Inside Cinema Synthetica: The 48 Hour AI Filmmaking Competition

Last Thursday was the 2nd AI on the Lot event, which culminated in the premiere of the three AI shorts from the Cinema Synethica 48-hour filmmaking competition.

9 filmmakers, each randomly assigned to 3 teams of 3, with (a bit less than) 48 hours to create a 2 minute film off the same dialogue sequence. 

We were on the ground, filming every prompt, diffusion, and action, getting a behind the scenes look at how some of the leading creatives are using the latest tools to reshape what’s possible with filmmaking.

The One-Liner: AI filmmaking isn’t an all or nothing endeavor. Every single team used live action filming in some form, using AI tools to level up the production.

Here’s a quick rundown of the three teams and videos.

Team Cyber-Kubrick

• Nem Perez

• Jagger Waters

• Adriana Vecchioli

Cyber-Kubrick went with a Zombie rom-com theme, or Zom-Com. They relied on the most live action filmmaking - shooting about 90% of the film as live action and then transforming the style using Kaiber and LensGo.

Team Neo-Spielberg

• Matt Wenhardt

• Jonathan Muller

• Reza Safai

Neo-Spielberg created a father/son story spanning different periods of human history. They scanned one of their faces to create a model to generate characters that had the same look. They also used live action filming to replace faces in AI generated videos, again to attempt consistent looking characters.

Team Blade-Ridley

• Kiri Margaros

• D. Ryan Reeb

• Jared Cotton

Blade-Ridley went with a Black Mirror-esque AI girlfriend story. They generated and composited a lot of separate images and generations, to get the right facial expressions and lip sync for each character. They also used NeRFs to scan one of them at an actual cemetery and create 3D camera moves in the video.

We created mini-docs about each team and their process - we’ll let you know when those (and the films) are online.

Also congrats to Cyber-Kubrick for winning the competition.