AI offers hope for young film-makers dreaming of an Oscar

LOS ANGELES – Studying at the film school where Oscar-nominated Sinners (2025) director Ryan Coogler honed his craft, SiJia Zheng dreams of winning an Academy Award.

Now with the recent developments in artificial intelligence, he can see a shortcut to achieving his ambition.

“That’s a chance for beginners like me who can use AI to just make a film and to announce to the world that I have the ability to be a director,” he told AFP.

The 29-year-old who hails from China is one of a burgeoning class of students at the USC School of Cinematic Arts, studying animation in a place that has long been a training ground for future Pixar and DreamWorks talent.

He has used his time at the University of Southern California (USC) in Los Angeles to learn about the emerging field of AI animation.

That has included producing his seven-minute short film Torment, about a masked killer terrorising a high school. Recognised at the LA Shorts Fest, it was generated entirely by AI – in just one week.

Zheng recorded himself in front of a green screen and then asked the software to modify his face to make him into all the different characters in the movie.

The technology also allowed him to set his story in an Asian school and have scenes in a swimming pool – two things that would have cost a fortune if he had filmed them traditionally.

“As a student, it’s impossible to have that much money” to produce a film, he said.

Not everyone in Hollywood feels so positively about AI.

The technology was one of the key sticking points in the writers’ and actors’ strikes that paralysed Hollywood in 2023.

Guillermo del Toro, director of Frankenstein (2025) which will compete for the Best Picture Oscar on March 15, is notoriously anti-AI, insisting he would “rather die” than use it.

Zheng said he had been impressed by the Oscar-winning Mexican film-maker’s “amazing” fantasy horror, particularly the opening scene where the monster attacks a 19th-century three-masted ship, which del Toro’s prop department constructed specially for the movie.

But “when I watched the film, I was just thinking, ‘Oh, using AI to do that would be much cheaper and make something pretty similar’”.

He insists, however, that it does not replace the film-making spark. “AI is just a tool, and people can use it to become even better.”

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the body that will hand out the Oscars in Hollywood, seems to agree. In 2025, it updated its rules to say it was neutral on the technology.

“Generative artificial intelligence and other digital tools neither help nor harm the chances of achieving a nomination,” it said in April 2025.

At USC, teachers like Professor Debra Isaac are trying to navigate the ethics around the emerging technology of AI.

The animation professor said she was shocked by an AI video that rocketed around the internet in recent weeks.

The short sequence created by Seedance – the AI-generation model developed by TikTok’s parent company ByteDance – shows an ersatz fight between Brad Pitt and Tom Cruise. Neither American star was compensated.

But, used properly, AI does not need to be exploitative, and is not a lazy way to make films, Prof Isaac said.

“It’s not just about, ‘Hey, I have a prompt, and I’m just gonna type a few words and I’ll get my image and I’ll get my animation and I’m done,’” she said. “Some of these tools are not ethically dubious at all. They’re trained by people who are using their own work.”

That is precisely what Xindi Zhang, a recent graduate of the programme and winner of a Student Academy Award for her short film The Song Of Drifters (2025), did.

For the mini-documentary about the difficulty of feeling at home anywhere, the 29-year-old artist fed the AI dozens of her drawings.

The database then served as graphic inspiration, allowing the computer to stylise the shots of the cities where the film takes place, accelerating production that would otherwise have taken years.

Even with the help of AI, Zhang spent nearly a month perfecting certain shots.

It is “a craft that nobody really appreciates right now”, she says.

But anyone who looks at the use of AI will soon find it is not a compromise-free shortcut to perfection.

“Good, cheap and fast will never happen, no matter what tool you use,” Zhang said. AFP