How Kling AI is enabling filmmakers to achieve more ambitious visuals than time or budget usually allow

 interview and copy written for Screen Daily

article here 

House Of David, the Amazon Prime Video series that launched earlier this year, used Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools to generate dozens of its final shots in the latest sign of the technology’s adoption as a creative tool.

Generative artificial intelligence platform Kling AI was one of the many AI tools indie studio The Wonder Project used on the project.

Jon Erwin, series creator and co-showrunner, has said using AI “allowed us to tell the story in a budget and time frame that we could afford. You can dream in real time and collaborate on the material much quicker”.

AI tools are being widely incorporated across all aspects of professional content creation. Kling AI, the AI-powered creative platform, calls it an “AI plus creator workflow”.

“Kling AI is a tool for creators to help them get more things done that they could not have done before,” says Yushen Zeng, head of operations at Kling AI. “It is your creative partner, enabling directors to enhance their productivity and also to transform the filmmaking process.”

Kling AI is being used to augment workflows in pre-production, production and post-production by everyone from creative agencies for blue-chip brands including Coca-Cola and Nike, to games developers, indie creators and high-end productions for studios and streamers such as Amazon Prime.

In pre-production, Kling AI helps creatives visualise ideas and rapidly iterate storyboards. The technology can generate photoreal video clips such as explosions, car crashes or helicopters for insertion into action-heavy productions. It will also create sound effects, animate characters and synchronise lip movement. In short, the tool enables filmmakers to envision and achieve more ambitious visuals than their time or budget may otherwise allow.

“Our goal is to create a one-stop AI creative suite,” explains Zeng. “From idea to image to final video, you can create it all with Kling AI. We are continually redefining the industry standard to give creators the best quality in terms of image, motion and aesthetics, as well as more control over their video generations.”

Kling AI is empowering the global creative community with promotional and funding initiatives, building what it calls a “creator ecosystem” with campaigns and grant programmes. Its ‘Bring Your Vision to Screen’ initiative, launched in April 2025, received more than 2,000 submissions from 60 countries. Winners were showcased on large public screens in cities including Tokyo, Paris, Hong Kong, Shanghai and Toronto.

Creative transformation

The seven-part anthology series Loading… was created by Kling AI in partnership with the Beijing-based studio Outliers. It transformed the entire creative process by generating scenes and images that are difficult to build using a physical set. Since being distributed globally in July on YouTube, the series has gained 200 million views.

In collaboration with directors including Jia Zhangke and art director Timmy Yip, who won an Academy Award for his work on Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Kling AI released nine AI-generated short films last December, marking one of the first attempts at human-machine co-creation in the film industry.

So confident is Kling AI in its platform that it has a strong presence at events including the Asian Contents & Film Market at Busan International Film Festival, the Tokyo International Film Festival and Mipcom in Cannes.

The technology is currently capable of generating a 10-second video clip in HD and the ultimate goal is to create a full-length video with all sound and imagery generated by AI.

“We are constantly looking to improve the capability of our AI model and to make it as cost-effective for users across the industry as possible,” Zeng says.

Ecosystem building

Kling AI supports a community of more than 45 million content creators and has powered the generation of more than 200 million videos and 400 million images.

“We’ve integrated more than 10 major video-generation models, and videos created with Kling AI outnumber all others combined,” says Joaquín Cuenca Abela, CEO of global creative platform Freepik, an enterprise user of Kling AI. “Kling AI stands out for its fast rendering, highly rapid video generation, precise prompt following, and exceptional camera control.

Freepik is among the more than 20,000 enterprise customers worldwide that Kling AI has gained across various industries.

As a further demonstration of its commitment to building a community of AI filmmakers, Kling AI recently rolled out the Next Gen Creative Contest. The winners of this global competition will be featured at Mipcom, Tokyo International Film Festival and more to empower a new generation of creators to push creative boundaries and shape the future of AI-powered story­telling.

