At the glassy boundary of Alistair Hall on Thursday, the 3rd Runway AI Film Festival celebrated an entirely new art form.
Winning movie, Total pixel spaceit was not made in a traditional sense. Jacob Adler, composer and educator at Arizona State University, was sewn together from an image generator, composite voice and video animation tool. The most notable runway Gen-3, the Text-to-Video model (Runway Gen-4 was released in March).
Video Generation Technology was released in public in 2022, with a crude video of Meta's crude corgi wearing red capes and sunglasses. Since then, it has fundamentally changed filmmaking, dramatically lowering barriers to intrusion, allowing for new forms of creative expression. Both independent creators and established filmmakers have access to powerful AI tools such as runways that allow you to generate realistic video scenes, animate storyboards, and create an entire short film from simple text prompts and reference images.
As a result, production costs and timelines are shrinking, allowing limited resources to filmmakers to achieve professional quality results and achieve ambitious visions. The democratization of content creation has expanded far beyond traditional studio constraints, empowering anyone with patience and rich imagination.
Adler's inspiration comes from the famous short stories of Jorge Luis Borges Babel's Libraryimagine a universe where every possible book exists in an infinite repository. Adler discovered that it is similar to the functionality of modern generation machine learning models. This allows you to generate an immense variety of images from noise (a random variation of pixel values that resemble “snow” on an old TV set) and text prompts.
“How many images are there probably?” the dreamy narrator begins when a fantastical AI-generated video plays on the screen. A human-sized house cat curled on a woman's lap. “What is there in the space between orders and confusion?”
Adler's amazing script is an engaging thought experiment that tries to calculate the total number of possible images, expanding the infinite possibilities of Ai-Ai's human imagination.
“Pixels are the building blocks of digital images and the small tiles that form the mosaic,” continues the voice.
“Each pixel is defined as a number representing color and position. Therefore, a digital image can be expressed as a sequence of numbers,” the narration continues, with the sound itself being a sequence of numbers explaining that air pressure changes over time. “Therefore, every photograph that can be taken exists as coordinates. Every frame of every possible film exists as coordinates.”
Winners at the 3rd International AIFF 2025
The runway was founded in 2018 by Cristobal Valenzuela, Alejandro Matamara and Anastasis Jar Madis after meeting at the New York University School of the Arts. CEO Valenzuela said she fell in love with neural networks in 2015 and couldn't stop thinking about how people who create them could use them.
Today it is a million-dollar platform used by filmmakers, musicians, advertisers and artists, with other platforms participating, including Openai's Sora and Google's Veo 3.
What separates the runway from many of its competitors is that it is built from scratch. The research teams that make up most of the company have developed their own models and are now able to generate videos of up to 20 seconds.
The results are what Valenzuela calls “a new kind of media,” as seen in films submitted to the AI Film Festival. words film It may not be applied soon. And perhaps there's no will Filmmaker. “Tisches of Tomorrow will teach you what's not yet named,” he said in a statement at the festival.
In fact, Adler is not a training filmmaker, but a classically trained composer, pipe organist and microtonality theorist. “The process of composing music and editing a film,” he told me, “Both is about adjusting changes over time.”
He used the image generation platform Midjourney to generate thousands of images and animated them using the runway. He used Eleven Love to integrate the voice of the narrator. The script he wrote himself is drawn from the idea of pure numbers, combinations, of images that could exist at a certain resolution. He edited it all together in Davinci Resolve.
result? A 10-minute film that feels philosophical as visual.
It's fascinating to put all of this together as the next step in a long evolution. From Lumière Brothers to CGI, Technicolor to Tiktok. But what we are witnessing is not a continuation. It's a rupture.
“Artists used to be gate-cate with cameras, studios and budgets,” Valenzuela said. “A child who is thinking now can press a button to create a dream.”
At the Runway Film Festival, the light went dark and the film was in animated hallucinations, synthetic voices, and waves of impossible perspectives. Some were rough. Some were polished. Everything was different from what was previously seen. This is not about filmmaker replacements. It's about unleashing them.
“When the photo first came out – in fact, when the daguerreotype was first invented – people had no words to describe it,” Valenzuela said in her opening remarks at the festival. “They have never seen anything like that, so they used this idea of a mirror with memory… I think it's pretty close to where we are now.”
Valenzuela called out the phrase Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. to tell them how photos capture and store real images, revisiting those images so they can be remembered forever after the moment has passed. Once surprised and unstable, photographs invite the generated media to rethink the meaning of creativity in the same way.
When we see Jacob Adler's film unfold, it's hard not to feel that the mirror is beginning to show us something deeper. AI Video Generation is a kind of multiverse engine that allows creators to explore and visualize an infinite spectrum of all alternative reality, all within the digital realm.
“Evolution itself is not a process of creation, it is a process of discovery,” his film concludes. “Each path that can lead to life's development is nothing more than a thread of one of the huge tapestry possible.”
