MiniMax x Shanghai International Film Festival

"When AI steps onto the film backlot and becomes a daily collaborator for creators, how will it transform the way films are made, roles are divided, authorship is defined, and aesthetics are judged?"

——We explored this question through a two-day open experiment.

As an official partner of the 28th Shanghai International Film Festival, we brought "AI Backlot" to life, a special AI session where filmmakers, AI creators, industry professionals, tools, and audiences came together in one shared creative space.

From June 14 to 15, nearly 2000 industry guests explored new workflows, joined salons, watched live creation, and experienced MiniMax Hub's AI-native creative process in action. More than a technology showcase or a screening of finished works, the session turned attention to what happens behind AI cinema: the creative decisions, technical challenges, and human judgment that shape each work.

Director Huang Jianxin, co-initiator of the AI Backlot, said, "At the current stage of AI development, the finished work is only part of the story. What matters more is bringing the creative process into the open and putting the real questions on the table."

During the two-day event, we officially launched MiniMax Hub, our new flagship desktop Agent-based multimodal creative platform.

Creators once had to move between separate tools for scripting, images, video, sound, and editing, spending too much time stitching together fragmented workflows. MiniMax Hub addresses this pain point by bringing these capabilities into one workspace. With a local AI Agent at its core, it supports the full journey from idea to finished work, reducing friction and bringing greater continuity to the creative process.

At the heart of AI Backlot was a form of co-creation that paired traditional filmmakers with leading AI creators.

Nearly 500 creators from seven countries and regions applied to take part and four co-creation teams were selected in the end. Over a one-month production cycle, the teams used MiniMax Hub as their core creative platform to complete an end-to-end AI filmmaking experiment, from initial concept to final work.

Among them, Team Bicycle Kids brought together director Hou Zuxin and German AI creator Mark Wachholz in a cross-cultural collaboration, creating a poetic visual essay on the philosophy of life.

Team N.I, formed by Wang Ze and Li Xinxin, approached animation creation from a Gen Z perspective, using MiniMax Hub for visual style research, footage editing, and custom Skills for batch image preprocessing.

We also launched a six-hour timed creative challenge during AI Backlot, testing not only model strength, but also the real-time production capability of an AI-native workflow.

At the industry forums and roundtables, veteran directors, screenwriters, scholars, and AI creators made one point clear: future creators will not merely use tools; they will design workflows. We have always believed that AI is not the endpoint of creation, but a new kind of backlot, where the burden of repetitive execution can be shared, imagination can be realized faster, and creators can return to the heart of expression.

The value of AI Backlot lies not in offering fixed answers, but in revealing how creators and AI adapt, experiment, and imagine together.

Together with creators, we will continue to push AI and cinema beyond today's boundaries, opening a new chapter for the future of filmmaking.