Director Neill Blomkamp has released a 13-minute AI-generated sci-fi short titled Nightborne through his new company Barley Studios. The film, loosely based on Peter Watts' 2014 novel Echopraxia, depicts an American pilot turned into a weaponized zombie through a secret military program called Project Nightborne, set against a US-Syria military conflict.
Every shot in Nightborne was generated using ByteDance's Seedance 2.0 text-to-video model, though the characters' voices and faces are modeled after human actors. Blomkamp described the project as a "test start" meant to showcase generative AI's capabilities and expressed interest in eventually tackling a full feature film using the format.
Critics argue that despite polished editing by Austyn Daines that helps obscure Seedance 2.0's limitation of only generating a few seconds of footage at a time, the short still exhibits hallmarks of AI-generated "slop" and fails to make a compelling case for the future of AI filmmaking.