ChatGPT
Perplexity
Claude
Gemini
Brad Tangonan's short film "Murmuray" opens with a man walking through his childhood backyard in rural Hawaii, and a couple of minutes in, a woman in a clay mask is chasing him through a misty forest, alternating between running and floating through the air. Ese plano aéreo es justo el tipo de cosa que un cortometraje independiente normalmente no puede permitirse: trabajo real de rigging o efectos visuales para unos segundos en pantalla, con un precio que Tangonan no podía permitirse. Aun así consiguió la toma, usando Veo de Google y Nano Banana Pro, as part of a five-week cohort called Google Flow Sessions that gave ten independent filmmakers access to the company's AI video tools.
Tangonan wasn't alone in that room. Hal Watmough made a short about the quiet importance of a morning routine. Keenan MacWilliam built a fictional guided meditation called "Mimesis" out of her own scanned collection of flowers and fish. Sander van Bellegem let a salamander turn into a balloon mid-shot in "Melongray," because the strangeness of the generation suited what the film was already trying to say about time speeding up. TechCrunch's Rebecca Bellan watched all ten films screen at Soho House New York and wrote that none of them felt like AI slop, y todos los cineastas con los que habló dijeron alguna versión de lo mismo: la IA les permitió contar una historia que, de otro modo, no habrían tenido el presupuesto ni el tiempo para hacer.
That's the actual shift; it isn't that rough, unfinished-feeling work is now acceptable everywhere. Es que esa categoría concreta de trabajo, personal y de pequeño alcance, ahora tiene por fin una forma de existir. Filmmaker Kévin Mendiboure spent roughly ten years unable to make Catacombs, a story he'd considered unmakeable by any conventional route, until this year, when he generated 3,229 AI shots to finish it. The idea hadn't gotten any easier to shoot the old way. What changed is that he ya no needed a shoot at all.
Taste didn't stop mattering just because the tools got easier, and the filmmakers making this work are the ones most insistent on that point. "AI is a facilitator," Tangonan told Bellan. "I'm still making all the creative decisions." Asked about the flood of generic AI content elsewhere online, he was blunt: if you have a voice and a creative perspective and a style, "you're going to get something different." MacWilliam drew her own line even more deliberately on "Mimesis," avoiding AI for anything she could have shot herself or handed to a longtime collaborator, and building every image from her own scanned material rather than a general model, because her goal was to unlock new expression within her established style, "not to replace the roles of the people who I like to work with." The tool did the executing. El criterio sobre dónde usarlo y dónde no siguió siendo completamente humano.
The loudest voices in film aren't converts. Guillermo del Toro has said he would rather die than use generative AI to make a film, and James Cameron isn't far behind him, calling the idea of generating actors and emotions from a prompt «horripilante» and arguing that generative models can only produce a blended average of everything already made. Werner Herzog put it more bluntly still: the AI-made films he's seen, he's said, «no tienen alma». No son posturas descabelladas, y el contenido basura al que reaccionan es real. Pon esas mismas herramientas en manos de alguien sin una visión detrás y obtendrás justo ese resultado del mínimo común denominador que describen.
Where that line actually falls became clear this February, when an AI-animated short called "Thanksgiving Day," made by Igor Alferov, won a festival prize that included a national theatrical pre-show run through Screenvision Media, the company that supplies pre-trailer advertising to chains including AMC. Once the announcement spread, the backlash moved fast enough that AMC se retiró and Screenvision confirmed to The Hollywood Reporter que AMC nunca había aprobado la iniciativa desde el principio. Las mismas herramientas de base que permitieron a diez cineastas terminar algo personal en Soho House quedaron fuera de un multicine unos meses después. La diferencia no era la tecnología. Era el room: a small screening built for people who came to watch experiments succeed or fail is not the same room as a theater full of people who paid for a trailer and got a fight about AI instead.
Por eso también este año está creciendo un circuito de festivales propio para el cortometraje asistido por IA, en lugar de integrarse en el existente, desde El cuarto festival anual de IA de Runway a AIFFI, which held its first edition in Honduras this April built specifically around work made with AI as part of its creative process. These aren't attempts to sneak into rooms built for something else. They're new rooms.
Nada de esto resuelve el debate más amplio sobre qué debería permitirse que la IA reemplace en el cine, y no debería resolverlo un pequeño grupo de cortometrajes. Pero lo que cambió concretamente para Tangonan, MacWilliam y Mendiboure es algo más limitado que ese debate y mucho más concreto: cada uno de ellos tenía una historia que no encontró salida durante años, a veces durante una década, y ahora la tiene somewhere to go. Whatever comes next for AI in film, cheaper effects, better tools, louder debates, that particular door doesn't close again. Once an idea has a way out of your head, you stop needing permission to find out if it was any good.