Kling AI, the AI-powered creative platform from Kuaishou Technology, showcased on Wednesday the capabilities of its video generation models on big screen in Tokyo as it screens a series of short films made by Kling AI creators worldwide.
The films were selected from over 4600 submissions from creators across 122 countries and regions, as part of the Kling AI NEXTGEN Creative Contest launched in early September featuring a total prize pool of 42,000 USD in cash and 1.25 million Kling AI credits. A Grand Prix winner and two Jury Prize winners were recognized for their outstanding achievements in narrative, production quality, creativity and social significance.
Cao Yizhe, the Grand Prix Winner for his work “Alzheimer” received the prize from Tim Yip, Oscar-winning art director and LEE Hwan-kyung, South Korean film director and screenwriter.
“At Kling AI, our mission is to empower creators, to give them tools that expand creative freedom and open new storytelling frontiers,” said Zeng Yushen, Head of Operations at Kling AI, at the screening in Tokyo.
The lineup of films showcased a range of creative styles and artistic themes. A short film titled “Alzheimer”, the Grand Prix winner of the contest, created by Chinese creators Cao Yizhe and Wei Zheng, is inspired by the personal experiences of their family members. The film depicts the vivid inner world of an elderly living with Alzheimer’s disease in oil- painting style, calling for greater public understanding and empathy.
The Jury Prize winner “BOZULMA (The Distortion)” by Turkish creator Sefa Kocakalay is a dark modern parable about a boy with a TV head who becomes a savior-turned-prisoner when the world’s gratitude turns to obsession. “Ghost Lap”, also a Jury Prize winner, offers a powerful reflection on how to let go of the past, narrated from the perspective of a young race car driver haunted by his dad’s fatal crash as he tried to get back to the track.
Leveraging Kling AI’s image-to-video model, the film depicts heavy-action car chasing scenes in realistic visual style.
“Kling’s image-to-video model was very good at keeping my film grounded in reality for its very good prompt and Kling was incredible at staying grounded in the physical world, which is something I really needed,” said Josh Williams, the British creator behind the film.
A panel featuring Kling AI content creators and award-winning directors discussed the evolving role of AI in filmmaking.
The films are all primarily generated by AI, though many of the creators entering the final stage of the NEXTGEN Creative Contest come from traditional film production background, enabling them to master the AI tool much more effectively with their industry know-how.
“The AI films are developing so fast that we can see a lot of technics are being refined minute by minute,” said Tim Yip, the first Chinese art director that won an Academy Award and a BAFTA Award for his work in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, at a panel themed “Filmmaking Reimagined: Next-Generation Storytelling with AI”.
Yip worked with Kling AI on his first AI short film “Courier” earlier last year as part of the creative project that Kling AI rolled out in collaboration with nine directors for a series of AI-generated short films, marking one of the first attempts at human-machine co-creation in the film industry.
Filmmakers like Dawid Meller, whose work “Lost & Found” was an Official Selection Winner, underscored AI’s role in democratizing filmmaking. For his upcoming sci-fi comedy, after initial quotes for traditional VFX proved too expensive and time-consuming, the filmmaker and motion designer used Kling Al to generate a complex sci-fi scene in minutes, significantly cutting costs and production time.
Cao Yizhe, the Grand Prix Winner for his work “Alzheimer” resonated with this, noting that Kling AI’s continuously improving models consistently equipped him with the tools to overcome technical hurdles.
“I think the potential of AI is not just in understanding your words, but acting as a partner for human creators and providing all the surprises and imaginations that the tool can offer us,” he said.
Adding to this sentiment, LEE Hwan-kyung, the acclaimed South Korean director of Miracle in Cell No. 7, emphasized the collaborative future between AI and filmmaking. “It’s better to think about how we can collaborate together with AI so that we can bring this human emotion to the movies.”
Launched in June last year, Kling AI now supports a community of over 45 million content creators and has powered the generation of more than 200 million videos and 400 million images.
Kling 2.5 Turbo, its latest video generation model hits No.1 in Artificial Analysis video arena, an industry-recognized benchmark that ranks video generators via public voting. The model outperformed Google’s Veo 3 and Open AI’s Sora 2 Pro, securing the No.1 spot in both the text-to-video and image-to-video leaderboards, according to the latest results released by Artificial Analysis.