AI and the future of movies

To address these industry concerns, the SIFF launched AI Backlot, a pioneering initiative pairing AI creators with filmmakers to collaborate on short films. The new project was "not just a simple AI short video contest, nor is it a creative challenge", said Tong Ying, deputy director of the Shanghai International Film & TV Festival Center. Rather, the center wanted to hold a blended experiment, observe the process and shed light on the possibilities of AI use in future moviemaking.

"We focused not only on the final work, but also on everything that happened during the creation of an AI film: how ideas are generated, how tasks are divided, how traditional experiences such as directing, scriptwriting, and cinematography are incorporated into the new creative process, and what problems still require human judgment and experience to solve."

The initiative received about 500 applications from seven countries and regions. After the initial selection, 22 outstanding creators made it to the finals. In Shanghai, following presentations and evaluations, four teams, each consisting of a filmmaker and an AI creator, participated in a monthlong collaborative film creation.

The fruits of their joint work — a five-minute short film by each team — were released during the 28th SIFF, and the AI Backlot workshop was open to the public from June 14 to 15, when the creators showed the public their working methods, processes and ideas.

The four teams "each explored a long way in their distinctive direction", Tong said.

The team Bicycle Kids, consisting of Chinese filmmaker Hou Zuxin and German AI creator Mark Wachholz, won the Honor for Industrial Exploration with their creation of a philosophical story about a butterfly's metamorphosis.

AI has been a powerful tool, helping the team create images for abstract and complex ideas — images that people of different cultural backgrounds can connect to and resonate with, Wachholz told China Daily after the premiere. A veteran of AI, Wachholz welcomes the model's uncontrollable outputs, viewing them as creative inspiration rather than enforcing strict directorial control.

In one scene, he wanted to create a disturbing and intense clip of the caterpillar turning into the butterfly. "We used the prompt, something like a 'horror documentary'," he said. By feeding these two words to AI, they managed to arrive at something in between and achieve the visual effects they were searching for. "This is a new kind of language, or a new kind of thinking, how to talk to these AI models," Wachholz said.

Having taken part in AI video contests all over the world, Wachholz said there are powerful video models in the United States and in China, but Europe doesn't yet have them.

Currently, AI models are developing at such a rapid pace that "it is a horse race … one may be better for two weeks, until another competitor comes up", he said. "But right now, at this point in time, the Chinese video models are better, and everyone knows this."

He has found that in China, there seems to be "a deliberate setup to have multiple competitors" in the sector. "You have Kling, MiniMax, and Seedance (ByteDance's latest AI video generation model), and Alibaba has also jumped into the race. This creates pressure to be even better and better."