[Dong-A Ilbo] “Thanks to AI… a film that once took a year was finished in just eight days, without a camera”

“It’s strange: lately it feels as if far more visitors are coming to ‘this place.’”

In a stark white room, a wolf-headed, human-bodied gatekeeper silently receives a stream of animals, counsels them, and guides them through a red door. Why do they come? And why must the gate be kept?

Photo credit: MooAm – Director Harry Hyun, short film “The Wrong Visitor,” Grand-Prize winner of CGV’s 1st AI Film Contest

The 11-minute short “The Wrong Visitor,” which won the Grand Prize at CGV’s inaugural AI Film Contest on 30 May, imagines the limbo between life and death through symbolic half-beast characters and eerie beauty—and was made mostly with generative AI.

Speaking at Dong-A Media Center in Seoul’s Jongno-gu on 2 June, the 35-year-old director said, “Making a film without a camera was unthinkable before. Now I can sit at a computer and turn what I picture into video instantly.”

A former factual-TV producer, Hyun previously directed the independent films “Nine Times Fired” and “Crypto Man,” and was nominated at the New York International Film Awards and the Toronto International Women Film Festival.

Writing and pre-visualisation

Hyun drafted the script himself, then refined awkward sentences with large-language-model tools such as ChatGPT and Claude—“as if writing with several co-authors,” he said.

Creating the images

He filmed a man sitting in a chair with a phone, fed the stills into an AI system to build a simple storyboard, merged animal features onto the face, and used an “Image-to-Video” model to animate the shots. “The AI was like a cinematographer,” he noted; rapid advances let him work with no physical set.

Fine-tuning

The AI-generated mouth movements did not match the recorded voice-over, so he re-synced them with another model. Colors also varied by shot, requiring manual grading. Even so, the team completed a high-quality short in eight days with minimal crew.

“A project like this normally takes a year or more and costs plenty. AI saved both time and money.”

Hyun is now planning a feature-length AI film, aiming for release within the year.

“Sometimes AI returns a shot I never asked for—and that can be great,” he said. “I see it as a co-worker on set. The age of Film with AI, not Film by AI, is already here.”

— Lee Ho-jae (hoho@donga.com)

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