AI Filmmaking Hits the Venice Film Festival: Platforms, Studios and Film Schools Wrestle With What Comes Next
A panel at the Venice Film Festival's industry arm brought AI video generation, AI music licensing and film-school philosophy into the same room — and nobody agreed on where the lines should sit.
TapNow, an AI creative platform developed by California-based Tamar AI, hosted the session on 7 September during the Venice Production Bridge at Hotel Excelsior. The panel, titled "AI x Cinema: The 10,000 Parallel Universes Initiative," was co-hosted with event organiser Dogme23 and moderated by Sabrina Qin, TapNow's brand lead. Tamar AI also operates Glanze TV, an AI-native streaming platform. The official La Biennale programme listed the session as 18+ (age-restricted), scheduled from 11:30 to 13:00 at Spazio Incontri, co-hosted with HappyHorse, Alibaba Cloud's AI video model. Variety
The panelists spanned the chain from infrastructure to creative practice. Tianshu Zhu, head of global AI product solutions at Alibaba Token Hub, presented HappyHorse, an AI video model designed to address budget and resource constraints in pre-production tasks like storyboarding, 3D character placement and previsualization. Zhu said the tool targets production limitations, not an absence of good stories. Alibaba Token Hub plans to launch HappyHorse 2.0 and a companion tool called HappyHorse Control — described as a "world model" enabling real-time interaction — by the end of September. HappyHorse had teased its Venice appearance days earlier on its official X account, stating it was "not here to talk specs." Variety
Shawn Song, co-founder and CEO of Sonilo, who previously led audio research at TikTok, discussed the company's licensing agreements with Universal Music Group and Sony Music. The deals, Song said, give commercial users confidence to use Sonilo's AI-generated music without publishing disputes, with revenue shared among the publisher, the label and the creator.
Ben Chimoy, GenAI director at PROMPTR and founder of AI Filmmakers Berlin, spent 15 years in traditional filmmaking before shifting to AI video production. He said the transition began while producing fashion films for Zalando. One moment stood out: a client preferred an AI-generated version of a project over the final produced film because it felt more emotional. Chimoy called that unexpected, given AI's reputation for being unemotional.
Barry Dignam, vice dean of FilmEU at IADT and chair of the CILECT European chapter, argued that AI raises the stakes for film education rather than lowering them. Schools should not chase every new tool, he said, because technology changes faster than curricula can be rebuilt. Instead, they need to teach critical thinking and core craft values. AI, in Dignam's view, is not a shortcut to becoming a filmmaker.
TapNow used the panel to introduce its Creator Growth Plan, structured in three tiers. The Experimental Creator tier lets participants publish qualifying work on Tap TV with exposure in more than 100 countries and access to unlimited open compute. The Selected Creator tier requires submitting a portfolio or social media channel for review. The Signed Creator tier is invitation-only, requires a referral from an existing signed creator, and includes a guaranteed monthly minimum, free compute and priority technical support.
The panel closed with a technical presentation on "Primodia," a flagship series in TapNow's "10,000 Parallel Universes" initiative, directed by first-time AI directors Haonan Liu and Yuhang Qiao. Both had studied AI filmmaking for less than a year. Variety
What makes this worth watching is the collision of interests in one room: a tech giant building production tools, a music startup clearing rights with major labels, an educator insisting craft still matters, and a platform signing creators to tiers with guaranteed pay. The Venice Production Bridge has long been where films find financing and distribution. Whether it becomes where AI filmmaking finds its business model is a question the festival calendar will answer over the next year.
