About
Hooroo Jackson
Hooroo Jackson is an American film director, screenwriter, editor, and film theorist. He is the architect behind The New Machine Cinema, and the director of the first AI feature film, AI animated feature film, AI stop-motion feature film, simultaneous dual-format release, and the first choose-your-own-protagonist feature film. He published the two earliest volumes of AI film theory defining its foundational terms: “One Person, One Film,” “Speed of the Mind,” “The Living, Breathing Cinema,” “The Adaptive Cinema Engine,” and “The True Line Cut”.
Early Filmmaking Career
Jackson first garnered attention in 2014 when the Wall Street Journal featured his investments in Bitcoin at $10 per coin; he leveraged these profits to finance his directorial debut ‘Aimy in a Cage’ (2015), starring Allisyn Snyder, Crispin Glover, Paz de la Huerta, and Academy Award nominee Terry Moore. He described the film as a millennial treatise: “Aimy is the deconstruction of a cartoon character in live action, revealing the real pain that would exist inside a persona like Bugs Bunny or Pee-Wee Herman.” The film was a fusion of styles, moods, and influences. “It is my postmodern Antoine Doinel via Philip K. Dick. Its themes of societal collapse, government overreach, and familial breakdown were seen as abstract during its release, but have come to represent the very story of the digital age.”
“Aimy in a Cage” won him the Director’s Prize at the 2015 Portland Film Festival, where its bold color palette and unique style drew comparisons to auteurs such as Tim Burton, Terry Gilliam, and David Lynch.
Pioneering AI Filmmaking
Next, he became a leading figure in AI cinema, unifying several divergent technologies in ways never before realized, planting the flag for the AI cinema revolution.
Window Seat
On July 21, 2023, he released ‘Window Seat’, the first fully AI feature film in the history of cinema. At 61 minutes and a budget of just $100, the solo-made film proved fledgling generative AI tools could already deliver a complete motion-picture experience. Window Seat represented several firsts in cinema including: the first completed and widely released AI feature film, the first feature film with complete AI video and performances, and the first AI feature film made entirely by one person. Lastly, it was the first narrative feature film in history utilizing lines of machine writing.
DreadClub: Vampire’s Verdict
On July 3, 2024, he premiered ‘DreadClub: Vampire’s Verdict’, the first fully AI animated feature film and the first AI anime feature film ever made. With 100% of its sound, music, video, and performances generated with AI tools, the $405 production also became the first AI feature film to land a major streaming license–debuting on Amazon Prime and winning two awards for Best Animated Film and Best Director on the festival circuit.
The Making of “DreadClub”
Alongside the film he released its AI-generated soundtrack, and the book, Artificial Imagination: The Making of “DreadClub,” documenting his complete dialogues with LLMs across the six month production, as well as its considerable controversies–the film’s existence led to large scale social media attacks against Jackson led by professional critics, influencers and institutions, leading to daily harassment and permanent bans on Reddit, Letterboxd, and TMDB. He remarked, “All this over a cartoon.”
The New Machine Cinema: Foundational Essays in AI Film Theory
In December 2024, Jackson published ‘The New Machine Cinema: Foundational Essays in AI Film Theory,’ pioneering the first formal theoretical framework for AI filmmaking. As creator of the first AI-generated feature films, Jackson’s seven essays explore this revolutionary medium while documenting its emergence as a distinct art form. “One Man, One Film”, Jackson likens machine filmmaking as the final and ultimate expression of Bazin’s auteur theory. His essay “Speed of Mind” essay examines how AI enables a new form of fast cinema that approaches the pace of human thought. “The Living Breathing Cinema”, explores the far out future of cinema and the concept of infinite films.
A Very Long Carriage Ride
On April 22nd, 2025, he premiered ‘A Very Long Carriage Ride,’ the first film in the history of cinema released in two different artistic styles simultaneously, becoming the first AI stop motion animated feature film, and the first AI classic style animated feature film at once. The $2,000 production crossed literary influences such as Jane Austen, Alexander Dumas, and Charles Dickens alongside Jackson’s trademark whimsy and theatricality. The film was accompanied with a supplemental essay, ‘One Film, Two Ways: Introducing A Very Long Carriage Ride’, positing: “A film is no longer a film, a film is a series of possibilities.” The stop motion version of the film played in six film festivals, winning Best AI Film in the Red Rocks AI Festival.
Post-Scarcity Cinema: Essays in AI Film Theory
On June 30th, 2025, Jackson published ‘Post-Scarcity Cinema: Essays on AI Film Theory’; his new essays ‘Machine Pleasures,’ brought forward a new philosophy in screen performance where eccentric machine readings created delightful tones beyond human performance. ‘Post-Aesthetic Cinema’ explored a future of non-visual cinema, and ‘The Pinnacle Contact’, introduced concepts in multi-outcome cinema such as the Story Brain and the Adaptive Cinema Engine. “The future of cinema will not be regarded from what happens on screen, instead, its story brain will be analyzed like a car engine.”
My Boyfriend is a Superhero!?
In October 2025, Jackson premiered ‘My Boyfriend is a Superhero!?’; taglined “Choose Your Protagonist.” The superhero romcom was the first feature film in history allowing audiences to choose their protagonist, offering two different Abigails. It was also the first fully AI 3D-animated feature, with all sound, music, visuals, animation, and performances machine-generated, also notable for being the first film to utilize AI agents in the editing of the film.
An experimental cut of Superhero!? presented itself as an early demonstration of what Jackson called, “The True Line Cut,” an artistic framework meant to introduce scarcity to post-scarcity abundance, in doing so, creating a subset AI cinema as jazz is to music. “The True Line Cut is where a film is made in one single pass and published without revision, capturing the raw process of creation in one unbroken true line.”
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