How AI Is Rewiring Filmmaking, And Why Craft Still Wins

When a Ukrainian drone mission destroyed Russian bombers last year, most news outlets covered it with standard footage and talking heads. Samir Mallal and Bouha Kazmi saw a spy thriller waiting to be told. Within days, they produced a cinematic news piece that would have cost millions using traditional filmmaking methods.

Mallal and Kazmi are co-founders of OneDay, a “director-led AI entertainment studio built on craft and creative excellence.” With 40 years of combined experience in documentary, commercials and music videos, they’re not tech enthusiasts disrupting an industry they don’t understand. They’re seasoned filmmakers using AI to overcome constraints that have limited creative expression for over a century. They are also raising funds right now to scale the studio, expand their slate, and push further into director-led AI storytelling while keeping craft at the center.

The Democratization Of Creative Vision

"AI gave us the allowance to prototype a lot of these concepts to understand which ones are worth exploring," Kazmi explains. In traditional filmmaking, you pitch hundreds of ideas and hope one gets funded. With AI, you can test and iterate rapidly before committing significant resources.

One of their recent films, set in Tehran, demonstrates this perfectly. You literally cannot shoot there as a Western production company, and the budget for the aircraft and production design they envisioned would be astronomical. AI removed those barriers, enabling stories that would otherwise remain trapped in a notebook.

The Human Layer Remains Essential

OneDay’s approach deliberately preserves the human elements of craft. For their Tehran project, they ran a full casting process and brought actors in for an afternoon of performance work. "We had the actors in the same room. We had a script that they were using as part of the scenes, but we also let them improvise," Kazmi notes. Those performances were integrated into AI-generated characters, creating emotional authenticity that synthetic voices alone couldn’t match.

They collaborated with a member of Arcade Fire for original music and meticulously crafted the sound mix, treating every element with the same attention as a major studio production. "AI has no taste or point of view," Kazmi observes. "The creative spark still comes from human beings."

This represents a sophisticated understanding of where AI excels and where human judgment remains irreplaceable. Technology handles visual generation while humans provide taste, timing, emotional nuance and narrative structure.

The Iterative Advantage

AI’s "plastic" nature allows constant iteration. "We can change one thing at the end, even," Mallal explains. "We’re not stuck with things." In conventional filmmaking, fixing a scene means organizing a reshoot with all its logistical nightmares. With AI, if you realize a scene needs a different emotional tone, you simply regenerate it.

This shift from linear to iterative production mirrors changes across technology-driven industries. The result is a more organic creative process where the best ideas can emerge throughout production rather than being locked in at the script stage.

Navigating The Backlash

When Coca-Cola and McDonald's released AI-generated commercials, backlash was swift, and McDonald's pulled their ads amid criticism about job displacement and devalued creative work.

Mallal acknowledges the concerns. "Artists are correct that copyright is a foundational aspect of an artist’s value." He supports establishing industry standards to address how models have been trained on copyrighted work.

But he sees parallels to previous technological disruptions. "This exact same thing happened in America in the eighties with globalization and automation." The difference is that it’s now affecting white-collar workers and creatives who haven’t experienced this before.

His advice is pragmatic. The most powerful companies in history are moving forward regardless of protests. "Whether we like it or not, it’s happening. I feel like it’s probably better served to look at this and go, okay, how can I position myself for what’s coming?"

The creative industry sentiment has already shifted. Major studios are cutting deals with AI companies. Directors like James Cameron, now on Stability AI’s board, are embracing the technology.

Skills For The AI Era

Mallal doesn’t think anyone will need to explicitly learn AI. "Every single thing will have AI in it, so you won’t need to talk about it," he predicts. Instead, valuable skills will be fundamentally human: the ability to communicate and relate to people in person, creativity and good judgment.

He’s teaching his children to be generalists rather than specialists. In an AI-powered world, flexibility becomes more valuable than deep specialization in a single technical skill that AI might soon handle better than any human.

Rethinking What Film Means

Mallal’s most provocative point is about the future of "filmmaking" itself. When asked to describe it in three words, his first answer is "non-existent." He’s making a point about how the medium defines the art form. Film became a two-hour format because of technical limitations, the physical reels that could be loaded into projectors.

"If that’s no longer the case, why would we continue making those kinds of things?" If content becomes personalized, interactive or fundamentally non-linear, it’s something new entirely. Calling it a movie would be "an offense to cinema."

Breaking Down Barriers

Mallal sees AI as potentially democratizing for creators locked out of traditional systems. As a person of color navigating an industry that hasn't meaningfully changed its power structures, he views disruption as overdue. "When I look around, and I see people who work in the business, it's all the same people. There's a lot of lip service about we want things to change, but I don't see that change."

If AI democratizes access to production capabilities, it could bypass gatekeepers who have historically determined which stories get told. The technology doesn’t care about your connections or film school pedigree.

The Pace Of Change

Mallal uses the iPhone analogy: last year we were at iPhone 3 in AI capabilities, now we’re at iPhone 6 or 7, next year we’ll be at iPhone 10 or 12. This exponential progression makes prediction nearly impossible.

What seems certain is that timelines will shrink and more content will flood the market. Kazmi argues that the scarce ingredient is still human originality: “It’s really important that people keep creating because the ideas need to originate from somewhere. If the focus stays on inception, there’ll be some exciting projects to consume.”

Craft Above All

What ultimately comes through is Mallal and Kazmi’s deep respect for craft. "Story development, concepting, character development, we’re still writing a script," Kazmi emphasizes. "We’re testing these and getting responses. We then go through creative direction where we’re deciding what a scene looks like, what the tone is, what the lighting looks like, what the characters are. All of these come into play way before we get anywhere near a keyboard."

The technology accelerates execution and removes logistical barriers, enabling iteration that would be impossible in traditional production. But it doesn’t replace the fundamental work of storytelling: understanding character, structure, pacing, emotion and what makes a moment resonate.

In a world where anyone can generate content, the premium on genuine craft may actually increase. AI gives you production value. The human brings everything that transforms that into art worth experiencing. The directors who thrive will maintain their artistic sensibility while embracing new capabilities, understanding that tools have changed, but the fundamental work of storytelling remains deeply human.