Kim Sung-soo, director of Korean box office hit “12.12: The Day,” once saw AI as a destroyer of the film industry. Speaking Sunday at a session hosted by Kling AI at the Busan International Film Festival‘s Asian Contents & Film Market, he described how it has instead become part of his craft.
His turning point was “Worm Train,” an eight-minute short he first gave up on because AI couldn’t render its key scene, a giant insect colliding with a packed train crowd. Months later, the technology had caught up. “Technology doesn’t replace creativity. It shows what’s in your imagination,” Kim said. The project changed how he imagines and collaborates, he added: “I’ll never go back to the way I used to make films.”
He did not make it alone. Kim assembled a nine-person team, including an animation art director and a music director. Though the short could have been made entirely with AI, he said, they chose to generate only part of it and handle the rest with conventional filmmaking methods. He plans a similar hybrid approach for a seven-part drama series he is developing. Its nearly 15-minute opening chase on the Gyeongin Expressway, which he said would require “enormous financial resources” to shoot conventionally, will first be generated with AI, then used to decide which shots need actors on set and where traditional VFX come in.
Kim was joined by Harry Hyun, director and CEO of AI production company MooAm; Chinese animation director Li Wei, co-director of “Jiang Ziya”; and Lee Sangwook, producer and team manager at MBC C&I’s AI Contents Lab.
Li made a similar case for animation. Presenting a trailer for “Born of the Tide,” a 105-minute AI-animated feature about China’s boat-dwelling Tanka community, he said the technology works best at the trial-and-error stage: concept designs that once took enormous time to draw by hand can now be visualized quickly and shared with the team. “AI can generate many things, but the choice and the details all come down to the director,” he said.
Hyun agreed that filmmaking skill is what makes the difference. “Faces look identical, sets look identical, lighting looks identical,” she said of AI output made without it. That is why MooAm looks for AI artists who have directed at least one live-action short.
Otherwise, she said, AI production is not fundamentally different from a conventional shoot, only more efficient. What changes is the crew. Her directing team now includes an “AI coordinator,” who decides which cuts will be generated, keeps a continuity script for them and checks with AI artists that everything cuts together. Even assistant directors need a basic grasp of AI, as gray screens marked with tracking points replace green screens.
Building those skills is also a priority for Lee, whose lab is producing “Rendering Love,” a short-form K-pop romantic comedy about a virtual idol group, with “Parasite” producer Barunson E&A developing the story. “If even one or two individuals lag on the learning curve, overall quality can suffer,” he said of keeping pace as models update.
Mastering the tools won’t settle every question, though. Kim argued that rules on commercial use and permissions should be settled before the industry sets any technical standards. “Whenever I generate outputs, I scrutinize the results closely to ensure they do not infringe upon existing works or violate anyone’s publicity rights,” he said.
“In the future, we won’t call AI movies ‘AI movies,’ just as we no longer call films ‘color movies,’” Kim said.
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