At the University of Southern California’s School of Cinematic Arts, 29-year-old Chinese student SiJia Zheng dreams of one day winning an Academy Award. And thanks to advances in artificial intelligence, he sees a faster way to get there.
Zheng has been exploring AI animation, creating his seven-minute short film “Torment” about a masked killer in a high school. The film, which screened at the LA Shorts festival, was generated entirely with AI in just one week. He filmed himself in front of a green screen and used software to transform his face into all the different characters. AI also allowed him to set the story in an Asian school and shoot scenes in a swimming pool—something that would have been prohibitively expensive with traditional filmmaking.
“As a student, it’s impossible to have that much money,” Zheng said.
While some filmmakers remain skeptical—like Guillermo del Toro, who refuses to use AI—Zheng sees it as a tool, not a replacement for creativity. “AI is just a tool, and people can use it to become even better,” he said. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, which oversees the Oscars, updated its rules last year to remain neutral on AI, stating that generative AI neither helps nor harms a filmmaker’s chances of nomination.
At USC, professors like Debra Isaac are helping students navigate the ethical use of AI. She points out that AI isn’t inherently lazy or exploitative if trained responsibly. For example, graduate Xindi Zhang, who won a Student Academy Award for her short “The Song of Drifters”, fed dozens of her own drawings into an AI model to stylize shots of the cities in her film, speeding up production that could have taken years. Even then, she spent nearly a month refining specific scenes.
“Good, cheap, and fast will never happen, no matter what tool you use,” Zhang said.
For students like Zheng, AI opens doors to ambitious projects without the huge budgets traditional filmmaking requires—but it still demands skill, creativity, and ethical use to truly succeed.