BTS Licorice Pizza

IBC

 

The giddy flow of Paul Thomas Anderson’s comedy romance Licorice Pizza is evident from the first scene in which 15-year-old high schooler Gary flirts with twenty something photography student Alana. 

“We don’t set the characters up or provide any establishing shots of the school. We just launch straight into the movie,” says editor Andy Jurgensen. “Paul and I were keen to keep the momentum going throughout, to propel you through all these stories and retain that youthful quality.” 

Written and directed by Anderson, Pizza is set in the San Fernando Valley, North of LA, like his previous features Boogie Nights, Magnolia and Inherent Vice and in the early seventies just like Boogie Nights and Vice. It’s familiar territory for Anderson who grew up there and is based partly on his own memories and on the early life adventures of his friend Gary Goetzman (who exec-produced Silence of the Lambs and was a one-time waterbed salesman). 

“Paul told me about the script shortly after finishing Phantom Thread,” says Jurgenson. “He had all these ideas bubbling up from talking with Gary Goetzman. The main idea was not specifically about Gary [Valentine, in the film] and Alana and more about how nostalgia and telling stories from memory can be embellished and made up and larger than life. Even the smallest events can become heightened moments.” 

The blurring of reality with fiction is fluid on screen and off. Alana is played by musician Alana Heim in her acting debut for whom Anderson has directed and Jurgenson has cut several pop videos. One of those, in 2017, was called Valentine. Heim in real life and before casting for Pizza once baby sat a 14-year-old Cooper Hoffman (who plays Gary) at the request of Anderson. Cooper Hoffman is the son of the late Philip Seymour Hoffman who was Oscar nominated for Anderson’s The Master. 

“Gary was a friend of the family,” says Jurgenson of the young actor’s relationship to the director. “We’d cast Alana and we’d tested several ‘Garys’ but the more we thought about it the more realised that the Gary Valentine personality had been in and around our cutting room all along. When we screen tested Alana and Cooper you could feel the chemistry was perfect.” 

Heim’s family, including sisters Este and Danielle and father, appear as Alana’s fictional relatives in Licorice Pizza. Anderson also found roles for two of Steven Spielberg’s daughters, Destry Allyn and Sasha Spielberg, and Leonardo DiCaprio’s father George. He wrote scenes loosely modelled on actual events featuring Lucille Ball, William Holden and infamous hairdresser turned Batman producer Jon Peters. The film weaves randomly in and around but never quite part of Hollywood itself. 

“It is a slice of life or a shaggy dog story where we wanted to keep a sense of the unexpected,” Jurgenson says. 

One review has described the film’s style as ‘Bresson meets Ferrell’ though perhaps Truffaut meets Ferrell gives a more appropriate sense of the film’s freewheeling romance and deadpan comedy. 

The touchstones for the film’s look are George Lucas’ American Graffiti which was set in 1962 and released in 1973, and Fast Times at Ridgemont High, a 1982 Brat Pack movie starring Sean Penn who also cameos in Licorice Pizza. 

Anderson emulates 1970s-style filmmaking processes by shooting on 35mm film with vintage glass (he shares cinematography credits with Michael Bauman). Dailies were screened every day, as filmmakers would have done to review footage in the ‘70s before video playback became widespread.  

Like American Graffiti, the film has a pop-strewn soundtrack of tunes from the era including But You're Mine (Sonny & Cher), Barabajagal (Donovan), July Tree (Nina Simone), Peace Frog (The Doors), Paul McCartney’s Let Me Roll It and Bowie’s Life on Mars.  

“We knew there would be a lot of needle drops to capture the energy of American Graffiti and Paul had this big playlist of songs which we’d pull from when building the movie. He would also play certain songs when we watched dailies during the shoot just to read the vibe from the room, including from myself. 

“We used ‘Stumblin In’ (by Susi Quatro) even though its from ‘78 rather than period accurate 1973 just because it felt like the best track for the moment right before Gary and Alana get on the airplane which really jump starts their relationship.” 

