Window Seat

On July 21st, 2023, Window Seat emerged as the first AI feature film in the history of cinema. Hooroo Jackson’s 61-minute landmark proved fledgling generative tools could already deliver a complete motion-picture experience, laying the foundation for his manifesto The New Machine Cinema and its principle ‘One Person, One Film.’

Assembled from over 4,000 videos with every line of dialogue performed entirely by machine actors, Jackson’s film is both a technological accomplishment as well as an artistic one.

At 10,000 feet, tech CEO Thom Claw’s life unravels during the flight from hell. With damaging chat logs threatening his career, he comes face-to-face with an unexpected passenger: Raiden, his high school bully. Confined to the airplane, Thom must navigate professional turmoil and confront long-buried personal traumas. As national backlash mounts and cancellation looms, the torment from his past escalates, building to an explosive final showdown—while Thom’s girlfriend Millie proves an unexpected source of anguish, twisting the knife deeper into his wounded pride.

The darkly comic mind-bender blends a gritty black-and-white live action aesthetic with surreal, machine-generated magic realism. Jackson’s film shines through the constraints of AI, resulting in a film that is both innovative and profoundly human.

Released on July 21, 2023—the iconic “Barbenheimer” day for Oppenheimer and Barbie—Window Seat was a radical statement against censorship and gatekeeping, championing indie filmmaking’s spirit and challenging the industry status quo.

“My influences ranged from Monty Python to Adult Swim, low-fi animation that embraced limitations,” Jackson explains. “The silent film masters figured all this out a century ago, despite having far less to go on. In film, any concept, no matter how wild, can work. So there was no idea in Window Seat that I couldn’t pull off through visual trickery.”

The machine-generated film quickly met with backlash. “I faced a harassment campaign right away. But you can’t separate Window Seat from its milestone; there’s subtext in every scene, and this isn’t an early Walt Disney experiment meant to inspire hope. It’s the kind of hard indie we saw only in the ’90s from people like Aronofsky, Mamet, or LaBute. Today, that’s possible only through AI.”

“My purpose was to realize both a technical milestone, simultaneously with an artistic one. I further that all the unique reaction to the characters, plot and themes across all its reviews are reactions to a film in the most classic sense, not a technology.

“[Window Seat] was not made for AI, but for independent filmmakers.”

On the raw machine video, Jackson noted, “None of my future films would be possible without the workflow I developed on Window Seat. By confronting raw machine video, we’re looking at the fear of an unknown reality on screen, a vision that grants the film a certain timelessness.”

Window Seat represented several firsts in cinema history 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 single person. Lastly, it is the first narrative feature film in history utilizing lines of machine writing.