Cinema in AI flux

By Herman M. Lagon

When UP Visayas Professor and Film Director Jonathan Jurilla took the stage at the DOST-hosted AI Fest 2025 at Iloilo Convention Center, he was not there to dazzle the audience with flashy tech tricks. He came to share a story—part family diary, part filmmaking lesson, part creative experiment—that grew out of years of being both a father and a filmmaker. The man behind the Cinemalaya finalist Love Child did not just talk about camera work or film festivals. He spoke about working with a strange new partner—artificial intelligence—that never sleeps, has no ego, but at times, still refuses to follow orders. He described it like teaming up with a moody genius: some days it gives you treasure, other days, nothing but junk. The audience—teachers, artists, coders, researchers, students—leaned in because his words felt lived-in, not just lifted from tech headlines.

Love Child grew from Jurilla’s own journey raising a son with autism. I only caught it when it landed on Netflix, and seeing it then gave me a deeper feel for its heart. Like many indie directors, he faced a big story with a small budget. Instead of cutting back, he took a bold leap. He turned to AI, using it to generate keyframes for 71 sequences—3,028 attempts in total, or about 42 tries for every scene.

It was a test of patience and stubbornness that only artists, or maybe teachers preparing a week-long science experiment or outcomes-based lesson plan, could understand. For him, the process felt like fishing—sometimes you caught a prize, sometimes trash, and sometimes something unexpected that you suddenly could not imagine the film without.

Jurilla’s work with AI followed familiar patterns. First, he tried “precise replication”—crafting ultra-specific prompts, only to get results that looked like distant relatives of what he pictured. Then came “guided exploration,” where broader prompts gave the AI more room, often producing richer visuals. There was “productive deviation,” when AI misunderstood him in ways that sparked better ideas. “Serendipitous discovery” happened less often but felt magical, like finding a missing piece in an old drawer. Finally, “creative synthesis” meant combining parts from different AI outputs into one frame—much like a barangay pooling materials to build a fiesta float. At each stage, control and accident danced together.

But he was quick to point out AI’s limits. It still struggles to keep characters consistent, to capture emotional subtleties, or to sustain a story’s rhythm. It might do wonders for a quick montage—say, MassKara dancers, sugarcane fields, and a SPED classroom—but keeping the same face across 10 scenes? Almost impossible. One minute, the actor’s digital version has a Negrense profile; in the next, the features have shifted entirely. In a Pinoy classroom, he joked, that is like “palit-ulo” during group work—when the person presenting changes halfway through.

Behind the quick quip was a serious reminder: AI can open doors for filmmakers from Iloilo to Samar, from Batanes to Jolo, letting them create scenes once possible only with big-city budgets. A young filmmaker can test a sunset scene without expensive equipment. A public school can create a documentary without traveling far for stock footage. But, the unassuming Jurilla stressed, visuals are only the surface of cinema. The soul still comes from people. Film scholar David Bordwell has said that great films endure because they carry human insight, not just technical tricks. In classroom terms, AI might be the latest projector, but it cannot replace the contemporary teacher, at least for now.

He also touched on something many creatives feel but rarely put into words: humility when working with a machine. “Prompt engineering,” also known as “prompting skills,” the bemedaled film maker explained, is not just about writing better instructions—it is about patience, openness, creativity, humanity, and adaptability. Anyone who has coached a school play, run a barangay meeting, or handled a classroom knows this skill. You plan, but you make space for surprises, adjusting without losing sight of your goal. In one case, AI may give you a warped hospital corridor that looked wrong. At first, you may discard it. Later, you worked it into a dream sequence, capturing the parents’ disorientation after their child’s diagnosis.

But openness doesn’t mean letting go of control. AI, Prof. Jurilla said, is like a quick, resourceful, but inexperienced assistant—brilliant at times, but lacking the lived experience to make emotional choices. Left alone, it can churn out pretty but empty visuals. In the same way, a bright student still needs a teacher’s guidance. For the creatives, he urged, AI should be shaped by the story, not the other way around.

His reflections echo a bigger truth about technology in the country. Every new tool—from online banking to virtual classrooms—comes with big promises. But its value depends on how people use it. AI in filmmaking works the same way. Without ethics, local perspective, context, nuance, and a clear purpose, it risks becoming just another imported gadget. Local detail—the sound of Hiligaynon in dialogue, the feel of an Iloilo sunrise—cannot be typed into existence unless someone has lived it. UNESCO has warned that tech-driven art can erase local culture if it is detached from its community roots.

By the end of his 12-minute research presentation or pitch, Ilonggo artist Jurilla had framed AI-assisted filmmaking as both opportunity and challenge. The opportunity is access: a UP Visayas graduate can now create worlds rivaling those of big studios. The challenge is discipline: knowing when to trust the machine and when to take back the reins. He urged filmmakers to demand better tools from tech companies, but also to sharpen their storytelling instincts, noting how the grind of creating thousands of frames taught him more than any single “perfect” image could. For him, AI is not the future of cinema—it is a new tool in the long history of human creativity.

Leaving the venue, it was hard not to see the parallels with teaching, parenting, apostolic or community work. You have the plan, then you have what actually happens. The magic often happens in the space between, but control keeps you from drifting too far. For Prof. Jurilla, that anchor was always his story—a love letter to parents raising children in a world that often misunderstands them. For the rest of us, whether holding a camera, a chalk, or a barangay budget, it is the same balance. The tools may change, but the heart of the story never should.

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Doc H fondly describes himself as a lifelong learner who, like many others, dreams of a more life-giving and purpose-driven world built on justice, reflection, and joy. His views do not necessarily reflect those of the institutions he serves.