Storytelling reimagined: the Generative AI Film Festival at Adobe MAX 2025

We asked a bold question at Adobe MAX 2025: What happens when visionary filmmakers pair their exceptional storytelling skills with the power of generative AI?

Powered by Firefly — Adobe’s all-in-one home for ideation, creation and production with the industry’s top AI models and the best tools for video, audio, imaging and design — the Generative AI Film Festival is a first-of-its-kind showcase that celebrates human imagination amplified by technology. Six visionary directors, from live-action storytellers to experimental animators, used Adobe Firefly and Creative Cloud tools to bring their ideas to life in ways that simply weren’t possible before.

The results? A breathtaking mix of genres and aesthetics: a hand-painted folktale, an Afrofuturist comedy, a lo-fi New York love story, and more. Each film proves that generative AI doesn’t replace the creative process — it supercharges it.

The intersection of art and innovation

At Adobe, we believe the future of filmmaking belongs to those who see technology not as a replacement for creativity, but as a catalyst for it. That’s exactly how these directors approached their work: blending the best of human storytelling with the newest creative tools.

The filmmakers used Firefly Boards for ideating and mood boarding, Generate Image and Generate Video for visual development, Generate Sound Effects, Generate Speech and Generate Soundtrack for voice, sound, and scores. The industry-leading Adobe Premiere, Adobe Photoshop, Adobe After Effects, and Substance 3D then supported the editing phase and final polish.

The innovative directors worked with world-class models, including Adobe’s own commercially safe Firefly Image and Video models, Google’s Veo 3, 3.1 and Nano Banana, Luma AI’s Ray 3, FLUX.1 Kontext, Runway Gen-4 and more, in combination with traditional production techniques — including mixing live action, motion capture, hand-drawing, archival photographs and more — to produce work that would be impossible to achieve with conventional time and budget-constrained workflows.

Watch the films of the MAX GenAI Film Festival 2025

Below, we spotlight each film: the full finished film, the director’s original idea, and the creative choices that inspired it. The film sections that follow show how a similar set of tools unlocked wildly different creative approaches — from sumi-e animation to hybrid live-action character pieces.

“Beta Earth”

Director / Studio: Nik Kleverov / Native Foreign

Concept: Eccentric trillionaire Dash Kincaid leads a ragtag crew of ‘volunteers’ to settle a new world: Beta Earth. It's a huge disaster, but the team must put on a good show for the investors back on Earth.

For irreverent adult animated series “Beta Earth”, Kleverov’s team is collaborating with Ryan Walls, writer and producer of award-winning sitcom “Modern Family.” “At Native Foreign, we’ve already done a ton of different animation styles with AI,” Kleverov explained, “but haven’t quite explored 2D yet in a substantive way, so this was the perfect opportunity.”

To create the series trailer, the team started with Walls’s concept and idea, then went into scripting, hand-drawn storyboards, and world-building, while human actors were cast for all the characters. “I really love working with actors and all the fun things they bring to the creative,” Kleverov said. “My goal in AI is never to remove people from the process, and at Native Foreign we have humans in the loop at every stage of storytelling.”

Walls therefore was in the room for the main voice-over recording session to spitball ideas and come up with improvisations that ended up in the trailer.

“Enter the BBL Drizzyverse: The Yams of Life”

Director / Studio: King Willonius

Concept: An Afrofuturist sci-fi comedy that introduces Lady Fatima. Through her voice and vision, the film reveals how the Yams of Life became the most powerful source of clout in the universe and why her family’s legacy is central to the prophecy of the BBL Drizzy.

Recognized on TIME’s "100 Most Influential People in AI," King Willonius has emerged as a leading voice in exploring AI as a medium for creative expression. For this short, King Willonius — known for playful, viral AI-driven music and satire — wanted to expand the BBL Drizzy world.

The story is inspired by a combination of “Dune” and the “Animatrix.” “The ‘Animatrix’ has all these side stories about the ‘Matrix’ that show you more of that world,” King Willonius said. "That’s what I wanted to do with this story.”

One of the key creative decisions was choosing an AI and an aesthetic style that would build up the story. “I love sci-fi stories and movies that visually grab you and then are backed up by a strong story and comedic dialogue,” King Willonius explained. “I wanted to be able to incorporate that and see if you could create your own look and visual style with these generative AI tools.”

“My friend, Zeph”

Director / Studio: Dave Clark / Promise Studios

Concept: A teen discovers an alien robot in their basement that guards Earth’s last defence against invasion — a portal that can only be sealed from the other side.

