# Generating Photorealistic Video with AI

- Date: 2019
- Type: film
- Credit: Jon Warlick
- Genre: Experimental
- Artists: [Jon Warlick](https://aifilmhistory.org/artist/jon-warlick)
- Made with: NVIDIA GauGAN
- Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b8DGrB7th4w
- URL: https://aifilmhistory.org/entry/gaugan-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.

Links:
- Hackaday: https://hackaday.com/2020/10/17/attemping-to-generate-photorealistic-video-with-neural-networks/
- NVIDIA GauGAN Blog: https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/gaugan-photorealistic-landscapes-nvidia-research/
- Orange — Alejandro Matamala Ortiz's SPADE experiment, same year: /entry/orange-matamala/

---
Source: https://aifilmhistory.org/entry/gaugan-warlick
Era: 2015-2021 · Before the Dawn
Last updated: 2026-09-23