Welcome to the new surreal. How AI-generated video is changing film.

To make The Frost, Waymark took a script written by Josh Rubin, an executive producer at the company who directed the film, and fed it to OpenAI's image-making model DALL-E 2. After some trial and error to get the model to produce images in a style they were happy with, the filmmakers used DALL-E 2 to generate every single shot. Then they used D-ID, an AI tool that can add movement to still images, to animate these shots, making tents flap in the wind and lips move. "We built a world out of what DALL-E was giving back to us," says Rubin. "It's a strange aesthetic, but we welcomed it with open arms. It became the look of the film." "This is certainly the first generative AI film I've seen where the style feels consistent," says Souki Mehdaoui, an independent filmmaker and cofounder of Bell & Whistle, a consultancy specializing in creative technologies.