5 films
2023
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.
A short, AI-assisted film depicting a British gangster — and one of the first works to demonstrate real scene blocking and dialogue potential in AI filmmaking. Before this, AI shorts mostly leaned on montage, voiceover, or music to hide the medium's weaknesses. Uncanny Harry showed you could stage a conversation, hold on a character's face, and let an AI-generated performance carry a beat.
2026
Ryan Phillips built this scene specifically to test the thing that changes how a scene can be written: Seedance 2.5 generates 30-second shots and extends them near-seamlessly — with a little post blending — into far longer sequences. The result runs a full minute, and length is the whole point. Every generative model before this one imposed a five-to-ten-second grammar on its users, which is why so much AI film looks like a trailer: cut, cut, cut, because the tool couldn't hold a shot long enough to let anything develop. A thirty-second take is a different instrument. You can let a beat land, hold on a face after the line instead of cutting away from it, stage a scene in real time and let the pacing come from the performance rather than the edit. Phillips calls it the best synthetic performance he's gotten out of a video model — the same claim Tim Simmons made for Seedance 2.5 a day earlier, from a very different kind of scene. Coming from a BAFTA-nominated director with two decades of television behind him, the interesting part isn't that the shots are longer; it's that duration finally stopped dictating the cutting rhythm.