Dave Clark’s coming of age story was inspired by his own experience as a father. In the film, a teenage girl prepares for college and struggles with letting go of her childhood, especially since her father left when she was young. “I wanted to show that even adults need to remember what it was like to be a child,” Clark explained.

The team’s approach blended traditional filmmaking with new AI workflows. Clark said: “As an AI film studio, we wanted to mix live action, virtual production, and generative AI to tell this personal story in an inventive way.”

“Nagori”

Director / Studio: Guillaume Hurbault / Promise Studios

Concept: An aging fisherman, once devoted only to the sea, realizes too late the

distance it created with his daughter. As he sets out on a haunting journey to reconnect with her, he faces memory, longing, and the legacy of his own choices.

Trying to balance creativity and fatherhood, and wondering if he was “doing it right”, “Nagori” grew from Guillaume Hurbault’s own life. “I wanted to capture that feeling through ‘animated paintings’, which led me to the Japanese sumi-e style — minimal, emotional, and beautifully imperfect.”

Hurbault focused on blending poetry with clarity. His aim was to create a story simple enough to follow but deeply moving on an emotional level. “Every scene had to carry that feeling through visual rhythm rather than dialogue, balancing surreal imagery with a structure that keeps the viewer grounded in the father’s journey,” he said.

“Kyra”

Director / Studio: MetaPuppet / Promise Studios

Concept: An urban artist follows the woman he loves onto a NYC subway train and unknowingly begins the ride of his life — one that forces him to abandon the familiar rhythm of his world and take a chance on love before the last stop.

When MetaPuppet was building a career as a filmmaker and musician, he discovered the 5 Pointz Building in Queens. “Every inch of it — inside and out — was covered in graffiti art,” he explained. “I had never seen anything like it and was deeply inspired not only by the creativity but also by the boldness of the artists who transformed that space.”

At the same time, MetaPuppet was fascinated by the subway buskers — drummers who made music with nothing more than five-gallon plastic buckets. “To me, both the graffiti artists and the buskers embodied skill, discipline, ingenuity, and fearless self-expression,” MetaPuppet said. “Those qualities continue to inspire me to this day. The film is a tribute to the artists who influenced me during a pivotal moment in my life.”

MetaPuppet wanted to ground “Kyra” in reality, so he began with real photography captured throughout the subway system. It was also important to him that the setting of the 5 Pointz Building remained authentic and featured the actual art that once covered its walls, not a reimagined version.

“The building is gone now, but I was fortunate to have taken photos there 20 years ago,” MetaPuppet explained. “I used some of those as source images. My goal was to preserve the rawness and grit of street art, so I leaned toward a lo-fi film aesthetic with a slightly desaturated color palette.”

“Dreamer”

Director / Studio: Ryan Patterson / Queen One Studios

Concept: From an endlessly creative kid in the 1980s to a struggling father in the 2010s, “Dreamer” follows an aspiring filmmaker through the decades and explores the bumpy road to success and the power of inspiration.

Ryan Patterson’s film moves through snapshots — a child coming up with movie ideas at the kitchen table in the ’80s, a hopeful student in the ’90s, a restless adult navigating early digital tools in the 2000s, a father in the 2010s still chasing a break. “Dreamer”, one of the first AI films featured at the Toronto International Film Festival, was made in under two weeks using Adobe’s Firefly stack and finished in Premiere.

“I wanted to create a short that expressed my love for film and my own creative journey,” Patterson explained. “I've seen first-hand how new technology is allowing filmmakers to tell personal stories and so it felt like the perfect time to tell my own.”

Making “Dreamer” started with photographs of Patterson’s life growing up. “Using generative technology, I was able to recreate those scenes from my past in a way that felt very authentic,” he said. “I was also able to incorporate my own footage in a way that felt seamless. I think the decision to have the majority of the shots from an over-the-shoulder perspective allows the audience to imagine what my journey was really like.”

The human + machine future of storytelling

“Showtime!”, the Generative AI Film Festival at MAX, spotlights a transformative moment in filmmaking, where human creativity and cutting-edge technology converge to redefine the art of storytelling.

The featured films are a showcase of how new AI tools let filmmakers push the boundaries of storytelling and realize ambitious projects, allowing them to follow instincts more fully, iterate ideas more widely, and spend scarce resources on the things that matter: performance, composition, and story.

As these tools continue to evolve, Adobe’s goal is to keep the creative person at the center: top industry models available with one login to offer plenty of creative options, integrated workflows, and features that reduce production costs and let filmmakers and storytellers go faster from concept to finished film in new ways.

Don’t miss our companion blog post, which explores how each of these shorts was created and provides behind-the-scenes insights into the director’s creative processes, the tools they used, and the evolving role of AI in filmmaking.