Each year, the New Directors’ Showcase asks creative filmmakers around the world what the future of storytelling looks like. This year, we asked, “What if a machine answered the call?” Working with a cast of artificial intelligence, algorithms and machines, we created a world first — a film conceived, directed and edited entirely by machines.

From bits and bytes to artificial brains, these machines worked together to extract the meaning of the song, generate a creative idea, film, direct and edit the music video in time to premiere at the 2016 New Directors’ Showcase at Cannes.

We debuted the film at Cannes by way of a Turing Test on Alan Turing’s birthday. Hiding the video in the New Directors’ Showcase reel, we asked audience members to guess which film was made by machines. To our delight, the film felt no more or less human than its competitors.

To be able to achieve this feat, we combined different types of AI to mirror a human film crew.

IBM Watson's Tone Analyzer API broke down the meaning and emotional intent of each line of lyrics.

Microsoft Rinna used that understanding to build a narrative. She answered questions about setting, characters and wardrobe — even the food on set.

Muse EEG headsets and Affectiva Facial Recognition AI measured the emotion behind the singer's performance, and we used that data to cast talent who hit the same emotional cues.

Eight swarming, AI-Powered Prenav drones were used to capture the footage using facial recognition data to determine how to shoot the actors.

We then created a proprietary AI editor who cut footage algorithmically to the beat of the song, based on emotion.

Our visual-effects editor was a custom neural-art AI that applied a style transfer to the end product.

We set out to provoke the creative industry by creating a film conceived, directed and edited by machines. And we had to do it with limited production time (six weeks) and budget ($100K).

The film not only melded perfectly with the 19 other films it debuted alongside, but it got people talking to the tune of 514,617,609 mentions. Over 600 articles were written about our experimental film, and, in the end, the project far exceeded our expectations generating a media value of £4,7million. It was even featured in an international broadcast of the BBC’s hit show Click, and continues to gain press attention nearly a year after its debut.