In the AI-generated short film 2026, a guy takes viewers on a tour of his home post-apocalypse. “It’s a little dusty, that’s why I wear a helmet,” he says. “Safety first.”
Dust isn’t the only hazard the guy needs to worry about as he walks through the smoke and rubble of his bombed-out abode. His pet, Carl, looks like a rabid, radioactive green alien, though our tour guide still likes to think of the creature as a dog. With flames shooting out of the poor fellow’s television set, he can’t even watch TV to distract himself from the aftermath of the catastrophe that changed everything. The situation doesn’t look much brighter in the incinerated world outside.
New York-based AI start-up Runway on Wednesday announced 2026 as the winner of its inaugural Gen:48 short film contest. The company gave filmmakers 48 hours to create a movie between one and four minutes long with Runway text-to-video tools such as Gen-1 and Gen-2, which let users generate videos simply by typing a few descriptive words into a box. Contest rules dictated that 75% of the footage had to be created with Runway products.
Viewers voted for the Gen:48 winner, crowning it from 65 finalists narrowed down from 600 submissions. You can watch all the finalists here.
2026, which was written, directed and produced by Dan Hammill and Jeff Wood, manages to capture the apocalypse of our nightmares while also being highly amusing, as in this little Seinfeld-meets-armageddon bit from our protagonist’s stand-up comedy routine: “Hey, what’s the deal with the post-apocalypse, am I right?”
As the comedian waves his hands around, it’s easy to spot his misshapen fingers, a classic error in AI-generated images. The film’s designers were able to mask the common animation challenge of lip sync by putting a helmet over their main character’s head.
Hammill and Wood made their film using Runway Gen-1, Runway Gen-2 and Stable Diffusion, which creates AI-generated images from text prompts.
“We learned a lot and found that sometimes the best art comes from serendipitous mistakes,” they said in a YouTube description of their film.
Gen:48 is the first AI short-film contest presented by Runway and Runway Studios. Runway also puts on an AI Film Festival that spotlights films that embrace emerging AI tools as a core component of the filmmaking process. Other AI film fests include the AI International Film Festival and the AI horror film festival.
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