viral AI comedy starring Binance CEO CZ and Arnold Schwarzenegger — stitched together from Midjourney stills, DALL-E 2 generations, and D-ID face animation, composited in After Effects. The Schwarzenegger voice is from voice actor @Govournator. Racked up 3.4 million views and became one of the earliest examples of AI-generated content breaking through to mainstream internet audiences.

"Will Smith Eating Spaghetti"

Reddit user chaindrop / ModelScope

The video that made AI video generation mainstream. Horrifying, hilarious, impossible to look away from. Generated with ModelScope's text-to-video tool. Millions of views. The 'this changes everything' moment for the general public.

Property

Shane Willet

A comedic AI rap video where dogs and cats don't see Red or Blue — just territory. Made with Runway Gen-2 in its earliest days, Property showed that generative video didn't have to be serious or cinematic to land. The humor works because the AI aesthetic adds to the absurdity rather than fighting it.

NEMESIS

Shane Willet

After contacting their PenPals, they have now awakened the Nemesis. There is no turning back — you can't escape the mafia bass beats of the apocalypse. A music video that leans hard into the visual language of the Gen-2 era: warped textures, hallucinatory motion, and a dark energy that feels native to the tools. The aesthetic is unmistakably of its moment — defining what early Runway Gen-2 art looked and felt like.

THE OLD LADY

Abel Art

An early AI short film from Abel Art, crafted in the first months after consumer AI video tools became available. A haunting, atmospheric piece that demonstrated the emotional range possible even with the limited tools of mid-2023. Abel Art would go on to become a key contributor to community projects like the T2 Remake.

Lost Marbles

Dale Williams (The Reel Robot)

One of the earliest AI-generated anime shorts, created during the first wave of AI filmmaking in mid-2023. Made with the tools available at the time: Midjourney for imagery and early Runway Gen-2 for video generation. Williams would go on to become one of the most visible AI animators in the community, with over 7 million views and multiple festival awards. Lost Marbles is where that journey began.

SH*T!

Abel Art

A comedic AI short from Abel Art that leans into the absurdist potential of early generative video. Made weeks after THE OLD LADY, it shows a creator already experimenting with tone and genre — moving from atmospheric drama to irreverent humor. A reminder that the early AI film community wasn't all serious experimentation; some of the best work was just fun.

Mechaniverse

Shane Willet

An early attempt at building a visually consistent world using generative AI — mechanical creatures, clockwork landscapes, and impossible machines stitched into a cohesive short. Mechaniverse captures the distinct aesthetic of this period: dreamlike, slightly uncanny, rich with details, and pushing for narrative consistency when the tools barely supported it.

NinjaPunk

Dave Clark

Set in the neon-lit streets of Los Angeles in 2065, a cybernetic ninja seeks vengeance after his wife's murder by the Yakuza, uncovering an underworld where ancient powers collide with futuristic warfare. Made with Midjourney and Runway Gen-2, this early short became a landmark: it later grew into a hybrid live-action/generative AI feature film developed at Promise Studios and showcased at the Cannes Film Market in May 2025, with stunt choreographers from John Wick. One of the most important early AI films.

Stable Video Diffusion

Stability AI

Open-source video generation arrives. Stability AI releases models that turn a single image into a 2-4 second animated clip, and anyone can download and run them locally. For creators who want control over their tools, who want to fine-tune and customize, who want to run AI video without a subscription, this is the starting gun. The open-source AI video ecosystem begins here.

2026

Dan Hammill & Jeff Wood

The Myth

Hilario Abad, Javi Lería & Esteban Diba

Trailer for Kowloon Night and Fog

Shang Zhu

HIDE OR SEEK

Emad Khalid Mughal

Follow the Sun

Andrea Aureli & Gemma Costa

Under Siege

Seif Abdalla

Let Us Explore

Gabe Michael

Balloons

Daniel Scott Cribbs

Generation

Riccardo Fusetti

Checkpoint

Áron Filkey & Joss Fong

Original Voice

Jordan Rosenbloom

Landscape

Kyle Goodrich

I want 1000 Rabbits

Shan He

AI ARTIST

Jessey Nelson & Dani Barker

Expanded Childhood

Sam Lawton

Magnific AI

Javi López & Emilio Nicolás Riquelme.

