Vincent Soberano sweeps Bali International AI Film Festival
‘In the end, it looked like a one-hour pilot episode but also a full-length feature movie.’
Filipino film director Vincent Soberano added another feather on his cap as his groundbreaking project, Secret Apartment, bagged two of the highest honors at Season 5 of the Bali International AI Film Festival where he took home both the inaugural Bold Vision Award and the festival’s top competitive honor, Gold Award for Best AI Major Motion Picture, beating more than 1,000 entries this year from dozens of countries worldwide.
A master in the action genre, Soberano took his career’s biggest challenge as he initially forayed into dramatic storytelling in Secret Apartment and dipping his artistic fibers in full-length generative AI filmmaking.
With modern Taipei as is his beautiful background, Secret Apartment bridges the opulent penthouses of Taiwan’s billionaire elite with the city’s raw, shadowed underbelly.
With his thematic inspiration coming from Marguerite Duras’ classic The Lover and the 2018 hit rom-com drama Crazy Rich Asians directed by Jon M. Chu and based on the 2013 novel by Kevin Kwan, Soberano’s Secret Apartment chronicles the psychological and sensual exploits of a young university student who embarks on an illicit affair with a commanding real estate tycoon — her older cousin’s fiancé.
Expanding the horizons of AI cinema
The festival first recognized the production with its newly created distinction, the Inaugural BIAIFF Bold Vision Award, established to honor filmmakers who dare to push emerging cinematic tools into uncharted territory.
“The Bali International AI Film Festival is proud to present its first-ever BOLD VISI AWARD to Vincent Casa Soberano’s Secret Apartment,” the festival announced.
Secret Apartment ventures into territory still rarely explored in AI cinema: adult desire, intimacy, social hierarchy, secrecy and the consequences of crossing boundaries we know are there.
To complete the film, Soberano used emerging cinematic tools to examine the intoxicating and sometimes destructive nature of forbidden desire. It is provocative. It is unapologetically adult. And it takes risks.
Creative courage is why BIAIFF has created a new distinction
A seasoned filmmaker with nearly three years experience as an AI video creator, Soberano had originally used AI technology to create storyboards, previsualization videos, pitch decks, sample clips, and VFX elements for post-production.
“I kind of stumbled into creating a full-length movie when I was experimenting with Higgsfield’s Cinema Studio,” Soberano explained. “I gave it a simple prompt for a small scene with a short backstory between two unlikely lovers and it gave me several video clips that would go on to be my inspiration for the movie.”
Using the Higgsfield platform and AI models such as Seedance 2.0, Nano Banana Pro, and Cinema Studio 4, as well as CapCut for AI-enhanced editing and Songer for musical scoring, Soberano single-handedly wrote, directed, generated, edited, and composed the entire 60-minute movie in less than three months.
“I made it in episodic chunks, originally as a miniseries,” he explained. “In the end, it looked like a one-hour pilot episode but also a full-length feature movie.”
With its controversial nature, sexually explicit scenes, and controversial storyline, Soberano felt it would not be well-received in film festivals but he submitted it anyway. The results were surprising to him, as he swept several major awards and accolades.
According to Soberano, creating an AI feature-length erotic romance movie is technologically challenging as it is, Generating sexually explicit scenes is flagged and rejected by all the major AI models, and generating many 15-second clips that would eventually comprise a 60-minute movie without facial, body and wardrobe continuity issues is a huge challenge for AI filmmakers. By developing his own special workflow and toolsets including software apps that he’d built to support the project, Soberano single-handedly solved the problems and challenges that had stopped other AI filmmakers, down to the minute details such as intricate tattoos.
With these victories and accolades, Soberano has found distribution and licensing deals for his movie, and potentially for his other upcoming AI films. Secret Apartment will soon be released in a variety of platforms for AI films including a special version for vertical drama platforms.
Soberano is now working on his next project which he calls “hybrid filmmaking” using real human actors to portray the character roles and AI elements for the rest. His company, Scene 8 Studio, is building a library of AI elements for hybrid filmmaking, which they hope to license the IP to other film producers and studios.