Indie Film's AI Revolution: Fast, Cheap, and Lonely?

A Filipino man traverses the familiar grounds of his childhood home in rural Hawai’i, his footsteps rustling softly through the grass. The air is filled with the tropical chorus of chirping birds as he approaches a small shrine nestled at the base of a starfruit tree. He kneels, his gaze drawn to a framed black-and-white photograph of a woman, her hair styled in a distinctive 1950s side part.

Suddenly, a powerful gust of wind sweeps through the tree’s branches, scattering the shrine’s contents. The man instinctively recoils, stumbles over an exposed root, and strikes his head. Upon regaining consciousness, he finds himself in a shadowy, mist-shrouded forest, a woman in a clay mask looming over him, a sword glinting in her hand.

“Who are you who dares to sleep under the sacred tree?” she demands in Ilocano, a Filipino dialect spoken in Hawai’i, holding the sword menacingly at his throat. He responds that he is lost and attempts to flee. She pursues, her movements a disorienting blend of running and floating through the air. He falls once more. She advances, sword held high, until he hurls a rock, shattering her clay mask and revealing half of her face.

This dramatic sequence marks the opening of “Murmuray,” a short film crafted by independent filmmaker Brad Tangonan. The film’s aesthetic, from its detailed nature shots to its ethereal, desaturated highlights, bore a striking resemblance to his previous cinematic endeavors.

The sole distinguishing factor was its method of creation: it was made using artificial intelligence.

Tangonan was one of ten filmmakers invited to participate in Google Flow Sessions, an intensive five-week program that granted creatives access to Google’s advanced suite of AI tools, including Gemini, the image generator Nano Banana Pro, and the film generator Veo, to produce their short films.

Each film explored a unique scope. Hal Watmough’s “You’ve Been Here Before” playfully combined hyperrealistic visuals with cartoonish stylization to highlight the significance of a morning routine. In contrast, Tabitha Swanson’s “The Antidote to Fear is Curiosity” presented a more abstract, philosophical dialogue concerning humanity’s relationship with AI and itself.

These short films, which premiered at Soho House New York late last year, transcended the label of mere "AI slop." Every independent filmmaker interviewed confirmed that, in their specific cases, AI had been instrumental in enabling them to realize stories that would have otherwise been unattainable due to budget or time constraints.

“I see all of these tools, whether it be a camera you can pick up or generative AI, as ways for an artist to express what they have in their mind,” Tangonan remarked after the screenings.

This assertion—that AI is simply another instrument for creators—is clearly the message Google aims to emphasize. And Google is not mistaken; as video generation technologies continue to advance, AI will undeniably become an increasingly integral part of a creator’s toolkit.

By 2025, companies such as Google, Runway, OpenAI, Kling, Luma AI, and Higgsfield had significantly surpassed the "uncanny, prompt-based novelties" of the preceding year. The AI video industry, bolstered by billions in venture capital, is now transitioning from the prototype phase into full post-production capabilities.

Yet, this era of AI proliferation, while offering tools to “democratize access” to the film industry, simultaneously poses a threat to jobs and creativity, risking their submergence under an overwhelming tide of low-effort content. The existential implications have created a divide among creatives: those who engage with AI risk being perceived as complicit, while those who refuse risk becoming obsolete.

The pertinent question is not whether these tools belong in the toolkit—they are undeniably arriving, irrespective of preference. Rather, it is: what form of filmmaking will endure when the industry prioritizes speed and scale over artistic quality? And what transpires when individual artists leverage these same tools to craft something genuinely meaningful?

The arguments against AI in filmmaking are numerous, voiced by some of the most prominent figures in the industry.

Filmmaker Guillermo del Toro declared last October that he would rather die than employ generative AI for a film. James Cameron stated in a recent CBS interview that the concept of generating actors and emotions through prompts is “horrifying,” and that generative AI is only capable of producing a “blended average of everything that’s ever been done by humans before.”

Werner Herzog asserted that the films he has witnessed created by AI “have no soul.” He elaborated, “The common denominator, and nothing beyond this common denominator, can be found in these fabrications.”

Cameron and Herzog’s central thesis suggests that AI is usurping the creative helm from human hands and is inherently incapable of authentically representing individual lived experiences.

“It’s very easy to be angry with AI as a concept in the machine, but it’s harder to be angry with someone that’s made something personal,” Watmough conveyed to TechCrunch.

Tangonan, who describes “Murmuray” as a “family story,” echoes this sentiment.

“AI is a facilitator,” Tangonan explained. “I’m still making all the creative decisions. When people see ‘AI slop’ online, it’s a lot of lowest common denominator stuff. And, yeah, if you hand over the keys to AI, that’s what you’re going to get. But if you have a voice and a creative perspective and a style, then you’re going to get something different.”

Utilizing AI in filmmaking extends beyond merely prompting a film into existence. Tangonan, for instance, authored the script for “Murmuray” without AI and meticulously gathered visual references for a shot list. He then fed this curated content into Nano Banana Pro to generate images that aligned with his distinct style, serving as the foundational elements for video generation.

Filmmaker Keenan MacWilliam likewise went to great lengths to ensure her short film “Mimesis,” a fictional guided meditation, was a “true extension of [her] visual language, rather than a ‘blender’ of other artists’ work.”

MacWilliam penned the script and recorded her own voice for the mock meditation, which struck a balance between relaxation and humor. On screen, against a dark, watery backdrop, psychedelic imagery of flowers and plants seamlessly blended, transforming into smoke, then morphing into seahorses that swam gracefully away.