Javi López & Emilio Nicolás Riquelme launch Magnific AI, the first popular 'creative' image upscaler — a tool that doesn't just add resolution but reimagines and hallucinates new details into images. With sliders for 'creativity,' 'HDR,' and 'resemblance,' creators can control how much the AI invents, turning rough Midjourney or Stable Diffusion outputs at the time, into images with stunning detail and texture. Over 30,000 people sign up within the first 24 hours. For the AI filmmaking community, where image-to-video workflows with models like Gen-2 depend highly on the quality of the input image, Magnific feels like magic. It fills in the details that early image models miss — skin pores, fabric texture, environmental detail — transforming good images into extraordinary ones. The impact is immediate and the approach is quickly emulated by competitors. Magnific is later acquired by Freepik in May 2024.

What if: The Takemura Files

FERA

A Cyberpunk 2077-inspired AI short that reimagines the game's world through generative video. FERA builds a moody, atmospheric narrative around the character Takemura, blending game aesthetics with AI-generated visuals. An early example of AI filmmaking drawing from gaming IP to create something that feels like a lost cutscene from a parallel universe.

Sora Preview

OpenAI

OpenAI drops a preview that changes the conversation overnight. 60-second videos with coherent physics, consistent characters, and cinematic camera movements. Nothing publicly available comes close. The internet is split between awe and existential dread. For creators, the preview is both inspiring and frustrating: it proves AI video can be genuinely cinematic, but almost no one can actually use it. The gap between 'demo' and 'product' becomes the story.

Air Head

Shy Kids

One of the first films made with OpenAI's Sora. A 1:21 short about a person with a balloon for a head. Goes massively viral as part of Sora's public debut. Toronto collective Shy Kids becomes the face of early Sora filmmaking.

Ellie

UNVEIL

LAPSE

YZA Voku

Unknown

Gabe Michael

Be An Elephant

Gurkan Atakan

Pliers

Nelson Quimbay, Wilman Aguilera Charry & Juan Felipe Ortiz

Get Big

Guillermo Miranda & Javier De La Chica

I Want to Go Home, Please

Evan Siegal

You Are, Unfortunately, an A.I. Artist

Mind Wank

The Illusion of Innocence

Rich Klein

(this is one of my animated short films)

My Gen:48 2nd Edition finalist film and my first real experience working with generative video. I worked with my daughter on the story using Runway Gen-2 for all the video generations. The film explores themes of innocence and perception through a fairy tale (with a twist).

Our T2 Remake

Sway Molina & Nem Perez / Storyblocker Studios

A feature-length AI parody remake of Terminator 2: Judgment Day, produced by over 50 AI artists and filmmakers. In this version, humanity must fight back against a world ruled by ChatGPT. Three months in the making, it premiered at the Landmark NuArt Theatre in Hollywood — one of the earliest community-driven, feature-length AI films to get a theatrical screening. A statement piece for the AI filmmaking community: proof that dozens of creators scattered across the internet could come together and ship a full-length movie.

Veo 1

Google DeepMind

Google officially enters the consumer AI video race at I/O 2024, announcing a model that generates 1080p video over a minute long. What this meant in practice: full HD video at lengths that start to feel like actual filmmaking, not just clips. Google's massive compute infrastructure means they can offer quality that smaller companies struggle to match.

