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”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0NtLtxX0epQ
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”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-8e4WV8QkSk
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”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CrAxMOpK7IY
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”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LVmFEEQl5lg
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”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hM_Kg6wbv_I
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.”
