AI NewsAI’s promise to indie filmmakers: Faster, cheaper, lonelier

AI’s promise to indie filmmakers: Faster, cheaper, lonelier

5:51 AM IST · February 21, 2026

A Filipino man walks through the backyard of his childhood home in rural Hawai’i, his footsteps swooshing through the grass. Birds chirp, contributing to the tropical din, as he approaches a shrine at the base of a starfruit tree. He bends to inspect a framed black-and-white photograph of a woman, her hair in a 1950s side part. Suddenly, a gust of wind shakes the tree’s branches, knocking over the contents of the shrine. The man steps back, trips on a root, and hits his head. When he awakens, he’s in a dark, misty forest, a woman wearing a clay mask standing over him, brandishing a sword. “Who are you who dares to sleep under the sacred tree?” she asks in Ilocano, a Philippine language widely spoken in Hawaii’s Filipino community, while holding the sword at his throat. He replies that he’s lost and turns to flee. She chases, alternating between running and floating through the air. He falls again. She advances, sword held high. He throws a rock at her, shattering the clay mask and revealing half her face. “Mom?” he asks. This is the opening of “Murmuray,” a short film by independent filmmaker Brad Tangonan. Everything about this film felt like his previous work, from the tactile nature shots to the dreamlike desaturated highlights. The only difference? He made it using AI. Tangonan was one of 10 filmmakers to participate in Google Flow Sessions, a five-week cohort that gave creatives access to Google’s suite of AI tools to produce short films, including Gemini, image generator Nano Banana Pro, and film generator Veo. Each film differed in scope. Hal Watmough’s “You’ve Been Here Before” blended hyperreal, lifelike visuals with cartoonish stylization to playfully explore the importance of a morning routine, while Tabitha Swanson’s“The Antidote to Fear is Curiosity”is a more esoteric, philosophical conversation about our relationship with AI and ourselves. None of these short films, which were screened at Soho House New York late last year, felt like AI slop. Each independent filmmaker I spoke to said that, in the case of these films, AI had enabled them to tell a story they otherwise wouldn’t have had the budget or time to tell. “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 told me after the screenings. This AI-is-just-another-tool-for-creators argument is certainly the message Google is trying to underscore. Google isn’t wrong; AI will increasingly be part of a creator’s toolkit as video generation products improve. In 2025, companies like Google, Runway, OpenAI, Kling, Luma AI, and Higgsfield progressed far beyond the uncanny, prompt-based novelties of the year prior. The AI video industry, with billions in venture capital dollars in tow, is now moving from prototype to post-production. This era of AI abundance that has provided tools to “democratize access” to the film industry also threatens to erase jobs and creativity, smothering them under an avalanche of low-effort slop. The existential stakes have pitted creatives against one another. Those who engage with AI risk being labeled as complicit; those who don’t risk becoming obsolete. The question isn’t whether the tools belong in the toolkit — they’re coming, whether we like it or not. Instead it is: What kind of filmmaking survives when the industry pushes for speed and scale over quality? And what happens when individual artists use the same tools to make something that actually matters? The arguments against AI in filmmaking are plentiful — and from some of the highest-profile names in the industry. Filmmaker Guillermo del Torosaid last Octoberthat he would rather die than use generative AI to make a film. James Cameron said in a recentCBS interviewthe idea of generating actors and emotions with prompts is “horrifying,” and that generative AI is only capable of spitting out a blended average of everything that’s ever been done by humans before. Werner Herzog said the films he’s seen created by AI “have no soul.” He added: “The common denominator, and nothing beyond this common denominator, can be found in these fabrications.” Cameron and Herzog’s thesis is that AI is taking the wheel of creation out of the hands of humans and couldn’t possibly be used to create a representation of their own 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 told TechCrunch. Tangonan, who describes “Murmuray” as a “family story,” agrees with that sentiment. “AI is a facilitator,” Tangonan said. “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.” Using AI in filmmaking doesn’t mean just prompting a film into existence. Tangonan, for example, wrote the script for “Murmuray” without AI and gathered visual references for a shot list. He then fed that content into Nano Banana Pro to generate images that matched his style and served as the foundation for video generation. Filmmaker Keenan MacWilliam also took pains 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 wrote the script and recorded her own voice for the mock meditation, which was equal parts