A look at The Frost, a 12-minute movie created by Waymark using DALL-E 2, as startups like Waymark and Runway make AI tools for fast and cheap video production
“We kind of hit a point where we just stopped fighting the desire for photographic accuracy … Tweets: Jack Shafer / @jackshafer : “The immediate future of generative video is being shaped by the advertising industry. ... A slick minute-long commercial can be generated in seconds.” https://www.technologyreview.com/ ... @siggraph : You'll get the chills ❄️ when you witness how #AI-generated video is changing film! “The Frost” is a short film in which every shot is generated by an image-making AI. Watch now: (cc: @techreview) https://www.technologyreview.com/ ... @d_id_ : Extremely proud that @D_ID_'s text-to-video solution was chosen for such an ambitious and visually stunning project. Kudos to @waymark for producing next level #GenerativeAI content and showcasing it to the world ! https://twitter.com/... Nathan Labenz / @labenz : Today @waymark's amazing creative team, @Stephen_Parker & @bigkickcreative at the helm, debuted The Frost, a short film produced with DALLE2 It's said to be “the first generative AI film ... where the style feels consistent” Watch on MIT Tech Review https://twitter.com/... https://twitter.com/... [image] @tariqkrim : The Frost is a 12-minute movie in which every shot is generated by an image-making AI. It's one of the most impressive—and bizarre—examples yet of this strange new genre. https://www.technologyreview.com/ ... Gaurav Dalmia / @gdalmiathinks : Artificial intelligence has made a short film. It's called “The Frost,” and fittingly, it's dystopic. Very interesting! https://www.technologyreview.com/ ... Stephen Loggins Parker / @stephen_parker : Thank you 🙏 and sorry for the hiatus, we've been busy with this. Planning on getting into it with lots of detail and BTS this week. https://twitter.com/... Roland Meyer / @bildoperationen : AI may or may not change film, but to me this little video seems as generic as any mediocre video game cutscene. There's nothing »weird« or »surreal« here, only visual clichés that can be found in every Netflix show, boring dialogues and stiff animations https://www.technologyreview.com/ ... @juliewdesign_ : holymoly this is good! https://twitter.com/... Roope Rainisto / @rainisto : 12 minute AI-generated short film: “The Frost.” (MIT Technology Review) Your response (it looks a bit stilted vs incredible work - I can see where we will be in a year or two) is a good tell as to “do you get” what's happening right now. https://www.technologyreview.com/ ... Fabian Mosele / @fabianmosele : A short film created with DALLE 2 by Waymark (an AI company). While the compositing required a lot of work, I'm still not convinced at this after-effects style of animating generated images... visually it's not so appealing and it lacks expressions. https://www.technologyreview.com/ ... See also Mediagazer
Context & Ripple Effects
In 2023, Waymark — a startup selling fast, cheap video production — released 'The Frost', a 12-minute film where every shot was generated with DALL-E 2, with Hour One-style synthetic-likeness work already showing how AI characters were entering marketing video two years earlier. The project leaned on D_ID_'s text-to-video pipeline and made the point Jack Shafer amplified in the surrounding discussion: advertising, not cinema, is where slick generated commercials get produced in seconds.
Two years later the arc this film started is legible across the corpus: OpenAI's Sora powered a first major-label music video for Washed Out in an entirely AI-generated clip, Meta built Movie Gen for its apps, and Adobe pushed Firefly Video into Premiere Pro itself. By 2025, a WSJ reporter making a short with Google, Runway, ElevenLabs, and Midjourney found the tech much improved but scene consistency still demanding tedious manual work — the exact limitation 'The Frost' sidestepped by abandoning photographic realism.
First-order effects
- Waymark and Runway get proof-of-concept credibility for their pitch that AI tools make video production fast and inexpensive — with D_ID_ gaining visibility as the text-to-video engine behind 'The Frost'.
- Advertising is established as the beachhead market: Shafer's framing in the piece is that slick minute-long generated commercials can now be produced in seconds.
Second-order effects
- Incumbent toolmakers respond at the platform level rather than with one-off films: Adobe ships Firefly Video inside Premiere Pro, and Meta plans Movie Gen for its consumer apps — moving generation into tools editors and audiences already use.
- Adjacent creative industries adopt the template: a major record label commissions an entirely Sora-generated music video for Washed Out, extending the technique beyond ads to artist promotion.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, the bottleneck shifts from raw generation quality to workflow control — the 2025 WSJ experiment shows scene consistency across shots still requires laborious human stitching, keeping creatives in the loop as Hollywood treats AI as a tool, not a replacement.
- Structurally, video production unbundles: studios and brands assemble pipelines from specialized generators (image models, voice, likeness licensing) instead of commissioning monolithic shoots — the direction Hour One's licensed-likeness business pointed to back in 2021.
The trend: Generative video is maturing from ad-industry demos like 'The Frost' into embedded creative toolchains, with shot-to-shot consistency — not image quality — as the remaining constraint on replacing conventional production.