Get Me Out

Daniel Antebi

Where Do Grandmas Go

Léo Cannone

Pounamu

Samuel Schrag

e^(i*pi) + 1 = 0

Junie Lau

L'éveil à la création

Animitas

A Tree Once Grew Here

Dear Mom

Separation

Luma Dream Machine

Luma Labs

Luma Labs launches Dream Machine and 25 million users sign up. The appeal is simplicity: type a prompt or upload an image, get video back fast. For many creators, Dream Machine is their first experience with AI video generation. It becomes the gateway that brings filmmakers, animators, and content creators into the AI video world. The sheer scale of adoption proves the demand is real.

Runway Gen-3 Alpha

Runway

A major quality leap. Gen-3 Alpha produces 10-second clips with dramatically improved fidelity, motion coherence, and understanding of 3D space. For the first time, filmmakers start treating AI video as a real production tool rather than a novelty. The jump from Gen-2 to Gen-3 Alpha is the difference between 'interesting experiment' and 'I can actually use this in my work.' The era of AI filmmaking as craft begins.

LE VOYAGEUR

Abel Art

A visually rich AI short from Abel Art that follows a traveler through dreamlike landscapes. By mid-2024, the tools had matured enough to match Abel Art's ambition — the result is a piece with real cinematic scope, atmospheric depth, and a visual confidence that reflects over a year of working with generative video.

Borrowing Time

Dave Clark

Sci-fi short based on Dave Clark's father's true story of being Black in 1960s America. Made with Midjourney, Runway, and ElevenLabs. 110K+ views on X. Goes viral and leads to feature film offers from major production houses. Personal storytelling meets AI tools.

The Last Artist

Dustin Hollywood

Billed as the world's first 100% AI-crafted feature-length film. Set in a future where AI has surpassed human creativity, the protagonist Tanaka stands as the last artist wielding a brush in a world dominated by digital perfection. Written and directed by Dustin Hollywood, founder of NAKID Magazine.

What We Leave Behind

PJ Accetturo

A cinematic AI concept film depicting a Japanese village preparing for war. Made from scratch in just 3 hours using only $50 in Kling credits. PJ Accetturo showed that cinematic quality, speed, and low cost no longer had to be trade-offs in AI filmmaking.

Hailuo Video-01

MiniMax

MiniMax quietly launches its first video model. 720p, 25fps, up to 6 seconds. The specs look modest on paper, but the motion quality and realism surprise everyone. Hailuo represents the emergence of a new player that will quickly become known for photorealistic output. The Cat Olympics viral moment a few months later will prove that Hailuo's physics simulation is genuinely convincing.

Battalion

Dave Clark

A 5-minute short telling the story of the 320th Barrage Balloon Battalion, the only all-Black unit to storm the beach during D-Day. Created 100% with image-to-video and text-to-video generative AI using Runway and Luma. Goes viral with millions of views and leads to feature film offers from major production houses. Clark proves AI can tell stories that Hollywood won't.

The Yolky Universe: Concerto for Drips & Dreams

Sway Molina

A surreal, animated series by Sway Molina exploring beauty, horror, and the spaces between. The Yolky Universe was one of the most distinctive (and memorable to me) aesthetic signatures in early AI animation — weird, vivid, unmistakably handcrafted, even though it was AI-generated. As Molina put it: "The mind that's capable of creating beautiful worlds is the same mind that can create horrific ones for themselves. Always choose beauty and when in doubt — return to reality. It's not so bad here."

Adobe Firefly Video Model

Adobe

Adobe launches its Firefly Video model at Adobe MAX, entering the AI video race with a focus on commercial safety and professional workflows. Text-to-video with camera controls, image-to-video transformation, and Generative Extend for Premiere Pro that fills footage gaps and smooths transitions. Supports 100+ languages. The first AI video model explicitly designed for commercial use from day one, built on content that Adobe has the rights to use for training.