These captivating images originated from MacWilliam’s personal collection of scanned flora and fauna—she is known to travel with her scanner wherever she goes.

“I spent a lot of time learning how to make apps that were built with my own dataset, and then used those as reference points,” MacWilliam told TechCrunch, further noting her collaboration with her long-time composer and sound designer on the film. “I made a choice to avoid using AI for anything that I could have shot with a camera or ask my collaborators to animate. My goal was to unlock new forms of expression for my established themes and style, not to replace the roles of the people who I like to work with.”

This particular aspiration—to employ AI only when human collaboration was unfeasible, or when the unique, often surreal, nature of AI generations directly served the narrative—was a recurring theme among the filmmakers interviewed at the Google Flow event.

For example, Sander van Bellegem’s “Melongray” explored the accelerated pace of life through mesmerizing, trippy visualizations. In one notable shot, a salamander morphs into a balloon. This was not part of his initial storyline but was inspired by how AI allowed him to transcend the conventional boundaries of both his imagination and physics.

Contemporary film studio budgets are currently under severe strain, battered by escalating production costs, the industry’s strategic pivot to streaming, and the risk-averse tendencies of corporate consolidation. Consequently, significant expenditures are reserved for reliably profitable ventures (e.g., the seemingly endless Marvel installments), while original mid-budget films have largely become a rarity.

Introducing AI into this equation risks intensifying the scarcity mindset within studios to a point where they might seek to replace anything deemed replaceable—actors, sets, lighting—potentially sacrificing art and quality. However, the efficiencies that AI offers could also lower barriers and empower film studios to produce more original content.

Even Cameron acknowledged in his CBS interview that generative AI could reduce VFX costs, potentially paving the way for more imaginative science fiction and fantasy films—genres that are typically expensive and often reserved for established intellectual properties like “Avatar.”

The scene in “Murmuray” depicting the woman flying through the forest, according to Tangonan, would have necessitated costly visual effects or extremely complex on-set rigging, both beyond the budget of a short film. AI made it achievable.

Yet, even filmmakers who recognize the advantages of efficiency also grasp the inherent risks to artistic expression.

“I think efficiency in general is not the best friend of creativity,” MacWilliam stated.

For independent filmmakers, the availability of such powerful tools presents both a boon and a challenge. While it undoubtedly “democratizes access,” it also frequently necessitates working in isolation. The more one can accomplish independently, the less compelling the need for collaboration becomes.

“I know I’m a one man band, and I just made all this by myself…but that should never be the way that anyone tells a story or makes a film,” Watmough conveyed to TechCrunch, mentioning that an actor friend contributed the voice for his short. “It should be a collaborative process because the more people that are involved, the more accessible it is by everyone and the more it reaches and connects with people.”

Directors typically make creative decisions, but not all of them. The filmmakers interviewed found themselves unexpectedly assuming roles like set designer, lighting director, and costumer—positions demanding expertise they did not possess. This proved frustrating and draining, diverting their focus from the creative work they genuinely cared about, and unsettling as they contemplated how swiftly an entire industry ecosystem could be disrupted.

The filmmakers also expressed a preference against replacing actors with AI, though some conceded that AI-generated actors are an inevitability for smaller studios. The tools already exist, and are continually improving, to generate actors, their emotional expressions, and their movements. AI video startups like Luma AI, which secured a $900 million Series C funding round last November, are even developing technology that allows a single actor’s performance to be captured once, then utilized by AI to alter the character, costume, and setting.

“In an ideal world, I would work with real actors and some cinematographer and department heads and the full crew to make something amazing and use AI and complement that to be able to do things that we can’t do on set, whether for budgetary or time reasons,” Tangonan articulated.

“I think making any creative work that uses new technology always requires a certain kind of gut check and a willingness to have conversations around the work,” Swanson commented.

“These are tools,” she added. “How are you going to use the tool? Are you going to be ethical about it? Are you going to ask questions? Are you going to be transparent and share knowledge?”

However, many do not perceive AI tools as neutral. Beyond the issue of labor displacement, significant copyright concerns persist. AI video generation startup Runway has reportedly scraped thousands of hours of YouTube videos and copyrighted studio content, while others—including Google, OpenAI, and Luma AI—have faced scrutiny regarding similar practices or training on copyrighted films and stock footage without explicit permission. (Though some tools, like Moonvalley’s Marey, are trained exclusively on openly licensed data). Furthermore, there are alarming environmental implications; some estimates suggest that generating mere seconds of AI video can consume as much electricity as hours of streaming content.

Unsurprisingly, many of the filmmakers interviewed disclosed facing stigma for their experimentation with AI.

“Whenever I do post things online, a lot of my filmmaking colleagues have a very knee jerk reaction to it that we should all hold the line and not use any of these tools,” Tangonan shared. “I just don’t agree with that.”

If filmmakers remain hesitant to engage in discussions about how AI can and should be employed, and what its ethical boundaries are, then the trajectory of this conversation risks being dictated for them. It would not be shaped by artists striving for responsible use, but by efficiency-obsessed studios prioritizing profit margins over artistic integrity.

“The film industry is floundering because people aren’t innovating and everything costs too much. We need tools like this for it to survive,” Watmough asserted. “I think it’s essential that people engage with it because if we don’t, then it’s going to become something we don’t recognize, and that’s not sustainable.”