Four leading filmmakers from Asia have leveraged Kling AI to produce AI-powered films that push the boundaries of cinematic storytelling, spanning AI-generated short films, virtual entertainment, AI-hybrid cinema and feature-length films.
At the 2026 Asian Contents & Film Market (ACFM), filmmakers and content creators from China and South Korea—including Sung-Soo Kim, director of 12.12: The Day, MBC C&I AI Contents Lab head Sang Wook Lee, MooAm founder and director Harry Hyun, together with Chinese animation director Wei Li with over 20 years of experience in the animation industry—presents projects that illustrate how generative AI has been applied across different stages and formats of filmmaking. Their work is featured in “New Cinematic Possibilities: Reimagining Filmmaking with Kling AI”, a session co-hosted by Kling AI and ACFM.
Kling AI is participating in ACFM for the second year as part of InnoAsia, a program connecting technology companies with the content industry. Its participation this year comes as Kling 4.0, its latest video generation model, starts early access beta testing, bringing the platform’s latest advances in AI video generation into focus as filmmakers explore new production workflows.
New Tools, New Ways of Filmmaking
The four filmmakers and producers featured in the panel are currently working on projects that involve Kling AI tools.
Korean director Sung-Soo Kim, director of 12.12: The Day, used AI for the first time in his creation process and collaborated with Kling AI on his new AI short film Worm Train. Inspired by Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, the film follows an ordinary office worker overwhelmed by corporate life who turns into a giant insect but still has to commute to work.
Kim first began developing the project with Kling 3.0 in early 2026. He resumed production in September with Kling 4.0, integrating the model into a collaborative filmmaking workflow. A key turning point came when he recreated a subway scene with Kling 4.0 Preview—a scene he had abandoned in March.
“The moment I recreated the subway scene with Kling 4.0 Preview, I was able to see the realistic physical interaction and sense of weight as the insect collided with passengers. It was the very scene I had given up back up then.”
Seeing images that came so close to what he had envisioned left Kim deeply moved. Beyond cinematic continuity, he highlights Kling’s ability to render characters and settings in Asian context, as well as its audio-generation capabilities.
Sang Wook Lee, head of the AI Contents Lab at MBC C&I, presents Rendering Love, a short-form AI series co-developed by MBC C&I and Barunson E&A, the production company behind Parasite. Blending live-action scenes with AI-generated virtual idols, the series explores new possibilities for cinematic storytelling through Kling 4.0’s advances in character consistency and motion control.
Kling 4.0’s enhanced Omni Reference supports up to 10 keyframes for precise scene planning and up to 15 multimodal references, including images, video and audio, helping maintain character consistency across shots and episodes. This makes it possible to move beyond isolated AI-generated scenes toward character-driven storytelling.
Meanwhile, the team uses Kling’s motion control to preserve the dance movements and subtle physical nuances of real performers, bringing their performances to life through virtual characters. As Lee explains, AI does not replace an actor’s performance; it becomes a tool for transferring that performance onto a character.
For Chinese animation director Wei Li, Kling AI offers a way to make ambitious visual storytelling more achievable. His feature-length animated film Born of the Tide, being developed in collaboration with Kling AI, runs 105 minutes, with more than 2,350 shots and over 152 characters.
Productions of this scale place substantial demands on both visual detail and production efficiency, particularly in expansive sequences designed for the big screen. With Kling’s native 4K generation, scenes such as dragon boat races and an explosive action sequence in a fish market can be rendered with greater detail.
MooAm founder, CEO, and director Harry Hyun, whose film Crypto Man ranked No. 1 on Netflix Korea’s film chart in 2025, also shared her experience developing AI-hybrid cinema Natasha with Kling AI. Planned as a 100-minute mystery thriller and period romance, the film is set during the harsh winter of 1944 under Japanese colonial rule.
In developing Natasha, Hyun uses Kling AI to help realize her creative vision, highlighting Kling 4.0’s 10-bit HDR output, which helps preserve shadow detail in high-contrast settings, including backlit and nighttime scenes, while offering greater latitude for color grading in post-production. The model’s 21:9 aspect ratio also supports widescreen cinematic compositions and a more immersive viewing experience.
What Makes Cinema More Cinematic?
Across the four projects presented in the session, a common theme emerges: AI can expand the possibilities of filmmaking, but cinematic expression depends on more than what technology can generate. It also depends on what creators choose to show, what they leave unsaid, and how individual images, people and ideas come together to form a story.
Yet, as Korean director Sung-Soo Kim sees it, AI may not diminish the human element of cinema, but create new ways for it to flourish.
For Kim, the short film presented at the forum marked his first experience working with AI. Initially, he viewed AI as a collaborative or alternative tool for VFX. However, his perspective gradually shifted after he tried making a film with AI firsthand. Rather than focusing solely on how much AI could reduce production costs, he began to consider how it might transform the filmmaking process itself.
Still, Kim believes that producing polished, commercially viable mid-length and feature-length narrative films with AI requires a workflow modeled on traditional collaborative filmmaking. For Worm Train, he assembled a nine-person team, including VFX supervisor Ryu Jae-hwan and specialists in art direction, narrative editing and music.
“AI can generate images and footage endlessly, but I can clearly see that it still cannot truly create the connection between shots,” Kim observes. “AI has not eliminated the creative process. Instead, it has made collaboration between people more efficient and more closely connected.”
A similar focus on human creativity underpins Rendering Love, an AI series that explores both the creative boundaries and commercial potential of virtual characters. Rather than using AI simply to imitate existing films or animation, the team set out to discover where AI-generated content can go while remaining engaging and acceptable to audiences.
At its heart, Rendering Love is a love story about recognizing the real person behind a character. For the team, this reflects a broader belief: even in the age of AI, compelling content ultimately remains a story about people.
From short-form series to feature-length films, and from established production teams to AI-native creative studios, Kling AI is moving beyond isolated creative experiments toward more structured workflows and commercially oriented applications.
Driving this transition is Kling AI’s continued model development. Since its launch in June 2024, the platform has undergone more than 30 product iterations, evolving from version 1.0 to 4.0 while continually expanding its creative and production capabilities. As of June 2026, Kling AI had surpassed 100 million users worldwide, with users across 224 countries and regions and nearly 50,000 enterprise customers.