Beatrice

OLD NEW RARE

RUPU-KK: the Loop

Federico Papasodero, Emidio Battipaglia & Simone Adami

So Much for A Piece of Blue Sky

UNVEIL

Shizukana Koe

John Kelly

Honu

Holden Boyles

Welcome To Void's

Neural Viz

the brave little hen

Thomas Frenk & Clifny Alves de Lima

Saving the Sun

Rich Klein

(this is one of my animated short films)

One of my early animated shorts, made with Runway Gen-3. I wanted to explore themes of light, hope, and the lengths we'll go to preserve what matters most. A simple story, but one that felt meaningful to make.

One Last Wish

Edmond Yang, Simon Valentine & Alex Holm

A poignant short film about an elderly inmate's final wish, created in just 48 hours as part of the Cinema Synthetica Norway workshop. Script by acclaimed novelist Erlend Loe, directed by Simon Valentine, with AI visuals and animation by Edmond Yang. Won 1st Place in the Narrative Category at Project Odyssey 2025 and was featured in Forbes. A powerful example of how AI tools can accelerate traditional filmmaking workflows without replacing the human elements of storytelling, performance, and craft.

Coca-Cola AI Holiday Ad

Coca-Cola / Silverside AI / Secret Level / Wild Card

Coca-Cola remakes its iconic holiday ad using Gen-3 Alpha, Luma Dream Machine, and Kling. The result is polarizing: praised by some for ambition, called soulless by others. Sparks a major debate about brands using AI to replace traditional production. The backlash proves the AI filmmaking community cares deeply about craft and authenticity.

Home

Ezra Li

The King's Secret

Osvaldo Rivera Vazquez

Clover

Faith Cho

Eyes on Me

Prasad Gori, Anurag Tiwari & Sagar Chogale

No Pressure

Nicholas Flandro

I'm the Lamb

Mahmoud Salah & Karim Moftah

!Dale caña!

Javier De La Chica & Guillermo Miranda

How It's Made

Matthew Berger, Kavin Kapoor & Ishan Modi

FEAST

Alex Naghavi, Dan Taplin & Sara DeCou

Aelita

Linus Mariscal Carulla, Max Ponce Pons & Dru Wu

The Thin Man The Gun The Hotpot

Jim HuiHui

A 10-minute noir animation set in the neon-lit streets of Sichuan, China, following Xu Xia's struggle between conscience and survival. 242 shots, nearly three months of work, created largely by one person with AI. Midjourney generated 4,164 images, Kling produced 984 video clips, Pika added 693 more. Won Best Animated Short Gold at the Independent Shorts Awards. Featured at the AI Artist Festival and VACAT Awards. A landmark achievement in solo AI filmmaking: one creator, multiple AI tools orchestrated together, producing a film with the depth and craft of a studio production.

Veo 2

Google DeepMind

Resolution jumps from 1080p to 4K, and the physics simulation takes a serious step forward. Released via VideoFX and later the Gemini app. Veo 2 becomes the model behind some of the most impressive creator work of the year, including Jason Zada's 'The Heist' (10M+ views) and Henry Daubrez's 'Kitsune.' Veo 2 is the first model where the output genuinely looks cinematic at feature-film resolution.

The Heist

Jason Zada

Every shot generated text-to-video with Veo 2. A 1:56 bank heist and car chase. 1.1M views on the original X post, 10M+ across platforms. Proves that a single creator with taste and the right model can make something that looks like a studio production.

Luma Ray2

Luma Labs

Built on an entirely new multi-modal architecture with 10x the compute of the original Dream Machine. Ultra-realistic details, coherent fast motion, and logical event sequences. For creators who built workflows around Dream Machine, Ray2 delivers a generational upgrade without changing the interface. The quality jump is dramatic enough that side-by-side comparisons circulate widely on X.

Kitsune

Henry Daubrez

A tale of two lonely souls finding connection. Curated from 1,700+ AI-generated shots into a coherent narrative. Made with Veo 2. Named one of the 9 Best AI Animated Films of 2025 by Curious Refuge. A masterclass in AI film curation — the human taste is the tool.

