I'm a software engineer and hobbyist actor/director. My friends are in the film industry and are in IATSE and SAG-AFTRA. I've made photons-on-glass films for decades, and I frequently film stuff with my friends for festivals.

I love this AI video technology.

Here are some of the films my friends and I have been making with AI. These are not "prompted", but instead use a lot of hand animation, rotoscoping, and human voice acting in addition to AI assistance:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H4NFXGMuwpY

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tAAiiKteM-U

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7x7IZkHiGD8

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tii9uF0nAx4

Here are films from other industry folks. One of them writes for a TV show you probably watch:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FAQWRBCt_5E

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t_SgA6ymPuc

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OCZC6XmEmK0

I see several incredibly good things happening with this tech:

- More people being able to visually articulate themselves, including "lay" people who typically do not use editing software.

- Creative talent at the bottom rungs being able to reach high with their ambition and pitch grand ideas. With enough effort, they don't even need studio capital anymore. (Think about the tens of thousands of students that go to film school that never get to direct their dream film. That was a lot of us!)

- Smaller studios can start to compete with big studios. A ten person studio in France can now make a well-crafted animation that has more heart and soul than recent by-the-formula Pixar films. It's going to start looking like indie games. Silksong and Undertale and Stardew Valley, but for movies, shows, and shorts. Makoto Shinkai did this once by himself with "Voices of a Distant Star", but it hasn't been oft repeated. Now that is becoming possible.

You can't just "prompt" this stuff. It takes work. (Each of the shorts above took days of effort - something you probably wouldn't know unless you're in the trenches trying to use the tech!)

For people that know how to do a little VFX and editing, and that know the basic rules of storytelling, these tools are remarkable assets that compliment an existing skill set. But every shot, every location, every scene is still work. And you have to weave that all into a compelling story with good hooks and visuals. It's multi-layered and complex. Not unlike code.

And another code analogy: think of these models like Claude Code for the creative. An exoskeleton, but not the core driving engineer or vision that draws it all together. You can't prompt a code base, and similarly, you can't prompt a movie. At least not anytime soon.