AIFF, the AI Film Festival, showcases innovative video, as industry set to pounce

In just three short years, AI has gone from being vilified in Hollywood to having its own AI film festival. It’s not quite Cannes yet, but look at the jury, and you’ll find an important list of industry insiders and VFX veterans.

6,000 submissions
Run by Runway, an ai art company focusing on film shorts, and offering a $15,000 grand prize, it showcases independent creators using AI in their projects, a far cry from the accusations of AI stealing creative jobs.

— Three years ago, this was such a crazy idea, Runway CEO Cristóbal Valenzuela told the crowd. — Today, millions of people are making billions of videos using tools we only dreamed of, writes the Independent

The festival started up fairly quickly during the early AI boom in 2023, but only got about 300 submissions. This year, Valenzuela said, it netted about 6,000 submissions.

We have a winner!
Getting the grand prize at the gala last night was Jacob Adler’s «Total Pixel Space», a nine minute short which you can watch from the link. It consists of «a stunning series of images, ranging from the familiar, to those that completely bend reality», AP writes.

These films aren’t «easy» to create, often demanding fusing lots of shorter videos together, each one created by complex, lengthy prompts and instructions. They are the results of hours, days and weeks of meticulous work by the artist.

The problem with AI in movies
While the industry celebrates the creative potential of AI, it’s worth noting that many who once filled these roles — voice actors, background artists, even junior VFX teams — have seen their careers quietly vanish.

Festivals like AIFF showcase the upside, but the cost has already been paid by those who never got a seat at the table.

Industry insiders like James Cameron see upside in the technology to reduce costs of VFX-heavy blockbusters by as much as fifty per cent, while Netflix CEO Ted Sarandos says it can make movies better by democratizing VFX tools.

While AI was still in its infancy, actors and writers saw the dangers of the technology and went on strike in May, 2023 to get protections in contracts, banning the use of digital twins and the use of «likeness» of actors in future films.

AI Visual effects have indeed crept into blockbusters, mostly with de-aging sequences of popular, aging actors, but these are early days yet and the technology is still young — but growing at a healthy clip, and festivals like this showcase what is possible with the technology.

You can catch up on a few of the contestants on Youtube.

Read more: The festivals home page, AIFF, the Associated Press, the Independent.