ALEX

Dale Williams (The Reel Robot)

An anime-style AI short from early 2025, showcasing Williams' signature style of character-driven narrative animation. Created during a highly productive period where Williams was collaborating with Promise AI on concept development and building his reputation as one of the leading AI anime filmmakers.

Rapture

BLVCKL!GHT

A feature-length AI-generated narrative, approximately one hour long, that transports viewers into another dimension through bizarre, surreal worldbuilding. Drawing from 1980s boundary-pushing shows like Ren and Stimpy and Pee-Wee's Playhouse, BLVCKL!GHT creates a sustained fever dream that proves AI filmmaking can work at feature length. Selected by Curious Refuge as one of the 9 Best AI Animated Films of 2025.

One Fire Left

Dale Williams (The Reel Robot)

An AI anime short depicting two surviving tribes fighting over Earth's last heat source as global temperatures drop to deadly levels. Won 1st Place in Curious Refuge's AI Animation Contest. Described as 'easily one of the best AI anime shorts out there.' Williams' work has amassed over 7 million views across social media and earned multiple festival awards.

Gorbo's Swim Hole

BLVCKL!GHT

A surreal, darkly comedic piece set in an interdimensional water park where visitors encounter reality-bending experiences and may never truly leave. Part of BLVCKL!GHT's interconnected 'Route 47 Television' universe, an Adult Swim-inspired network of AI-generated shows. The concept grew into a recurring series with elaborate worldbuilding, its own website, and characters that cross between BLVCKL!GHT's other shows.

Cryptid Dating Game

BLVCKL!GHT

A twisted dating show parody where human contestants choose between grotesque cryptid bachelors like Mothman, a shapeshifting Skinwalker, and the recently divorced Jersey Devil. BLVCKL!GHT's breakout hit and most viral property, achieving tens of millions of views across TikTok and YouTube. The claymation-esque visual style blends horror, surrealism, and comedy. Proves that AI-generated serialized content can find massive audiences on short-form platforms.

A Love Letter to LA

Paul Trillo, Paul Flores & Cuco

A poetic, music-driven tribute to Los Angeles directed by Paul Trillo — one of the most respected names bridging traditional filmmaking and AI tools. The film weaves generative imagery into a love letter that feels both deeply personal and unmistakably AI-native. Trillo's work consistently demonstrates that the best AI films come from directors who already know how to tell stories.

Runway Gen-4

Runway

The breakthrough feature is single-image character consistency: upload a reference photo and the model maintains that character's appearance across generated clips. For narrative filmmakers, this solves one of the biggest pain points in AI video. Before Gen-4, every generation was a roll of the dice on whether your character would look the same. Now you can build stories with recurring characters.

Sad Steve's Taxidermy and Ice Cream

BLVCKL!GHT

The tri-state area's only combination taxidermy studio and ice cream parlor. Sad Steve preserves deceased pets while his manic assistant Sprinkles serves up questionably-sourced frozen treats with flavors like 'Rocky Road Kill.' Part of BLVCKL!GHT's Route 47 Television universe, explicitly referencing characters from Gorbo's Swim Hole and The Mysterious Forest. The cross-series worldbuilding is a distinctive achievement in AI-generated content.

LATE

Hal Watmough

First place winner at the Curious Refuge AI Animation Contest 2025. An unforgettable emotional narrative that showcases what generative animation can do when craft and feeling come first. Part of a growing wave of AI animation contests proving the medium has its own artistic identity.

Reflection feat

FERA

A music-driven AI short by FERA that pairs striking generative visuals with a hypnotic soundtrack. Fluid, reflective imagery merges with rhythm to create a piece that feels more like a music video from the future than a traditional short film — an example of AI filmmaking finding its own native format.

