Kling AI Showcases Human-Led AI Filmmaking at TIFF Market Panel where Human Creative Direction is Essential
Sep 14, 2026
Industry panel at the Toronto International Film Festival’s inaugural market explores how AI video is moving from experimentation into real production workflows
Toronto, Ontario, Canada, September 14, 2026 -- Kling AI, a leading AI-powered creative platform, hosted an industry panel at the Toronto International Film Festival’s inaugural market, exploring the future of AI-assisted filmmaking as the industry continues to define how AI can be used while keeping human creativity and control at the center of production.
The session, moderated by Tony Pu, Head of Creator Community & Industry Partnerships, Europe and North America at Kling AI, brought together Diane Shorthouse, producer and co-founder of Evolutionary Films, and Issa Sissoko, AI filmmaker and founder of Amissa Studio, to discuss the practical realities of AI-assisted filmmaking.
This year marks the first time the Toronto International Film Festival has hosted a dedicated business-to-business trade event. The inaugural market opened on September 10 and runs through September 16 at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre.
Shorthouse, who has more than 25 years of experience across film and television and more than 30 feature film credits, has seen firsthand the transition from traditional filmmaking to AI-assisted production. She is currently producing the animated feature MINIBOTS, using tools including Kling AI while keeping the project fundamentally artist-led. The film is written by Michael Ferris, whose credits include Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines and The Simpsons, with character design by Tony Bancroft, director of Mulan.
“The script is the blueprint, and the director and what they want is the vision,” Shorthouse said. “I’m not really thinking about prompts. I’m thinking about shots. So where does the camera need to go? What does the performance need to be? What does it need to cut to?”
Unlike short-form AI content, feature-length production requires a much higher level of consistency and technical discipline, Shorthouse noted.
“Making 10 great seconds and making 90 coherent minutes are really different problems,” she said. “If [a character] is 15% bigger in the next shot, we cannot use that; if his hands have changed or the room geography's changed, it's no good. But even if we get all of those things right, we still need a performance that works. At the end of the day, we're here to tell a story, and that's where this becomes...definitely about filmmaking and not another AI generation.”
Consistency and Control
Kling AI’s character consistency and controllability are central to that creative process. Its latest Kling 3.0 model series introduced native 4K output, preserving fine visual details and enabling cinematic shots without compromising quality. Kling 3.0 Omni moves beyond simple prompting, giving creators the ability to precisely edit videos, adjust shots, and refine outputs across text, image, and video.
“What we're interested in is performance and story, and we can get really subtle acting choices out of using the Kling model,” said Shorthouse.
Sissoko, whose work spans projects for Coca-Cola, Netflix, and Amazon, has consulted on hybrid production and led previs work for major film and television projects. His collaborations include work with Antoine Fuqua, creative consulting for Doug Liman, and a project for TIME with Darren Aronofsky.
“In hybrid production, it's all about finding a way to blend the AI with the real footage in a seamless way,” Sissoko said. “So nowadays the challenge is more so in hybrid production where I'm taking an actor's performance and changing the environment without affecting their performance, and that's been challenging for the last couple of years, but it's getting a lot better. And Kling is one of the best ones at doing it.”
Keeping Humans Behind the Creative Steering Wheel
Across Hollywood and the broader creative industry, the concept of “human-generative workflow” is gaining traction as a way to describe AI-enabled production pipelines that support, rather than replace, human creative decision-making.
For Minibots, Shorthouse emphasized that it still depends on human-authored stories, human-designed characters, and human creative judgment at every stage.
“We have a human-written script, a director, designers and artists,” she said. “We design the shots, choose where the camera goes, decide how the lighting works and determine what the scene needs emotionally. When we generate 20 options and reject 19, those rejections are also part of the human creative process. That is why ‘human-generative’ is a useful term — it better reflects how deeply the creative team remains involved.”
Sissoko added that control is central to making AI viable within professional production environments.
“There is a difference between prompting and simply accepting whatever is generated, and building an entire pipeline where you have control over references, workflow and output,” Sissoko said.
Both said the next phase of AI filmmaking will depend on greater control, more cinematic model behavior, stronger consistency, improved motion and physics, and tools that better understand filmmaking language.
“Control, definitely control,” Shorthouse said. “I don’t need [the models] to surprise me anymore....I need them to obey me more," said Shorthouse.
“I think the faster these models are coming up with different possibilities, the more important it is that the humans doing it have good creative judgment to get that emotional truth from a film,” she added.
As AI video continues to evolve, Kling AI is positioning its models and creative tools around professional workflows that keep human creators at the center — helping filmmakers move faster, visualize more ambitiously, and bring cinematic ideas to life with greater flexibility.
About Kling AI
Kling AI is a next-generation AI creative productivity platform powered by proprietary video and image generation models. Since launch, Kling AI has empowered more than 100 million global creators and industry professionals, as well as 50,000 enterprise clients worldwide. Its tools support a growing range of creative workflows across video generation, image generation, editing, previsualization, animation, and professional content production.
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