relaxing and funny. Onscreen, over a black, watery backdrop, psychedelic images of flowers and plants blended into each other, turned into smoke, morphed into seahorses, and swam away. The images all came from MacWilliam’s own collection of scanned flora and fauna — she travels with her scanner everywhere 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, adding that she worked 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.” That was a common thread among the filmmakers I spoke to at the Google Flow event — the desire to use AI only in cases when it was not possible to rely on other humans, or when the strange nature of AI generations serve the story. For example, Sander van Bellegem’s “Melongray” explored the acceleration of life through trippy visualizations. In one shot, a salamander transforms into a balloon. It wasn’t part of his original storyline, but he was inspired by the way AI allowed him to push the limits of both his imagination and physics. Today’s film studiobudgets are being squeezedby rising filming costs, thepivot to streaming, and risk-averse corporate consolidation. That means big spends are saved for predictable revenue generators (see: the millionth Marvel movie) and originalmid-budget movieshave all but been abandoned. Adding AI to the mix risks exacerbating the scarcity mindset of studios to the point where they might try to replace anything that can be — actors, sets, lighting — art and quality be damned. However, the efficiencies AI brings could also lower barriers and make it easier for film studios to produce original work. Even Cameron noted in his CBS interview that generative AI could make VFX cheaper, which could lead to more imaginative sci-fi and fantasy films — expensive endeavors that are reserved for existing IP like “Avatar.” The shot in “Murmuray” where the woman is flying through the forest would have taken expensive VFX or very complex rigging on set, both out of budget for a short film, according to Tangonan. But even filmmakers who see the benefits in efficiency understand the risks to artistic expression. “I think efficiency in general is not the best friend of creativity,” MacWilliam said. For independent filmmakers, having so many powerful tools at their disposal is a blessing and a curse. It “democratizes access,” sure, but it also means working alone. The more youcando yourself, the less reason there is to collaborate. “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 told TechCrunch, noting that an actor friend of his 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 make creative decisions, but not all of them. The filmmakers I spoke to found themselves suddenly playing set designer, lighting director, costumer — roles requiring expertise they didn’t have. It was frustrating and draining, pulling them away from the work they actually cared about. And upsetting to think about how an entire ecosystem could be upended so swiftly. The filmmakers I spoke to also said they’d rather not replace actors with AI, though some said AI-generated actors are an inevitability for smaller studios. The tools exist, and are increasingly getting better, to generate actors, their emotions, their movements. AI video startups like Luma AI, which last November raiseda $900 million Series C, are even building technology that allows you to shoot an actor’s performance once, and then use AI to change the character, costume, and set. “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. “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,” MacWilliam said. “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?” But many don’t see AI tools as neutral. Labor replacement aside, there are still copyright concerns. AI video generation startupRunwayhas reportedly scraped thousands of hours of YouTube videos and copyrighted studio content, while others — including Google, OpenAI, and Luma AI — have faced questions about whether they are doing the same, or training on copyrighted films and stock footage without permission. (Though some tools, likeMoonvalley’s Marey, are trained only on openly licensed data.) Then there are the environmental horrors —some estimates suggestgenerating seconds of AI video can consume as much electricity as hours of streaming. Unsurprisingly, many of the filmmakers I spoke to said they face stigma for experimenting 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 said. “I just don’t agree with that.” If filmmakers are too afraid to discuss how AI can and should be used and what the ethical boundaries are, then the conversation risks being decided for them. Not by artists trying to use it responsibly, but by efficiency-crazed studios that care more about bottom lines than art. “The film industry is floundering because people aren’t innovating and everything costs too much. We need tools like this for it to survive,” said Watmough. “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.” Correction: An earlier version of this article mischaracterized Ilocano as a Hawaiian dialect of Filipino. Ilocano is a language from the northern Philippines and is widely spoken among Filipino communities in Hawaii.