Paul Trillo

Art school, After Effects and a $10K multiverse

Paul Trillo went to art school rather than film school, and taught himself After Effects in high school^[42]. He started out around 2009 making music videos and comic shorts for YouTube and Vimeo, for acts such as Lazer Sword, Low Limit and Teebs, alongside freelance work for Google Creative Lab^[61]. Short of the Week was featuring his shorts by 2010^[60].

His breakout was A Truncated Story of Infinity, made for Nokia Brand Labs' Everyday Adventure series on a budget of about $10,000^[10]. One ordinary day in the life of a man called Vincent splinters across the infinite variations of the multiverse, built in camera with cloud tanks, smoke bombs and match cuts rather than computer graphics^[10][63]. Shot in 2012 and released in July 2014, it has more than 418,000 plays on Vimeo^[10][11].

Ideally the technique starts to disappear into the story.

Paul Trillo^[14]

Rigs nobody else had built

For Nokia he also built the Arc of Wonder, a ten-foot mobile bullet-time rig of 50 Lumia 1020 phones, and used it to freeze moments in 360 degrees for Living Moments, which had nearly 350,000 YouTube views within weeks in 2014^[17]. According to Stash, Living Moments was shortlisted for the D&AD Next Director Awards and won Best Mobile Film at the One Screen Festival, and in 2015 he won The One Show's One to Watch award^[16].

The ideas kept coming from the camera itself. The Life and Death of an iPhone told a phone's life from its own point of view^[49]. The Irrational Fear of Nothing, for Olympus, followed a neurotic man through Manhattan on a body-mounted snorricam, and Stash reports the Olympus film was a Tribeca X Award finalist^[48][16]. Then came At the End of the Cul-de-Sac in April 2017: ten minutes in one unbroken drone shot, in which a man's public meltdown turns a suburban dead end into a stage for public shaming^[12][13]. He planned it in Cinema 4D with 3D actors and computer voices, rehearsed for three days, flew a DJI Inspire 1 with a Zenmuse X5 camera with the drone team Aerobo, and re-recorded the dialogue in a studio^[13][14][62]. It premiered as a Vimeo Staff Pick Premiere, screened at Palm Springs International ShortFest and now has more than 337,000 plays^[12][15].

Music videos, satire and a lockdown black hole

Through the late 2010s he moved between music videos, commercials and his own shorts. Bas's Fragrance borrowed the look of David Hockney's photo joiners^[44], The Brain and You belonged to his satirical series Alt America^[45], and in April 2020 Until There Was Nothing spun repurposed drone footage into a black hole to the words of Alan Watts^[43]. That September, The Shins' The Great Divide, made in CGI with Hunters House, became his most watched music video: it has passed 3 million views on The Shins' YouTube channel^[38][37].

In May 2021 he signed with ArtClass for US commercial representation, by which point, Stash reported, 11 of his original shorts and documentaries had screened at festivals including Cannes, Tribeca and Palm Springs, and he had 17 Vimeo Staff Picks^[16]. His 2026 SIGGRAPH bio puts the Staff Picks at 21^[40]. Commercial work has included Carvana's Oversharing Mom spot for Super Bowl LVI^[46].

Early to generative video

Trillo was one of the first directors to make a narrative film with generative video. Thank You For Not Answering, released in April 2023, was made with Runway Gen-2 while it was still in private beta: he generated storyboard stills locally in Automatic1111, fed them to Gen-2 for four-second clips across more than 400 generations, and built the voice from about 60 clips in ElevenLabs^[18][19][20]. He called Gen-2 the strangest experience he had had creating video, yet still told shots he believed there is infinitely more value in working with real actors^[18][19]. He went on to judge Runway's AI Film Festival^[66].

Jacques's Absolve, in October 2023, put that thinking inside a real shoot at the Louvre: a leak in the ceiling pulls the singer into a vortex where a cosmic teardrop dissolves the masterpieces, made with Stable Diffusion img2img and Luma AI NeRF captures over the live-action footage^[21][22]. In April 2024 his two-screen installation Notes to My Future Self opened in the Windows to the Future exhibition at Espacio Fundación Telefónica in Madrid, with Stable Diffusion backdrops used as the on-set lighting reference, upscaled to 8K with Magnific, Krea and Topaz^[23][24][58]. Between them came E P H E M E R A, a Gen-2 experiment on the line that permanence is a human construct^[59].

