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Executives from Alibaba Token Hub, Sonilo and PROMPTR joined film educator Barry Dignam at a TapNow-hosted panel during the Venice Film Festival’s Venice Production Bridge to debate AI filmmaking’s creative and economic
impact, capped by a technical breakdown of the AI-generated series “Primodia.”
The panel, titled “AI x Cinema: The 10,000 Parallel Universes Initiative,” was held at Hotel Excelsior and cohosted with event organizer Dogme23. It was moderated by Sabrina Qin, brand lead at TapNow, the AI creative platform developed by California-based Tamar AI, which also operates the AI-native streaming platform Glanze TV. Panelists included Tianshu Zhu, head of global AI product solutions at Alibaba Token Hub; Dignam, vice dean of FilmEU at IADT and chair of the CILECT European chapter; Ben Chimoy, GenAI director at PROMPTR and founder of AI Filmmakers Berlin; and Shawn Song, co-founder and CEO of Sonilo, who previously led audio research at TikTok.
Chimoy, who spent 15 years in traditional filmmaking before moving into AI video, said his shift began while producing fashion films for Zalando. He said a client preferred an AI-generated version of a project over the final produced film because it felt more emotional, a reaction he called unexpected given AI’s reputation for being unemotional.
“For me, AI is actually connecting people, bringing us into the same room to create together,” Chimoy said.
Dignam, representing FilmEU’s network of 50 European film schools, argued that AI raises the stakes for film education rather than lowering them. He said schools should not try to teach every new tool, since the technology changes faster than curricula can be rebuilt.
“I do think we need to teach critical thinking and core values around craft and practice,” Dignam said.
“AI is not a shortcut to becoming a filmmaker. You still have to do the work,” he added.
Zhu said HappyHorse, the AI video generation model built by Alibaba Token Hub, is designed to address budget and resource constraints rather than an absence of good stories, with a focus on pre-production tasks such as storyboarding, 3D character placement and previsualization.
“I really resonated with you that filmmaking is never lacking a good story; it’s the budget, the resources, and obstacles, the languages that’s turning into real challenges,” Zhu said.
He said Alibaba Token Hub plans to launch HappyHorse 2.0 and a companion tool called HappyHorse Control, described as a “world model” enabling real-time interaction, by the end of September.
Song discussed Sonilo’s licensing agreements with Universal Music Group and Sony Music, which he said give commercial users confidence to use the company’s AI-generated music without publishing disputes, with revenue shared among the publisher, label company and creator.
“Not every song is a masterpiece. But every song represents someone’s time, effort, and dedication,” Song said.
TapNow used the panel to introduce its Creator Growth Plan, offering three tiers of entry. An Experimental Creator tier lets participants publish qualifying work on Tap TV, with exposure in more than 100 countries and access to unlimited open compute. A Selected Creator tier requires submitting a portfolio or social media channel for review. A Signed Creator tier is invitation-only, requiring a referral from an existing signed creator, and includes a guaranteed monthly minimum along with free compute and priority technical support.
The panel closed with a technical presentation on “Primodia,” an S-level flagship series in TapNow’s “10,000 Parallel Universes” initiative directed by Haonan Liu and Yuhang Qiao, described as first-time AI directors who had studied AI filmmaking for less than a year. Presenters said TapNow’s tools were used for early concept art and that its Creative OS agent generated video content directly through conversational prompts. A Sonilo representative said its tools helped cut composing time on the project.
“We reduced the composing time from 10 hours to 20 seconds,” the representative said.
Qin closed the session by framing the panel’s broader stakes for the industry.
“AI will not define the taste of future content, but creators will,” she said.
