“Some days I’m really excited about the possibilities,” says Finnish producer Aleksi Hyvärinen. “The next day, I’m like, ‘Wait, is this even a good thing?’”
That tension, between optimism and unease, set the tone for a two-day workshop at this year’s Amman International Film Festival, where Hyvärinen led a session titled AI and Filmmaking: A Grounded Guide as part of the festival’s Amman Film Industry Days program. Hyvärinen, who co-founded The Alchemist, a Nordic creative studio combining storytelling and AI to create “emotionally intelligent” content for film, TV and branded media, guided the workshop that skipped coding and tech demos in favor of a far more nuanced goal: getting real about what AI means for the future of storytelling.
“It turned into two days of discussion,” Hyvärinen recalls. “We didn’t dive into generating videos or learning software. That’s not where the real urgency lies. What people needed was context, grounding, and space to reflect.”
Hyvärinen, who has produced films like “The Twin,” “Lake Bodom,” and Netflix’s “Hold Your Breath: The Ice Dive,” has hosted similar AI sessions across Europe, including in Croatia, Cyprus, Finland, the Netherlands, and, now, Jordan.
While each group brings a different cultural backdrop, the spectrum of reactions is surprisingly consistent: “Some were ready to dive in. Some were totally skeptical. Most were like me: living in the grey zone, just trying to figure it out.”
Yet no matter the stance, one takeaway keeps surfacing: “People leave saying, ‘I need to know more about this.’ Whether they love AI or fear it, they know it’s not going away.”
Reactions to AI
That urgency resonated with many in the room.
“Before the workshop, I had a medium level of familiarity with AI tools, mostly out of curiosity,” said Anwaar Al-Shawabkeh, a Jordanian filmmaker (“Start Now”). “But those two days truly shifted my perception! After going through the tools with Aleksi, I felt it had become true and there is no way to avoid it.”
One moment that struck her: how casually participants began referring to AI as “he.” “It made me reflect on how this technology might evolve, and how our kids may see it entirely differently. No one asked us if we wanted this change and no one will. It’s coming!”
While she expressed some ethical concern, particularly around the lack of clear terms in creative industries, Al-Shawabkeh ultimately sees AI as a natural next step. “As happened 50 years ago in red editing rooms, what used to take hours will soon be done with one click. I plan to use AI in my future work. With careful thought and experience, I believe it will enhance the creative process in powerful ways.”
Her main takeaway for fellow indie filmmakers? “Don’t panic. AI is just a new tool. We need to explore both its strengths and limitations to truly understand its place in our work, and in the world to come.”
Mohammed AlQaq, Aleksi Hyvärinen, Anwaar Al-Shawabkeh
Courtesy of Mohammed AlQaq, Aleksi Hyvärinen, Anwaar Al-Shawabkeh
How AI Is Reshaping Workflow
One of the workshop’s central goals was to demystify how AI is actually being used in filmmaking and to draw a sharp line between what’s possible now and what remains hype.
Participants explored tools like Google Veo and Google Flow, as well as 4D Gaussian Splatting, an astonishing new method that allows filmmakers to create 3D environments from just a few flat images. “You can shoot a simple 2D scene,” Hyvärinen explains, “and later reframe it, change the camera angle, zoom in. It becomes a full 3D model.”
But it wasn’t just the flashy stuff. A significant part of the workshop focused on non-generative AI, tools that don’t create new media but help organize and accelerate existing workflows. Think AI for de-rushing 300 hours of raw documentary footage, automatically cataloging dialogue and scenes.
“It’s often overlooked in the ethical conversation,” he says. “While non-generative AI tools aren’t free from ethical or copyright concerns, they typically don’t carry the same weight or creative implications as generative AI.”
Still, he’s realistic. Entry-level jobs, like assistant editors, may be among the first to go. “It’s not necessarily better, it’s just cheaper and faster. And that’s usually how the world works.”
That question of authorship also resonated with participants, especially around the issue of control.
“Before the workshop, I thought I completely rejected the idea of AI taking the place of my mind or my creativity,” said Mohammed AlQaq, Palestinian-Jordanian artist, performer, and filmmaker. “I wanted to use it only to save time, but not to save my creativity.”
But by the end of the two days, his stance had shifted slightly. “I still hold that opinion, but I’ve also changed. I realized that even in creative work, I can still be in control.”
AlQaq pushed back on one participant who expressed fear about AI’s role in filmmaking: “I felt that discussion was a bit dramatic. There’s no need to be afraid. This is a tool, not a threat.”
Still, concerns remain. “I’ll continue to have concerns about copyright, and I’ll always have questions filled with fear: Will I truly own all the rights? Will these tools one day deceive me and say I have to pay huge sums to obtain them?”
His takeaway? “AI is just another tool, an assistant, and I will always be the director.”
AI: A Cost-Cutter When the Industry Faces Budget Constraints
When asked where he draws the line between assistance and authorship, Hyvärinen cites a fellow Finnish writer, Katri Manninen, who compares AI to having a human assistant in a Hollywood writers’ room.
“If you’d credit a human for that level of input, then AI shouldn’t be doing it either,” he says emphatically. “You can’t let it cross that creative line.”
That said, he uses it often as a brainstorming partner. “It’s amazing at surfacing ideas quickly. But once you dig in, you see it’s generic. There’s no voice. No point of view. Storytelling is all about point of view.”
Coming from Finland, Hyvärinen is no stranger to budget constraints. That’s why he believes indie filmmakers might have the most to gain, as long as they approach AI strategically.
“There are stories we never even pitched because we knew we couldn’t afford them,” he says. “Now? Maybe we can. Maybe we don’t need $10 million. Maybe we can make it for $500K and still pull it off.”
What does Hyvärinen imagine the industry will look like in 2029? He envisions a split: high-end, handcrafted cinema on one end, and fast-turnaround, AI-enhanced content, think telenovelas or streaming serials, on the other. “We might be shooting actors in green screen studios, generating environments, tweaking wardrobe, faces, dialogue, even camera angles. All of that in post-production.”
Still, he believes core creative work will remain human, particularly acting, direction, and story. “But the rest? Location scouting, production design, maybe even some editing, that’s going to shift.”
And while he compares the shift to past transformations like digital cinematography, nonlinear editing, and the rise of the Internet, he’s under no illusion that this will be a smooth ride.
“It’s going to be partly great and partly painful. Like the internet in the 2000s, or electricity in the early 1900s, we can guess a few things, but we have no idea what’s really coming.”