He continues, “There’s also a lot of music in the background, on car radios for instance. The tracks we used for the backstage sequences of the story when Gary performs on a variety show was pulled from the actual episode. It’s one of those little easter eggs.” 

The segment featuring Peters, played by Bradley Cooper, could have been pulled from Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time In Hollywood. The situation Alana and Gary find themselves in becomes so unhinged the scene is played for tension as well as laughs. 

“It’s also the one scene where there is no music. Throughout that entire scene when the truck is going backwards there’s no score. Bradley is playing such a loose canon that you don’t know what is going to happen and the lack of sound helps you sense that danger.” 

One of the film’s endearing characteristics is that the young odd couple exhibit a maturity and an integrity which is missing in virtually all the adult characters.  

“The comedy helps carry that. A lot of the adults are terrible people – there’s a womaniser, a crazy coked out actor, a racist. Despite all the fun and games, Alana and Gary are about to know what it’s like to become an adult and face real problems and dangers.” 

Jurgensen began working with Anderson as first assistant editor on Inherent Vice; he became associate editor on Phantom Thread and is the solo editor on Licorice Pizza. Since 2015, he’s also been editor on all of the director’s shorter-form projects including the Jonny Greenwood and Shye Ben Tzur album documentary Junun; the Thom Yorke one-reeler Anima; and music videos for Radiohead. He dubs these music videos “mini movies” and a great way to learn how Anderson likes to work with dailies, cutting and finishing. In postproduction for Pizza they were able to work in a Covid-bubble over winter 2020 which Jurgensen says preserved their creative energy. 

“Perhaps the toughest scene to crack was set in the [oak-panelled bar-restaurant] ‘Tail of the Cock’ when Alana is with Jack Holden (Penn). Gary and his friends enter the scene and we got bogged down in early assemblies with setting up Jack as being drunk and then Gary trying to catch Alana’s eye, meanwhile Tom Waits is talking to the whole bar. We just had to continually pair it down so it worked.” 

The opening sequence wasn’t quite as effortless as it appears either. “As you can tell from his other films, Paul doesn’t like a lot of heavy cutting. He wants to keep the performances intact so he’d try to find two or three perfect takes he can pull from. This scene was shot over two days and we’d initially assembled it from more of a front-on angle which just didn’t feel right. We found a take of Alana and stayed on her facial expressions for a minute, maybe more, before switching to Gary and that just clicked.” 

A scene in which Alana auditions for a talent agent is perhaps the funniest, largely because of the performance of Harriet Sansom Harris.  

“We had two different takes of her, one wider shot and a close-up. Her performance was so powerful on the close-up we built the scene from those and [the close-up] became a motif used in the rest of the film as well. I think it’s her timing and her use of pauses that works so well and that’s not easy to do when there’s no actual audience to perform to on set. When we test screened the film the moment when she’s on the phone and talking about Tatum [O’Neal] and then describes Alana as like an English pit bull dog… the theatre roared with laughter.” 

Video entertainment resilient to economic distress

Streaming Media

article here

Price inflation and wage squeeze are not putting a dampener on ‘TV’ as consumers ratchet up their spend and their time spent on home video entertainment, according to the latest 2025 Video Trends Report from TiVo. The average number of services used by consumers is up too with the average number of FAST channels watched by viewers almost doubling year on year but SVOD churn has increased.

Viewers are now using close to 11 different video sources (it was 9 in 2024), including cable and satellite TV, premium streaming services, social platforms, and free ad-supported options, per TiVo’s report which surveyed consumer habits across the U.S. and Canada during the second quarter this year.  Americans and Canadians are also spending over five hours a day, on average, viewing video content; up from 4.4hrs in Q2 2024.

With these choices, spending on video entertainment has increased. On average, consumers are paying $20-30 more per month than they did last year. The report attributes this to seasonal price increases and the popularity of bundled service offerings for exclusive content available only on select platforms.

Indeed, the data shows that video service bundles continue to gain traction. Tivo, a subsidiary of Xperi, concludes that consumers value the ability to access a diversity of content across multiple services.

