![\"Midnight](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/07\/1752997990_203_1920.jpg\")
Midnight Drop, an AI film depicting US-Israeli bombings in Iran<\/p>\nA US stealth bomber flies across a darkening sky towards Iran. Meanwhile, in Tehran a solitary woman feeds stray cats amid rubble from recent Israeli airstrikes.<\/p>\n
To the uninitiated viewer, this could be a cinematic retelling of a geopolitical crisis that unfolded barely weeks ago \u2013 hastily shot on location, somewhere in the Middle East.<\/p>\n
However, despite its polished production look, it wasn\u2019t shot anywhere, there is no location, and the woman feeding stray cats is no actor \u2013 she doesn\u2019t exist.<\/p>\n
Midnight Drop, an AI film depicting US-Israeli bombings in Iran<\/p>\n
The engrossing footage is the \u201crough cut\u201d of a 12-minute short film about last month\u2019s US attack on Iranian nuclear sites, made by the directors Samir Mallal and Bouha Kazmi. It is also made entirely by artificial intelligence.<\/p>\n
The clip is based on a detail the film-makers read in news coverage of the US bombings \u2013 a woman who walked the empty streets of Tehran feeding stray cats. Armed with the information, they have been able to make a sequence that looks as if it could have been created by a Hollywood director.<\/p>\n
The impressive speed and, for some, worrying ease with which films of this kind can be made has not been lost on broadcasting experts.<\/p>\n
Last week Richard Osman, the TV producer and bestselling author, said that an era of entertainment industry history had ended and a new one had begun \u2013 all because Google has released a new AI video making tool used by Mallal and others.<\/p>\n
A still from Midnight Drop, showing the woman who feeds stray cats in Tehran in the dead of night. Photograph: Oneday Studios<\/p>\n
\u201cSo I saw this thing and I thought, \u2018well, OK that\u2019s the end of one part of entertainment history and the beginning of another\u2019,\u201d he said on The Rest is Entertainment podcast.<\/p>\n
Osman added: \u201cTikTok, ads, trailers \u2013 anything like that \u2013 I will say will be majority AI-assisted by 2027.\u201d<\/p>\n
For Mallal, a award-winning London-based documentary maker who has made adverts for Samsung and Coca-Cola, AI has provided him with a new format \u2013 \u201ccinematic news\u201d.<\/p>\n
The Tehran film, called Midnight Drop, is a follow-up to Spiders in the Sky, a recreation of a Ukrainian drone attack on Russian bombers in June<\/a>.<\/p>\n Within two weeks, Mallal, who directed Spiders in the Sky on his own, was able to make a film about the Ukraine attack that would have cost millions \u2013 and would have taken at least two years including development \u2013 to make pre-AI.<\/p>\n \u201cUsing AI, it should be possible to make things that we\u2019ve never seen before,\u201d he said. \u201cWe\u2019ve never seen a cinematic news piece before turned around in two weeks. We\u2019ve never seen a thriller based on the news made in two weeks.\u201d<\/p>\n Spiders in the Sky was largely made with Veo3, an AI video generation model developed by Google, and other AI tools. The voiceover, script and music were not created by AI, although ChatGPT helped Mallal edit a lengthy interview with a drone operator that formed the film\u2019s narrative spine.<\/p>\n Google\u2019s film-making tool, Flow,<\/a> is powered by Veo3. It also creates speech, sound effects and background noise. Since its release in May, the impact of the tool on YouTube \u2013 also owned by Google \u2013 and social media in general has been marked<\/a>. As Marina Hyde, Osman\u2019s podcast partner, said last week: \u201cThe proliferation is extraordinary.\u201d<\/p>\n Quite a lot of it is \u201cslop\u201d \u2013 the term for AI-generated nonsense \u2013 although the Olympic diving dogs have a compelling quality<\/a>.<\/p>\n Mallal and Kazmi aim to complete the film, which will intercut the Iranian\u2019s story with the stealth bomber mission and will be six times the length of Spider\u2019s two minutes, in August. It is being made by a mix of models including Veo3, OpenAI\u2019s Sora<\/a> and Midjourney.<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019m trying to prove a point,\u201d says Mallal. \u201cWhich is that you can make really good stuff at a high level \u2013 but fast, at the speed of culture. Hollywood, especially, moves incredibly slowly.\u201d<\/p>\n skip past newsletter promotion<\/a><\/p>\n A weekly dive in to how technology is shaping our lives<\/p>\n Privacy Notice: <\/strong>Newsletters may contain info about charities, online ads, and content funded by outside parties. For more information see our Privacy Policy<\/a>. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and the Google Privacy Policy<\/a> and Terms of Service<\/a> apply.<\/p>\n after newsletter promotion<\/p>\n Spiders in the Sky, an AI film directed by Samir Mallal, tells the story of Ukraine\u2019s drone attacks on Russian airfields. Photograph: Oneday Studios<\/p>\n He adds: \u201cThe creative process is all about making bad stuff to get to the good stuff. We have the best bad ideas faster. But the process is accelerated with AI.\u201d<\/p>\n Mallal and Kazmi also recently made Atlas, Interrupted<\/a>, a short film about the 3I\/Atlas comet<\/a>, another recent news event, that has appeared on the BBC. <\/strong><\/p>\n David Jones, the chief executive of Brandtech Group, an advertising startup using generative AI \u2013 the term for tools such as chatbots and video generators \u2013 to create marketing campaigns, says the advertising world is about to undergo a revolution due to models such as Veo3.<\/p>\n \u201cToday, less than 1% of all brand content is created using gen AI. It will be 100% that is fully or partly created using gen AI,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n![\"Film-maker](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/07\/1752997991_642_1920.jpg\")
Film-maker recreates Ukrainian drone attack on Russia using AI in Spiders in the Sky<\/p>\n