Zyphorax TV Tape 1

Uno Particular

A lo-fi, VHS-flavored fever dream that plays like a lost transmission from a public access channel in another dimension. Uno Particular leans into the glitchy, uncanny qualities of AI video rather than fighting them. The result feels like outsider art filtered through a broken CRT.

Veo 3

Google DeepMind

The landmark addition: native audio generation. For the first time, a video model generates synchronized dialogue, sound effects, and ambient noise alongside the visuals in a single pass. Lip-sync accuracy under 120ms. In practice, this collapses what was previously a multi-tool workflow into a single generation. No more generating video, then finding sound effects, then syncing dialogue. The model imagines the entire audiovisual scene at once.

Bigfoot Vlogs Go Viral

@bigfootvlogs / Various creators

Just one day after Google launches Veo 3 with native audio and dialogue, TikToker @bigfootvlogs posts an AI-generated video of Bigfoot casually vlogging in the woods: introducing himself, showing what he had for breakfast, taking a dip in a river, foraging for berries. It racks up over 6 million views in weeks. The format explodes across TikTok, X, and YouTube, with creators building entire character universes around talking cryptids: Yeti cooking shows, Mothman relationship advice, Loch Ness Monster nature documentaries. The trend proves two things: Veo 3's native audio generation is convincing enough to make fictional characters feel present and alive, and the AI filmmaking community has a sense of humor.

THE CLEANER

Dave Clark

A thriller-style AI short featuring a hitman entering a room, crafted to feel like authentic Hollywood cinema. Clark challenged himself to create a coherent cinematic narrative using Google Veo 3 and Google Flow, achieving a level of shot-to-shot visual consistency rarely seen in AI film at the time. The film showed what Veo 3 looked like in the hands of an experienced filmmaker: remarkably realistic, Hollywood-grade footage with coherent lighting and staging across cuts.

Electric Pink

Henry Daubrez

A nostalgic coming-of-age memory set to motion. Made with Google Imagen 3 and Veo 2 via Flow. Premiered at the 2025 Tribeca Festival. Created for Google's I/O 2025 developer event. AI film reaches a prestigious traditional film festival.

AIFF 2025 — Lincoln Center with IMAX

Runway

The third Runway AI Film Festival, screened at Lincoln Center in partnership with IMAX. Over 6,000 submissions judged by Gaspar Noé, Harmony Korine, and Jane Rosenthal. 'Total Pixel Space' by Jacob Adler wins Grand Prix. 'JAILBIRD' by Andrew Salter takes Gold. 'ONE' by Ricardo Villavicencio & Edward Saatchi earns Silver. 'Distance Between Two Points Of Me' by Illya Dutsyk, Bogdan Nesvit & Anatolii Kasianov receives Honoree. The remaining finalists, 'More Tears Than Harm' (Herinarivo Rakotomanana), 'Fragments Of Nowhere' (Vallée Duhamel), 'RŌHKI - A Million Trillion Pathways' (Hachi and IO), '6000 Lies' (Simon Rieth), 'Editorial' (Riccardo Fusetti), and 'Emergence' (Maddie Hong), represent the global breadth of AI filmmaking. The jump from 300 submissions in 2023 to 6,000+ in 2025 tells the whole story.

Total Pixel Space

Jacob Adler

JAILBIRD

Andrew Salter

ONE

Ricardo Villavicencio & Edward Saatchi

Distance Between Two Points Of Me

Illya Dutsyk, Bogdan Nesvit & Anatolii Kasianov

More Tears Than Harm

Herinarivo Rakotomanana

Fragments Of Nowhere

Vallée Duhamel

RŌHKI - A Million Trillion Pathways

Hachi and IO

6000 Lies

Simon Rieth

Editorial

Riccardo Fusetti

Emergence

Maddie Hong

Exactly How I Remember It

Holden Boyles

∞

Kartikye Kashyap

Signal

Ray Jaffer

TO THE VOID

YZA Voku

There is No Monster

Jaemin Yoo

shower thoughts in the abyss

Midday Visual House

we are infinite

Thomas Frenk, Eduardo Maluf & Yan Dotta

Prompted

Ron Baranov

Ausencia

Javier De La Chica & Guillermo Miranda

Elevate

Jaehong An & Haeyun Shin

Steve Against the World

Rich Klein

(this is one of my animated short films)

