Today, Eliza McNitt’s short film, “ANCESTRA,” premieres at the Tribeca Festival. It’s the story of a mother, and what happens when her child is born with a hole in its heart. Inspired by the dramatic events of McNitt’s own birth, the film portrays a mother’s love as a cosmic, life-saving force.

This is the first of three short films produced in partnership between our team at Google DeepMind and Primordial Soup, a new venture dedicated to storytelling innovation founded by director Darren Aronofsky. Together, we founded this partnership to put the world’s best generative AI into the hands of top filmmakers, to advance the frontiers of storytelling and technology.

“ANCESTRA” combined live-action scenes with sequences generated by Veo, our state-of-the-art video generation model. McNitt described her experience working with our technology: “Veo is another lens through which I get to imagine the universe around me.”

To create “ANCESTRA”, Google DeepMind assembled a multidisciplinary creative team of animators, art directors, designers, writers, technologists and researchers who worked closely with more than 200 experts in traditional filmmaking and production, a live-action crew and cast, plus an editorial team, visual effects (VFX) artists, sound designers and music composers.