MIT Media Lab Hosts Third Annual AI Filmmaking Hackathon
Jiajian Min: “This hackathon is a sandbox for these ideas — it’s where prototypes become blueprints for the industry”
photo provided by Angel Wang
On Feb. 15, the MIT Media Lab hosted over 600 participants from across the world for MIT’s AI Filmmaking Hackathon. The hackathon aimed to foster an appreciation for the union of arts and technology, allowing teams to collaborate and mesh their expertise into an AI film.
“Inspired by MIT’s legacy of innovation and the rapid evolution of AI tools in creative industries, we wanted to create a space where technologists, filmmakers, and thinkers could collaborate,” said Jiajian Min, the committee chair of the hackathon and a winner of the first AI for Filmmaking Hackathon.
The theme for this year’s event was “Dance in Life.” One of the winning films, Clown, explored the titular clown’s elegant dance performance as she spirals into an identity crisis, pondering if she controls her art or if her art controls her. In another standout film, Metanoia, a protagonist clings to the authenticity of her home to escape the AI-dominated world around her. As the digital realm gradually forces itself into her home, she fights for her freedom through a soulful dance that defies the rigid mechanized world.
Yet another film, For Pixi, was developed by a team of undergraduate students from New York University. The film follows a character named Zuck as they venture out to get a new toy for their puppy Pixi in a world that moves in a perfect rhythm, down to seemingly choreographed steps, conversations, and gestures.
“Stepping outside is daunting [for Zuck], and social interactions feel like a struggle,” Leah Jiaxin Yu, the visual designer for For Pixi, said. “This ties into [the theme of] ‘Dance in Life’ by contrasting effortless societal rhythms with the challenge of finding one’s own pace, turning Zuck’s journey into a dance of resilience and self-acceptance.”
While developing the film, the team faced technical setbacks due to the fickle nature of applying AI for creative purposes. “One challenge we faced was getting the AI to understand real-world physics. For example, when it was generating an image of a person walking towards the camera, the AI sometimes struggled with anatomical accuracy. In one case, the person was depicted walking on one leg because the AI couldn't generate the other leg properly. To address this, we had to explicitly prompt it to ‘follow real-world physics’ in each text prompt,” Yu said. “While refining ideas was time-consuming, the unpredictable outcomes were also exciting, as they often sparked new creative possibilities and approaches.”
The team — which comprised Nate Zucker, Leah Jiaxin Yu, Khushi Hora, and Carolina Herrera — advanced to the Cinequest Film Festival along with seven other teams at the hackathon, including the makers of Clown (Shanshan Jiang and Jessy Cheung) and Eternal Dance (Ziwei Chi). The Cinequest Film Festival is an annual event held in Silicon Valley to celebrate independent films and technological innovation, attended by over 300,000 creators. The highest honor is the Maverick Award, which recognizes films that leave a lasting impact on the vision of cinema.
As AI films reach global stages, AI enthusiasts and artists raise questions about the technology’s role in creative expression. Can AI compete with human storytelling, or does it risk sacrificing artistic expression? While AI promises thrilling possibilities, it also challenges concepts of creativity, ethics, and the very nature of storytelling itself.
“We envision AI as a catalyst for expansive creativity, where filmmakers focus on vision while AI handles execution. Imagine real-time multilingual dubbing, dynamic scripts adapting to viewer emotions, or ethical AI ensuring inclusive storytelling,” Min said. “This hackathon is a sandbox for these ideas — it’s where prototypes become blueprints for the industry. By uniting diverse minds, we’re not just predicting the future; we’re building it!”
The future of AI filmmaking remains to be written, both by its defenders and critics. The MIT AI Filmmaking Hackathon aims to offer a glimpse into how human creativity and artificial intelligence can collaborate to produce a new era of cinema.