This one’s different — my first real attempt at an animated comedy. Steve is a sarcastic, sophisticated cat with big opinions and a refined palate. He drinks lattes, avoids litter boxes, and judges other cats. I wanted to see if generative AI could sustain a recurring character across episodes. Turns out, it can.

Sora 2

OpenAI

OpenAI's second attempt, released to select users in the US and Canada. Improved quality and longer outputs, but the competitive landscape has shifted dramatically since the original preview. Sora 2 is a solid tool that arrives in a crowded market. The window of Sora dominance has passed, but the model finds its audience among creators already embedded in the OpenAI ecosystem.

Luma Ray3

Luma Labs

The world's first 'reasoning' video model. More than 2x the size of Ray2, it generates native 16-bit HDR video in ACES EXR format, bringing AI output directly into professional color grading pipelines. For creators working in professional post-production, this is a milestone: AI-generated footage that slots into existing studio workflows without quality compromises. The HDR output means AI video can finally sit alongside camera footage without looking out of place.

DRIFT SPLIT

The Butcher's Brain

A stylish, high-energy AI short blending drifting cars, split-screen editing, and kinetic visuals. The Butcher's Brain combines multiple video models — Veo, Kling, and Wan — with ElevenLabs for audio, showcasing the multi-model workflow that became standard practice in late 2025: pick the best tool for each shot rather than committing to a single pipeline.

The BEST

Dale Williams (The Reel Robot)

An AI short that Williams described as 'probably the best thing I've ever done.' Created during the late 2025 period when more advanced AI video tools were available. Williams' work has been exhibited internationally and he has spoken at events including Pacific Film as a featured AI filmmaker.

Veo 3.1

Google DeepMind

Enhanced audio generation, improved realism, and powerful new editing features via Google Flow. Native 1080p HD with videos up to 60 seconds. The Flow integration is transformative: it creates a complete production environment around Veo, with editing, trimming, and refinement tools that turn raw generations into finished shots. The gap between 'AI generated clip' and 'production-ready shot' narrows significantly.

Eyes On You

Rich Klein

(this is one of my animated short films)

My experiment in psychological horror with Veo 3 (Twighlight Zone style). A man visits a local theater for an ordinary movie night, only to discover the eyes on screen might not be acting. As he returns home, reality begins to blur.

KYRA

MetaPuppet

A sci-fi AI short from MetaPuppet, one of the prolific creators in the AI filmmaking community. KYRA showcases the cinematic quality achievable with late-2025 generative video tools — polished visuals, coherent characters, and atmospheric worldbuilding from a solo creator.

Hopeless Steve

Framer

A character who fails at everything and just can't turn his life around. Hopeless Steve became the breakout character from Framer's Cartoon Hero workflow — a lovably pathetic everyman whose animated misadventures proved that AI-generated cartoons could carry real comedic timing and emotional resonance. It also demonstrated that consistent animated characters with personality could be created using generative AI.

THE LAST PENCIL

The Butcher's Brain

A short film exploring what happens when the last traditional artist confronts a world that has moved on. The Butcher's Brain leans into Google's ecosystem — Veo 3 for video, Flow for editing, Gemini for planning — plus ElevenLabs for voice and Suno for music. A full AI production pipeline from a single creator, and a thematic mirror to the tool debate itself.

Runway Gen-4.5

Runway

Runway's most advanced model delivers unprecedented visual fidelity and creative control. The culmination of the Gen-1 through Gen-4.5 evolution. For creators who have grown with Runway since Gen-1, this release represents how far the technology has come: from simple style transfer to photorealistic video generation with character consistency, all within three years.

