A US stealth bomber flies across a darkening sky towards Iran. Meanwhile, in Tehran a solitary woman feeds stray cats amid rubble from recent Israeli airstrikes.
To the uninitiated viewer, this could be a cinematic retelling of a geopolitical crisis that unfolded barely weeks ago – hastily shot on location, somewhere in the Middle East.
However, despite its polished production look, it wasn’t shot anywhere, there is no location, and the woman feeding stray cats is no actor – she doesn’t exist.
The engrossing footage is the “rough cut” of a 12-minute short film about last month’s US attack on Iranian nuclear sites, made by the directors Samir Mallal and Bouha Kazmi. It is also made entirely by artificial intelligence.
The clip is based on a detail the film-makers read in news coverage of the US bombings – a woman who walked the empty streets of Tehran feeding stray cats. Armed with the information, they have been able to make a sequence that looks as if it could have been created by a Hollywood director.
The impressive speed and, for some, worrying ease with which films of this kind can be made has not been lost on broadcasting experts.
Last week Richard Osman, the TV producer and bestselling author, said that an era of entertainment industry history had ended and a new one had begun – all because Google has released a new AI video making tool used by Mallal and others.
“So I saw this thing and I thought, ‘well, OK that’s the end of one part of entertainment history and the beginning of another’,” he said on The Rest is Entertainment podcast.
Osman added: “TikTok, ads, trailers – anything like that – I will say will be majority AI-assisted by 2027.”
For Mallal, an award-winning London-based documentary maker who has made adverts for Samsung and Coca-Cola, AI has provided him with a new format – “cinematic news”.
The Tehran film, called Midnight Drop, is a follow-up to Spiders in the Sky, a recreation of a Ukrainian drone attack on Russian bombers in June.
Within two weeks, Mallal, who directed Spiders in the Sky on his own, was able to make a film about the Ukraine attack that would have cost millions – and would have taken at least two years including development – to make pre-AI.
“Using AI, it should be possible to make things that we’ve never seen before,” he said. “We’ve never seen a cinematic news piece before turned around in two weeks. We’ve never seen a thriller based on the news made in two weeks.”
Spiders in the Sky was largely made with Veo3, an AI video generation model developed by Google, and other AI tools. The voiceover, script and music were not created by AI, although ChatGPT helped Mallal edit a lengthy interview with a drone operator that formed the film’s narrative spine.
Google’s film-making tool, Flow, is powered by Veo3. It also creates speech, sound effects and background noise. Since its release in May, the impact of the tool on YouTube – also owned by Google – and social media in general has been marked. As Marina Hyde, Osman’s podcast partner, said last week: “The proliferation is extraordinary.”
Quite a lot of it is “slop” – the term for AI-generated nonsense – although the Olympic diving dogs have a compelling quality.
Mallal and Kazmi aim to complete the film, which will intercut the Iranian’s story with the stealth bomber mission and will be six times the length of Spider’s two minutes, in August. It is being made by a mix of models including Veo3, OpenAI’s Sora and Midjourney.
“I’m trying to prove a point,” says Mallal. “Which is that you can make really good stuff at a high level – but fast, at the speed of culture. Hollywood, especially, moves incredibly slowly.”
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He adds: “The creative process is all about making bad stuff to get to the good stuff. We have the best bad ideas faster. But the process is accelerated with AI.”
Mallal and Kazmi also recently made Atlas, Interrupted, a short film about the 3I/Atlas comet, another recent news event, that has appeared on the BBC.
David Jones, the chief executive of Brandtech Group, an advertising startup using generative AI – the term for tools such as chatbots and video generators – to create marketing campaigns, says the advertising world is about to undergo a revolution due to models such as Veo3.
“Today, less than 1% of all brand content is created using gen AI. It will be 100% that is fully or partly created using gen AI,” he says.
Netflix also revealed last week that it used AI in one of its TV shows for the first time.
However, in the background of this latest surge in AI-spurred creativity lies the issue of copyright. In the UK, the creative industries are furious about government proposals to let models be trained on copyright-protected work without seeking the owner’s permission – unless the owner opts out of the process.
Mallal says he wants to see a “broadly accessible and easy-to-use programme where artists are compensated for their work”.
Beeban Kidron, a cross-bench peer and leading campaigner against the government proposals, says AI film-making tools are “fantastic” but “at what point are they going to realise that these tools are literally built on the work of creators?” She adds: “Creators need equity in the new system or we lose something precious.”
YouTube says its terms and conditions allow Google to use creators’ work for making AI models – and denies that all of YouTube’s inventory has been used to train its models.
Mallal calls his use of AI to make films “prompt craft”, a phrase that uses the term for giving instructions to AI systems. When making the Ukraine film, he says he was amazed at how quickly a camera angle or lighting tone could be adjusted with a few taps on a keyboard.
“I’m deep into AI. I’ve learned how to prompt engineer. I’ve learned how to translate my skills as a director into prompting. But I’ve never produced anything creative from that. Then Veo3 comes out, and I said, ‘OK, finally, we’re here.’”
