T.E., a short film made in 48 hours

A short film in 48 hours

The contest started on Saturday 26 April 2025 at 16:00 Finnish time. Our team was Leandro Righini from MXM, Pascal Righini from Big Ears, and Antti Ahokoivu, a freelance director of photography, editor and AI enthusiast. We had two days to come up with the idea, generate the film and deliver it.

Following the Gen:48 rules, we chose from Runway’s prompts: a lost creature, a desert and a jar of eyeballs. From these came the story of T.E., told mainly through pictures.

We spent the first six hours on story ideas. They ranged from a time traveller hunting his double to a man who eats his friend’s sandwich and then, without knowing it, drives to his death, all in a single shot.

Then we worked on the characters, the visual style and the workflow. This took all of Saturday night, including six hours testing a workflow with its own user interface, which in the end did not suit us. On Sunday we started building the scenes: first the keyframes, then the video, all made in Runway.

Every shot made with AI

All the pictures and footage in T.E. were generated with Runway’s tools. Runway’s reference feature, new at the time, was key: it kept the look consistent under time pressure. There was no time for much refinement, so we used the tools as efficiently as we could to finish within the 48 hours.

We edited the film in DaVinci Resolve, with only light colour grading: enough to make the shots look like one film, within the time limit.

What we learned

Gen:48 was a practical way to test what AI filmmaking could do at the time. It showed what a small, focused team can make in a short time with the right tools.

In our Lab we wrote about the tools, where the characters changed from shot to shot, and what a marketing team can take from it: Making a short film in 48 hours.