Human Imagination, Steerable AI: How Asian Directors Are Bringing Kling AI Into Their Workflow

During a crowded morning commute, a man dozing off, crushed by overwork and pressure, transforms into a giant worm. Apart from a few passengers who recoil in fear or surprise, most are drowsy and indifferent. Though it is impossible to overlook, the worm is jostled, struck, and shoved about by everyone else in the suffocating subway car.

During a busy morning commute, a man takes a nap and turns into a giant worm from overwork and pressure. Apart from a few passengers who recoil in fear or surprise, the majority are sleepy and indifferent. This worm, though impossible to miss, is pushed, bumped and pushed around with everyone else in the suffocating subway car.

This is a scene from the short film Worm Train that premiered at the Asian Film and Content Market (ACFM) during the 31st Busan International Film Festival (BIFF). The latest effort from South Korean director and writer Sung Soo Kim, the film is inspired by Franz Kafka's Metamorphosis. Unlike Gregor Samsa, who is locked in his room after being transformed into a giant insect, the protagonist still has to go to work, a bleak, dark absurdity that reveals the alienation, isolation, and hypocrisy of modern life. In related news, filmmakers at Kling AI panel say AI productions need traditional skills to be cinematic: "You need experts to avoid making everything look the same" News Google DeepMind, Kling AI and Alibaba Join InnoAsia 2026 Busan Market.

Kim started the project in February, but it was stopped in March because of that very cramped subway scene. "At the time, AI could produce a giant bug, but it couldn't accurately record its physical contact with passengers and the chain of reactions that followed," he told a panel dedicated to AI and filmmaking at ACFM. He didn't resume production until late September, when the latest Kling 4.0 model allowed him to create continuous motion between frames and control character movement, scene transitions, and shot progression.

A veteran of South Korean commercial cinema whose hits include Musa and 12.12: The Day, Worm Train was Kim's first film to use the technology, which has been around for a decade in the film industry. By incorporating AI into his conventional production workflow, which focused on the director's creative vision and collaboration with experts across disciplines, he realized that AI was manageable and sustainable. "Technology can deliver anything we imagine, but we are the ones who give meaning and value to those cinematic images," he said.

What makes cinema more cinematic in the age of artificial intelligence? Kim posed for a two-hour panel titled "New Cinematic Possibilities: Reimagining Filmmaking with Kling Artificial Intelligence" on Sunday. Among the four filmmakers present, the answer seemed generally consistent: human insight, and technology driven by it.

For Sang-wook Lee, who is now the head of MBC C&I's AI department, it was more about finding out how far AI-generated content can go while remaining engaging and acceptable to audiences. He brought Rendering Love, a microdrama series powered by Kling AI and co-produced with Barunson E&A, the production company behind the Oscar-winning film Parasite.

The K-pop romantic comedy follows virtual group LEVRIT, whose true identities are hidden, and a female fan who sees through them. "The work itself is about the boundary between the virtual and the real, so our production followed that boundary: we use live action for the real world and artificial intelligence to produce LEVRIT's stage performances," he said.

Harry Hyun, director of the Korean Netflix series Krypton Man, agreed that the "border" is the key to the hybrid pipeline. The director and founder of creative content startup MooAm has announced a new IP called Natasha, a 100-minute romantic thriller inspired by Becksock's poem "Me and Natasha and a White Donkey." The film used live-action filming for character-driven scenes where subtle performances were essential, while expensive scenes such as the 1944 blizzard and large crowd scenes were created with Kling.

Kling tools including All-in-One Reference, V2V, 10-bit HDR output, and support for up to 10 keyframes as control points in the 4.0 model were all integrated into the production. "By setting up to 10 keyframes as control points, we can direct changes in character state and key story beats according to the director's intent," he cited as an example.

The discussion also extended to the presentation of a feature-length animated film with Chinese director Wei Li's Born of the Tide. Li has more than 20 years of experience in animation, including Litus Lantern, Jiang Xia: Legend of the Gods, and Big Fish and Begonia. For Born of the Tides, he first injected artificial intelligence tools into the traditional animation methods he's worked with for decades. "For animation, AI reduces the cost of trial and error and gives certain stories that were once difficult to deliver a chance to be realized in high quality," he said.

This 105-minute film contains more than 2350 shots and 200 characters. "At this scale, wide shots have been nearly impossible in the past, as faces rendered too small could lose definition on the big screen," he explained. "Kling's native 4K video production helps bring large-scale sequences like the dragon boat race and fish market explosion to the big screen."

Throughout the panel, both established filmmakers who were once wary of AI and creators building compositing pipelines seemed to share a similar view: AI is increasingly becoming something that directors can harness, serve their imaginations, inform their work, and expand their cinematic expression. This is perhaps what makes cinema more cinematic.

"One day the term 'artificial intelligence movie' may die out," Kim said. As we no longer want to call films "talkies" or "color films", in the end what remains is cinema.

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