“This willingness to spend highlights a strong desire for personalized and high-quality viewing experiences as well as the resiliency of video in these trying economic time,” said Xperi’s chief product and services officer, Geir Skaaden. “Consumers are looking for simplification by increasingly opting into the bundles and platforms that provide the highest-quality content for their household at the best value.”

The TV is overwhelmingly the most preferred device for watching video by almost a 3x margin. This includes a fractional rise in short form content consumed on the larger screen but the report also notes a 5.5% rise in viewing of long form content on cell phones. Three quarters of the survey’s cohort already own a smart TV and 21.6% say they planning to buy a smart TV in the next six months. Of those, 52.8% of respondents are planning to add a new TV to their home and 47.2% are planning to replace a TV.

FAST viewing up

The rise of viewing of FAST channels is an implicit consequence of smart TV penetration. Nearly 70% of respondents report using at least one Free AVOD / FAST service in Q2, an increase of about 8% year-over-year. The average number FAST channels watched has almost doubled to nine this year. Over three quarters of all Free AVOD/FAST viewers noted watching some form of free live streaming TV or FAST channels which in Q2 2025 accounts for roughly 55% the viewing time of all Free AVOD/FAST services. This trend spans news, genre channels (like Westerns) and binge show channels (like Baywatch).

SVOD churn concern

The overwhelming majority of people use SVOD services but at the same time, over a quarter of respondents have cancelled a service in the last six months. Another 28.7% say they started subscribing to a new service in that period. The comparison figures for spring 2024 were 18.5% and 19.2% indicating higher churn.

As expected, the usage of ad-supported versions of SVOD services continues to increase slightly year-over-year with the top three tiers being Peacock (69.3%), Paramount+ (59.7%), and Prime Video (59.1%).

Planned PayTV cancellations over the next six months are also up by 3% with potential cord cutters’ however, this decline has a surprising coda. The report found that the share of respondents who cut the cord but later decided to resubscribe to a traditional pay TV service actually increased by 10% (to 31.9%). This tallies with potential cord cutters’ preference for continuing to watching live TV via a vMVPD streaming service.

Content discovery a challenge

Despite the abundance of content, discovery remains a challenge. Per the report, the number of people relying on commercials for discovery has dropped by 5% since last year, and by over 14% since mid-2022. Instead, audiences are seeking recommendations from friends, social media buzz, online reviews, and algorithm-driven suggestion.

The percentage of respondents who use multiple apps in each viewing session remains high with 73.5% noting that they have to use multiple apps (compared to 72.7% in Q2 2024). Over half of respondents found it annoying to browse multiple apps before settling on something to watch which is up about 3% year-over-year. Excluding Amazon’s IMDB (which is used by 39% of respondents), JustWatch remains the most commonly used companion app.

The report also notes:

AVOD quality believed to have improved: Perceptions of the quality of programming across free services have increased, with AVOD services seeing an 8% jump from Q2 2024. TV Network Apps also jumped 8% according to this metric while the related perception of content on SVOD dropped by 3.5%.

Voice control growing: Voice control awareness and usage has increased. 47% of respondents noted that they currently own an entertainment device that offers voice control, an increase of about 5% since this time last year. Among those whose devices offer voice control, 75.2% of respondents use this feature. This represents a YoY increase of 9%.

Ad tolerance high: Consumers’ ad tolerance has remained largely consistent, with about 75% noting that they are at least tolerant of ads. The biggest complaint is about the volume of ads or frequency of ad breaks consumers have to sit through compared to the amount of actual programme being shown.

Local content shows value:  The importance of local content has increased over the past year, with 61% noting that it is ‘somewhat or very important’ compared to 54.8% YoY. 29.8% of all time spent watching video is spent watching local content, compared to 22.6% in 2023.

SVOD daytime viewing: The report indicates what it describes as ‘the first major shift’ in daytime viewing. The last quarter found that 41.5% of SVOD content is being consumed during primetime, with 15.5% of it watched during the morning, compared to 48.6% and 11% in Q2 2024.