The use of artificial intelligence (AI) in filmmaking has various benefits and challenges, as German director Mario Clement and producer/creative executive Arne Totz experienced themselves, when they applied OpenAI to their short-film project I Thought of You Again (watch it here). They offered an insight into their work with AI at the Explorer Impuls event on 9 July, which was presented by the Filmfest Hamburg Industry Days in collaboration with the MOIN Film Fund Hamburg Schleswig-Holstein.

“We are not ambassadors for artificial intelligence,” underlined the filmmakers, who produced I Thought of You Again for the opening event of the OpenAI office in Germany. “We look at this whole process with very mixed feelings,” said Clement, who has mainly directed adverts and music videos. He started to make short films when a major publishing house offered him the position of creative director. “They wanted to find out what’s possible with artificial intelligence when it comes to filmmaking, but also when it comes to writing IP and creating images.”

One of the challenges was to create faces that would show emotional reactions. “Many AI films have a lack of humanity,” stressed the filmmaker. Therefore, he prepared a mood board and added references so that the AI could learn from that. “When you work with AI, you have to write prompts, which can be a sentence or can be very descriptive,” explained Clement. “You’re not alone with your ideas any more; something new might appear.” While some things actually work, a lot of them don’t. “AI changes the creative workflow because it’s like an editorial process that starts almost in post-production.”

AI can be frustrating for a director who is a control freak because it’s not possible to control every aspect. It could be compared to a slot machine because AI may create the exact image you wanted or may deliver a number of different versions. “Learning from this experience meant really embracing the creative chaos that AI generates and finding one’s own language,” said Totz, who leads business development at Munich-based production company 27KM. “I really focused on looking at all AI tools and seeing how we could implement them on the business side.”

The biggest milestones in terms of recent developments are continuity and lip syncing. One game changer is Google’s new Veo 3 toolset, which was launched three days before the premiere of I Thought of You Again. Until recently, AI films always had voice-over or the phrases had to be swapped in post-production. “It was never about real lip-sync audio matched up with the character,” underlined Totz. “This will definitely accelerate AI and make filmmaking a lot faster.” Moreover, character consistency was not a given, so longer stories were hard to tell. “In two years, it might be very hard to distinguish between what’s real and what’s not,” the producer pointed out.

Thanks to improvements to AI tools and techniques, it might be possible to produce feature films of a high quality in the next few years. “It is not a one-click solution,” emphasised Totz. “That is something that all of our clients notice because you still need a lot of specialists. For the films that we have made so far with AI, there were still ten people involved over a few weeks.”

As a follow-up to the Explorer Impuls series, Clement and Totz will be among the speakers at the Explorer Konferenz, which will take place on 2 October 2025 as part of the Filmfest Hamburg Industry Days.