Florida Filmmaker Assembles 1,800-Piece AI Film "Defiance" for $500,000 Festival Prize

Venice, Florida-based filmmaker Doug Dibert has completed "Defiance," an 11-minute film about Moses' mother Jochebed, built entirely from AI-generated video, audio, music, and images — roughly 1,800 individual pieces of content stitched together in Final Cut Pro. Dibert, founder of Magnfi, used multiple AI platforms alongside ChatGPT prompts to generate assets, describing the process as directing a computer that simultaneously plays actor, cinematographer, and sound designer.

The film is now competing for the $500,000 top prize at the Higgsfield Global Film Festival, which requires entries to be fully AI-generated. Dibert emphasized that human storytelling remains essential — the technology handles asset creation, but the filmmaker must craft a narrative that holds an audience's attention and provide precise prompts to guide unpredictable outputs.