In a Tokyo screening room filled with filmmakers and creators from around the world, Oscar-winning art director Tim Yip delivered a clarion call for preserving human emotion in an age of artificial intelligence.
“Technology is so strong, you have to get something more than, higher than the technology to make it as a tool, so not as a god,” Yip said during the KlingAI NextGen Creative Contest awards ceremony and panel discussion.
The event, held alongside the Tokyo International Film Festival, showcased winning films from a competition that attracted more than 4,600 submissions from 122 countries and regions, competing for a $42,000 prize pool. But rather than celebrating technical prowess alone, the evening’s most powerful moments centered on deeply personal stories of memory, humanity and the creative partnership between humans and machines.
Zeng Yushen, representing Kling AI, set the tone for the evening by framing the contest as more than mere competition. “Tonight isn’t just about awards, it’s about celebrating creators and all the stories they bring to life,” he said. “At Kling AI, we always want to empower creators to give them tools to expand their creative freedom, as well as to give them new tools to do very new storytelling.”
Yip, who won the Academy Award for art direction for “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon,” praised the grand prize winner “Alzheimer” for its exploration of memory loss. The film, created by Chinese student C·one and inspired by a team member’s relative suffering from the disease, uses an oil painting aesthetic to depict the inner world of someone experiencing cognitive decline.
“When you are young, the energies come from you, so that you always have a new energy to build up new ideas,” Yip reflected. “But at the end, you are leaving your body, your spirit, and living more and more. So I feel this is really important, no matter AI film or some modern film, or the classical film — they always talk about humans and the relationship with the world and the environment too.”
South Korean director Lee Hwan-kyung, whose 2013 film “Miracle in Cell No. 7” became a box office phenomenon, echoed the emphasis on emotional authenticity. “I think it’s better to think about how we can collaborate together with AI so that we can bring this human emotion to the movies,” Lee said, drawing laughter when he joked: “I’m just personally hoping that the AI technology really slowly develops.”
The winning creators themselves spoke about how AI tools enabled them to realize deeply personal visions that would have been impossible through traditional filmmaking. Leammonn, a South Korean media artist and adjunct professor who won an official selection award for “I’m Not a Robot,” envisioned AI’s potential to create new forms of storytelling. “I imagine the future of the interactive film,” she said. “If we are making some kind of playground, using the things with technology or with some kind of network, it will be very powerful.”
Polish filmmaker and motion designer Dawid Meller, whose “Lost & Found” also received an official selection, described AI as liberating. “I was collecting a lot of ideas, and there are many limits when you’re creating films and stories — you are limited by budget and technology and sometimes bad time of your collaborators,” he said. “But with AI, I could finally free myself and do a lot of these kind of things alone.”
C·one, the grand prize winner, described the creative process behind “Alzheimer.” “When I use this AI tool, I just take the clean AI as the first step, like my camera,” he said. “It’s a process for me to start to organize this story and to do real thinking about this storytelling.”
Yip shared his own experimental journey with AI, describing how he created an alien character searching for human ruins in empty space. “I talked to him, and he changed. He will react to me,” Yip said of the AI tool. “Every time I’m not asking him to do what kind of things, but I am just asking him questions, and then they come up with all these reactions. So that I follow the reaction, and I come more deeper and deeper.”
The evening highlighted both the possibilities and anxieties surrounding AI in filmmaking. Yip warned against the medium becoming too focused on spectacle. “I worry about when we are still only working on the exciting moments, maybe after five years, no people have the really strong reaction of all that,” he said. “The most important thing is to going back to reality, try to repeat, try to create. But I think AI is really for me, it’s very exciting because I try to push it in some human touch, really sensible human touch.
Yet the panel’s overarching message was one of collaboration rather than competition. Lee suggested AI could help bridge the traditional conflict between screenwriters and directors by enabling rapid visualization of scenarios. “I believe that there’s a chance that we can actually integrate the one point between the script writer and the person who tries to direct it,” he said.
Meller provided a concrete example of AI’s democratizing potential, describing how a scene that would have cost half his film’s budget and taken weeks with traditional effects was roughed out in five minutes using Kling AI. “Now, like, not only big Hollywood studios could afford to make really high quality productions,” he said. “Everyone, even smaller teams or single creators can can actually do it.”
The event was hosted by Kling AI, a platform that has surpassed 45 million users globally and reached an annualized revenue run rate exceeding $100 million within 10 months of launch. The NextGen Creative Contest offered a $42,000 prize pool, with China, the U.S., and India leading in submissions.
As the evening concluded, C·one announced plans to create a new AI film about his hometown region grasslands, while exploring how to better integrate AI with traditional storytelling techniques. Leammonn expressed interest in developing interactive films that could help combat social isolation, while Meller revealed he’s working on both a traditional sci-fi comedy and a fully animated AI series.
Perhaps the most memorable insight came from Yip when asked what advice he’d give emerging AI creators. “I think you can do anything,” he said simply, before describing the creative process as moving “from outside to inside.”
The panel was moderated by Hanqing, founder of AI Talk.
In an era of rapid technological change, the Tokyo gathering suggested that the future of filmmaking may depend less on choosing between human and artificial intelligence, and more on their thoughtful synthesis — with human emotion firmly in the driver’s seat.
