4 Minutes
The mood in Hong Kong wasn’t anxious—it was electric. Inside Filmart, where conversations usually orbit budgets, casting, and distribution deals, a different kind of energy took over this year. AI wasn’t lurking in the background. It was the main character.
And if you expected fear, you’d be surprised. The executives shaping this shift aren’t sounding alarms. They’re making a case—calmly, confidently—that filmmakers may need to rethink not just their tools, but their entire creative process.
“I don’t want to use AI to replace artists,” said Lee Sangwook, who leads the AI Content Lab at MBC C&I. “I want to use AI to create content.” It’s a subtle distinction, but in a room full of producers and creatives, it landed hard.
On stage with him were voices from across the AI ecosystem: Midjourney China Lab, Google Hong Kong, MiniMax, and China Huace Film & TV. Different companies, same underlying message—this isn’t about machines taking over. It’s about changing how ideas come to life.
From weeks of work to hours of iteration
Yuhang Cheng from Midjourney China Lab cut straight to the tension many artists feel. The fear, she argued, doesn’t come from the technology itself—it comes from uncertainty about creativity.
Because creativity isn’t just output. It’s emotion, instinct, lived experience. And that, she said, isn’t something AI can replicate.
What AI can do, however, is translate what’s already in an artist’s mind—faster than ever before. Sketches become scenes in seconds. Concepts that once required actors, sets, and weeks of coordination can now be visualized almost instantly.
The implication is hard to ignore: time is no longer the bottleneck. “What used to take weeks can now take hours,” Cheng explained. And when time collapses like that, the creative process shifts. Artists spend less effort executing—and more time refining, experimenting, and pushing ideas further.
That shift is already visible on the show floor. One of the standout projects at Filmart this year is Raphael, an 80-minute feature produced entirely with AI tools. Developed by MBC C&I, the film blends technologies from platforms like Midjourney and ElevenLabs, offering a glimpse of what fully AI-assisted production can look like today—not in theory, but in practice.
The real disruption isn’t tools—it’s mindset
Ricky Lau from Google Hong Kong didn’t sugarcoat it. The future won’t belong to creators who master a single platform. It will belong to those who can navigate many.
Studios are already mixing AI tools—image generators, voice synthesis, editing systems—into hybrid workflows. No single model dominates, and that fragmentation is forcing filmmakers to adapt quickly.
“You have to unlearn your past experience,” Lau said. “And learn to work in new ways.”
That idea—unlearning—kept surfacing. It’s not just about picking up new software. It’s about letting go of assumptions built over decades of traditional production: long timelines, rigid pipelines, and clearly defined roles.
Because those boundaries are blurring. Fast.
And then there’s the bigger shift. Accessibility.
Fu Binxing, CEO of China Huace Film & TV, offered a glimpse of what’s coming next. In three to five years, he said, filmmaking could become radically more democratic. Not in a vague, aspirational sense—but in a very real, practical one.
“Even an elementary student will be able to create a good piece of work,” he predicted.
That’s the part that lingers. Not the tools. Not the hype. But the idea that storytelling—once gated by cost, skill, and infrastructure—might soon be open to almost anyone with an idea and the curiosity to explore it.
Leave a Comment