The clock is soft. Someone still made it.
Submit a Film Scroll into the afternoon ↓
The clock is soft. Someone still made it.
Submit a Film Scroll into the afternoon ↓The Night
There is a painting by Dalí where a clock has gone soft in the afternoon. It does not stop telling time; it simply tells it the way a memory does.
That painting is more or less the temperature we are aiming for on the night of July 31. We are calling it the AI New York Awards because it is, in the most literal sense, an awards show. It is also a small, slow, slightly strange evening in a working space on West 29th Street called Cre8ive NYC. Only a small number of people will be in the room. We have done this deliberately.
The whole event is built on the conviction that the films we are showing this year deserve to be watched somewhere quieter than a festival hall and stranger than a screening room. They do not belong to a single genre, and we are not going to pretend they do. Some feel like a half-remembered dream you had three Christmases ago. One is about a man slowly turning into a window. One is about a city of horses. There is a piece in the program that we still cannot describe to each other, and we have stopped trying.
A great deal of cinema made with AI is mistaken for the medium itself. We are interested in the films where there is a person underneath.
People look at the surface and confuse it with the work. A point of view. A reason for the cut. A handwriting that emerges across the runtime, even when the hand was assisted by a machine. The Dalí reference is not decorative. It is the point. The clock is soft, but it is still a clock, and someone still made it.
Most festivals say this quietly or not at all. We say it loudly: the short-form work being made right now in those two formats is where the most invention is actually happening. A ninety-second spec ad with a real idea inside it can sit beside a twenty-minute narrative in this program and earn the same screen, the same room. If you have made a music video that actually moves with the song, or a commercial for a product that should not exist, send it. It will be looked at carefully and probably twice.
We accept work made on any current model or stack, including the ones that did not exist last quarter.
Generative platforms come and go; the ones that matter on July 31 will not be the ones that mattered when we wrote this sentence. We are equally happy to receive films made entirely in a generative pipeline and films made by combining generation with traditional cinematography, animation, editing, and sound.
What we will not accept, and want to be honest about, is a sequence of generated images set to a needle drop and submitted as a film. That is a mood board with a soundtrack. Send us a film.
The Room
The night is hosted at Cre8ive NYC because it is a room that has not forgotten what work feels like. Concrete walls. High ceilings. A light that turns slightly purple after nine. Doors open at six. Films play in waves throughout the evening, with the awards landing toward the back end of the program.
There will be no panel. No moderator with a clipboard. There will be a few short conversations with filmmakers between blocks, conducted by us, badly, and on purpose. The point is the room, not the choreography. You will leave with images that stay with you for a few days, and maybe a quiet sense that something is shifting in a medium you thought you understood.
For the AI era of cinema. Awarded to people, not to files. Six honors handed across the back half of the night, in a room turning slowly purple.
The piece that altered the temperature of the room. The top honor of the night.
For the filmmaker whose authorship was visible in every frame, no matter what tools rendered it.
Our most loudly contested category: the strongest short-form piece, music video, brand film, ad spec, or something between.
For the score, sound design, or audio work that finished the picture and made it whole.
For the filmmaker whose pipeline, model stack, or self-built process is itself a work of craft.
For the hardest task in the medium: a character who remains a character across a full runtime.
The Rules
Submissions are accepted at runtimes from thirty seconds to twenty-five minutes. We are sensitive to padding and will gently downgrade work that lingers past its natural end.
AI must play a meaningful role, at any stage: generation, animation, editing, sound, writing, visual effects, or any combination. Describe its role honestly in a short process note. Three or four sentences is enough. The note is for the record and the audience, not for an audit.
All forms of short film are welcome, with explicit enthusiasm for music videos, commercials, brand films, and ad spec. Narrative, documentary, animated, experimental, surrealist, and forms we do not yet have a name for are all eligible.
The submission must be a coherent piece of work. We are not in the business of programming randomness, however visually attractive. The film must hold together as a film.
You must hold the rights to all material in your submission, including any training data not in the public domain or properly licensed. If you are uncertain about any element, raise it with us before submitting rather than after.
Deepfakes of real people are not permitted without written consent from the depicted individual. This rule does not bend.
If your film was made with a team, credit every collaborator, including the tools and models that contributed meaningfully. Hidden contributors are grounds for removal from the program.
One submission per creator or team per cycle. Selection grants us the right to screen your film on July 31 and include a short clip in our recap. Beyond that, all rights remain with you.
The clock is soft.
Someone still made it.
July 31 · Doors at 6 · Cre8ive NYC · 134 West 29th Street · Manhattan