On a packed morning commute, a dozing man, frayed by overwork and crushing pressure, turns into a giant worm. Apart from a few passengers who recoil in fear or surprise, the majority remain drowsy and indifferent. The worm, however impossible to miss, is shoved, bumped, and pushed around with everyone else in the stifling subway car.
This is a scene from the short film Worm Train screened at the Asian Contents & Film Market (ACFM) during the 31st Busan International Film Festival (BIFF). The latest endeavor from prominent South Korean director and writer Sung-Soo Kim, the film was inspired by Franz Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis”. Unlike Gregor Samsa who is confined to his room after transforming into a huge insect, the protagonist still has to go to work, a dark and bleak absurdity that lays bare the alienation, isolation, and hypocrisy of modern life.
Kim started the project in February but halted in March because of that very cramped subway scene. “At the time, AI could generate a giant insect but couldn’t precisely capture its physical collisions with passengers and the chain of reactions that followed,” he said at a panel dedicated to AI and filmmaking at ACFM. He didn’t resume production until late September, when the latest Kling 4.0 model allowed him to generate continuous motion between frames and better control character movement, scene transitions, and the progression of shots.
A veteran in South Korean commercial cinema whose hits include Musa and 12.12: The Day, Worm Train was the first film where Kim applied this technology that had been in the film industry for a decade. By folding AI into his conventional production workflow, one centered on the director’s creative vision and collaboration with specialists across disciplines, he found AI was directable and viable. “Technology can present everything we imagine, but it is we who give meaning and value to those cinematic images,” he said.
“What makes cinema more cinematic in the age of AI?” Kim posed at the two-hour panel titled “New Cinematic Possibilities: Reimagining Filmmaking with Kling AI,” held on Sunday. Across the four filmmakers present, the answer seemed broadly consistent: human vision, and technology brought under its direction.
For Sang Wook Lee, now leading MBC C&I’s AI section, it was more about finding how far AI-generated content can go while remaining engaging and acceptable to audiences. He brought Rendering Love, a microdrama series powered by Kling AI and co-developed with Barunson E&A, the production company behind Oscar-winning film Parasite.
The K-pop romantic comedy follows the virtual idol group LEVRIT with their real identities hidden and a female fan who sees through them. “The work itself is about the boundary between virtual and real, so our production followed the same boundary: We use live action for the real world and AI to generate LEVRIT’s stage performances,” he said, adding that Kling’s Motion Control was instrumental in transferring the movements filmed with real performers to the virtual characters before blending them into the live-action story.
Harry Hyun, director of Netflix Korean hit Crypton Man, agreed that the “boundary” was key to the hybrid pipeline. The director and founder of creative content startup MooAm introduced a new IP, Natasha, a 100-minute period romance thriller inspired by Baek Seok’s poem “Me and Natasha and a White Donkey.” In this film, live-action shooting was used for character-driven scenes where nuanced performances are essential while costly setting such as the snowstorm in 1944 and large crowd scenes were generated with Kling.
Kling tools including All-in-One Reference, V2V, 10-bit HDR output, and support for up to 10 keyframes as control points in the 4.0 model were all integral to the production. “By setting up to 10 keyframes as control points, we can guide changes in a character’s state and key story beats according to the director’s intent,” she cited an example.
The discussion also extended into the cinematic presentation of long-form feature animation with Chinese director Wei Li’s Born of the Tides. Having more than 20 years of experience in animation, Li’s credits include Lotus Lantern, Jiang Ziya: Legend of Deification, and Big Fish & Begonia. For Born of the Tides, he, for the first time, infused AI tools into traditional animation methods he has worked with for decades. “For animation, AI lowers the cost of trial and error, giving niche stories that were once difficult to present a chance to be realized at a high quality,” he said.
The 105-minute film spans more than 2,350 shots and 200 characters. “At this scale, wide shots were almost impossible in the past because faces rendered too small could lose definition on the big screen,” he explained. “Kling’s native 4K video generation helps render large-scale sequences such as the dragon-boat race and the fish market explosion for the big screen.”
Across the panel, both established filmmakers once wary of AI and creators building hybrid pipelines seemed to land on a similar view: AI is increasingly becoming something directors can direct, serving their imagination, folding into their workflow, and expanding their cinematic expression. That is, perhaps, what makes cinema more cinematic.
“One day, the term ‘AI film’ itself may fade,” Kim said. “Just as we no longer make a point of calling films ‘talkies’ or ‘color movies,’ what remains ultimately is cinema. And the ones creating it will still be us.”