The Cleaner II - Swan Song

Dave Clark

The sequel to 'The Cleaner,' continuing the cinematic hitman narrative. Clark returns to the character and world he established in the first film, building a longer and more complex story. The fact that an AI filmmaker is building sequels and recurring characters marks a maturation of the medium from one-off experiments to serialized storytelling.

On This Day... 1776

Darren Aronofsky / Primordial Soup

The Oscar-nominated director of Requiem for a Dream and Black Swan releases an AI-generated animated series on TIME's YouTube, chronicling the American Revolution on its 250th anniversary. Made with Google DeepMind. SAG-AFTRA voice cast and original score. Each episode drops on the exact anniversary of the historical event it depicts. The reception is brutal: viewers and filmmakers call it 'AI slop.' Significant not for quality but for what it represents — a major Hollywood director founding an AI studio (Primordial Soup) and going all-in on AI animation.

Seedance 2.0

ByteDance

ByteDance's unified multimodal architecture accepts text, image, audio, and video as inputs. Up to 15-second clips at 2K resolution with extreme character consistency and audio-visual beat matching. For creators, the multimodal input is the breakthrough: feed the model a reference image, a voice clip, and a text description simultaneously, and it synthesizes all three into coherent video. Then copyright disputes from major studios pause the global rollout, raising questions about the training data behind the magic.

Kling 3.0

Kuaishou

Unified omni-modal architecture spanning video, image, and beyond. From Kling 1.0 in June 2024 to 3.0 in February 2026, Kuaishou shipped 9 major versions in 20 months, the fastest model evolution in AI video history. For creators, Kling's trajectory proves that the best model today will be obsolete in months. The pace of improvement rewards creators who build adaptable workflows rather than betting on any single tool.

Apex

The Dor Brothers

Marketed as a '$200M movie made in 24 hours with AI.' A nearly 3-minute sci-fi short that racks up 50M+ views across platforms. Featured on Joe Rogan. Made with Seedance 2.0. Divisive reception: praised for visuals, criticized for prioritizing spectacle over story. The Berlin-based brothers become the most-viewed AI filmmakers in the world.

Overgrown

Henry Daubrez

A meditation on chronic resilience and the beauty of survival. Made with Google Flow and other tools during Daubrez's residency at Google Labs. In consideration for 2026 Tribeca Festival. One of the longest and most personal AI-generated films, pushing the format toward true short film territory.

Feral - Concept Trailer

Dale Williams (The Reel Robot)

A concept trailer for a new project in Williams' signature anime-influenced style, showcasing the capabilities of early 2026 AI video tools. Williams has stated the industry is 'less than a year out from commercially viable AI films,' and concept trailers like this represent steps toward that goal.

Junkyard King ep.0

Henry Daubrez

An animated series pilot inspired by Arthurian legends in an 80s sci-fi setting. Made with Seedance 2.0, Google Flow, Gemini, Adobe Premiere/AE, ElevenLabs, and Suno. ~4 weeks of work, ~$1,000 in Seedance credits. Pioneered an 'omnireference' workflow. The future of serialized AI animation.

Costa Verde

Leo Cannone

A nostalgic masterpiece about childhood summers. Sweeps the AI International Film Festival March 2026: Best AI Film (Jury), Best Film (Audience), Most Surprising (Audience), Best Use of AI (Audience). Four awards for a single film. France-based Cannone proves AI film can be deeply emotional.

Dragon Blue

Theoretically Media (Tim Simmons)

A hyper-stylized action thriller about vengeance and katanas. Every shot generated with Seedance 2.0. Created by Tim Simmons of Theoretically Media, one of the most prominent AI filmmaking voices on YouTube and a former Hollywood insider (Sony Animation). Simmons has been decoding AI tools for creators since 2022, and Dragon Blue shows what happens when deep technical knowledge meets cinematic ambition.