Sora and The Hardest Part

When OpenAI showed what its first artists had made with Sora on 25 March 2024, Trillo was one of them, with The Golden Record, a teaser built from 11 Sora generations^[8][9]. He wrote that Sora was at its most powerful bringing new and impossible ideas to life rather than replicating the old^[9]. OpenAI's own YouTube upload of the teaser has passed 80,000 views, and a Reddit repost of the clip OpenAI released of his work, titled "Hollywood director made this with sora", drew 1,767 upvotes in r/OpenAI^[70][73]. TED then commissioned him to imagine its next 40 years with Sora; TED's upload has more than 49,000 YouTube views^[72][71].

On 2 May 2024 Washed Out released The Hardest Part, the first officially commissioned music video made with Sora^[5][51][52]. It is one endless forward zoom through a couple's life, from school to marriage to loss, an idea Trillo had carried for about a decade with no way to shoot it^[6][3]. He wrote prompts of more than a thousand words, generated about 700 clips, used 55 and cut them in Premiere^{[5][7][64][65]}. It travelled further on his own X account than on the band's channel: his two posts of it passed 1 million views between them, against 456,000 on Washed Out's YouTube upload^[67][68][4].

I leaned into the hallucinations and Sora's dream logic to explore memories that never existed.

Paul Trillo^[3]

The video drew criticism as well as praise. Trillo told Rolling Stone that whatever time you save generating the shots, you end up putting elsewhere^[7]. That summer The Hardest Part won the Golden Nica in the first ever AI in Art category at Prix Ars Electronica, and was shown at the Prix exhibition at the Lentos Kunstmuseum in Linz in September 2024^[2]. He has since talked through the process at Screen International's AI Creative Summit and on the Ars Electronica Festival Podcast^[50][53].

A chapter on the Sphere

On 14 September 2024 he directed Chapter VI, Mexico Today and Tomorrow, the final film of For Mexico, For All Time, created by Carlos López Estrada and narrated by Gael García Bernal for UFC 306, Noche UFC, on the Sphere in Las Vegas^[25]. In his chapter a woman leaps from the shadows and soars into an imagined future Mexico City^[25]. For Mexico, For All Time went on to win two Sports Emmys at the 46th Sports Emmy Awards in May 2025^[26][27]. Paul directed a chapter of the winning work; he did not personally win an Emmy.

Asteria, and models trained on licensed data

In December 2024 Deadline reported that Trillo had joined Asteria, Bryn Mooser's AI film studio, as a strategic partner to lead its artist-focused approach to AI^[1]. Asteria later merged with Moonvalley, whose Marey model is trained on licensed data, and on The Cinematography Podcast Trillo described AI as a set of forking paths, with different people approaching it in different ways^[30].

It's not about turning production into a cheap factory line.

Paul Trillo^[1]

The Asteria work blends AI into traditional craft. Cuco's A Love Letter To LA, with the artist Paul Flores, fused 2D animation with trained AI ink-and-paint and style transfer, made by a team of more than 20^[28][57][29]. Try Again Later, in January 2025, was a short made with Google's Veo 2^[47]. For Aston Martin Aramco's Formula 1 team and CoreWeave he made a launch film for the Las Vegas race with a team of more than 25, combining miniatures, AR blocking, 3D tracking and painted keyframes with a custom model trained on Marey, so that every curve and logo of the car stayed exact^[31][54]. Etherea, released in January 2026, turns the dancers Hokuto Konishi and Erica Klien into living clouds^[32].

Mostly real: The Most Perfect Perfect Person

In May 2026 IndieWire premiered The Most Perfect Perfect Person, starring Poppy as a pop star who hands her autonomy to AI and is replaced by ever more perfect clones, executive produced by Edward Saatchi of Fable Studios and made over several years across models including Sora^[33]. When people asked which parts were synthetic, Trillo's own breakdown said 98.6% was live action with a real cast and crew, with generative tools used for transitions, clean-up, assets and lip-sync fixes inside a traditional VFX pipeline^[34]. On AI LIVE, Chris Branch called it the answer to every AI doubter asking where the skill is^[55].

In October 2026 he shared the trailer for The Very Next Day, an animated short he wrote and directed, animated by Asteria's 2D and 3D team on LTX open weights^[35]. It took straight 1s from the AI LIVE audience^[56].