1 film
2024
Waymark
Survivors in a frozen post-apocalyptic world follow a mysterious signal up a mountain in Antarctica. The complete 23-minute cut, merging Parts One and Two, premiered September 15, 2024 at the Creator RenAIssance Programme in Singapore — but the film's real significance is that its first half is a fossil of a moment that lasted about a year. Part One went out in June 2023 as a 12-minute short revealed exclusively through MIT Technology Review, and it was made without a video model, because there wasn't one worth using. Director Josh Rubin fed his script to DALL-E 2 and generated every single shot as a still, then animated those stills with D-ID — a tool that makes eyes blink and lips move. That's the whole pipeline. Waymark's Stephen Parker described the turn that made it work as giving up: they stopped fighting for photographic accuracy and started leaning into the weirdness DALL-E gave them. Rubin was blunt about the limits, saying it was a struggle to get emotional responses out of the faces. By the time Part Two was made, the tools had changed underneath the project, and the film wears that: Part One is uncanny and otherworldly, Part Two turns photorealistic. JeffSynthesized joined for the second half to work on character and landscape continuity. Watching them back to back is an unusually clean before-and-after of the gap between prompting stills into motion and generating motion outright.