Written by Lucas Auer
Jiaming Yao and Peiru Li Pioneer a New Paradigm of AI-Driven Filmmaking Through the Fusion of Art and Artificial Intelligence
The AI-assisted short film Ulysses, co-created by pioneering visual artist Jiaming Yao, who specializes in immersive media and AI-driven moving image, and artificial intelligence engineer Peiru Li, has received the Best Supporting Character Award at Global AI Film Hack 2026, an international AI filmmaking competition that attracted more than 150 submissions from creators around the world. According to the official announcement, Ulysses was created by Jiaming Yao and Peiru Li as a two-person creative team. Yao led the film’s visual development, character design, storyboarding, composition, and overall artistic direction, while Li designed the AI-assisted production workflow and technical framework that supported character consistency, visual continuity, and controllable generation across the film.
Founded at MIT in 2023, Global AI Film Hack is an international platform for AI filmmaking, media art, and next-generation storytelling. The 2026 season, presented as Global AI Film Hack @ MIT, brought filmmakers, artists, researchers, and technologists together through a global hackathon, exploring how artificial intelligence can transform filmmaking, digital media, and future visual expression.
Unlike competitions focused solely on AI tool usage, Global AI Film Hack evaluates works through a multidisciplinary framework combining cinematic creativity, digital media innovation, and artificial intelligence integration. The 2026 judging panel included internationally recognized experts from film, academia, digital arts, and emerging media, including Prof. Ruby Yang, an Oscar-winning filmmaker and Director & Professor of Practice at the University of Hong Kong’s School of the Future Media; Prof. Liam Young, a filmmaker and world-building expert known for exploring the relationship between technology, future environments, and storytelling; and Prof. Lev Manovich, Presidential Professor at the City University of New York and a leading scholar in digital art and computational media. The judging process evaluated submissions based on creative intent, technical execution, and overall alignment with each award category.
Global AI Film Hack attracts creators from filmmaking, AI-generated media, and digital arts. Award recipients demonstrate the competition’s interdisciplinary nature and professional standards. Shanshan Jiang, the 2025 Best Film Winner, completed her AI film project with a full filmmaking role as director, writer, and producer. Yuqing Liu, the 2026 Best Visual Winner, has previously received recognition from the Beijing International Film Festival’s AIGC short film program and continued to participate in AI filmmaking exhibitions and creative projects. These creators reflect the competition’s recognition of broad creative excellence in AI cinema.
Ulysses Redefines NPC Characters and Explores New Forms of AI-Era Storytelling
Ulysses grew from the team’s rethinking of “Attention.”
Inspired by the influential AI paper Attention Is All You Need, the creators asked: Do overlooked characters at the margins of a story also deserve their own narratives?
Based on this concept, Ulysses centers on a non-player character (NPC) from a video game environment. Traditionally, NPCs support players and advance storylines. The film challenges this convention by making an overlooked character the emotional center of the story.
Through the journey of an NPC carrying an orange, the film explores themes of existence, loneliness, and the desire to be recognized. By giving a supporting character greater emotional depth, Ulysses aligns with the Best Supporting Character Award and demonstrates a character-driven approach to AI filmmaking.
Mr. Jiaming Yao
Jiaming Yao’s Visual System Established the Artistic Foundation Behind the Award-Winning Character
As a primary creator of Ulysses, Jiaming Yao led the film’s visual direction, character design, and artistic framework, making a critical contribution to its Best Supporting Character Award.
Jiaming Yao is a distinguished visual artist working across creative technology, mixed-reality design, and AI filmmaking. His practice also extends beyond the screen into large-scale public art: his immersive LED installations with StandardVision have been presented in major civic spaces, including Long Beach Airport and the Los Angeles Public Library. His AI film works have been selected for the Cinequest Film Festival Official Selection, and he has also been recognized as a Featured Filmmaker on the Flick platform.
In Ulysses, Jiaming developed a complete visual system through character concept design, visual style development, storyboarding, and cinematic composition. His approach gave the central NPC character a distinctive visual identity and emotional presence.
Because the Best Supporting Character Award emphasizes the strength of character creation and narrative contribution, Jiaming’s ability to transform an overlooked NPC into a visually compelling and emotionally meaningful character became a key factor in the film’s international recognition.
Mr. Peiru Li
Peiru Li’s Engineering Framework Brought Greater Control and Consistency to AI Filmmaking
As a primary creator of Ulysses, Peiru Li designed its AI-assisted production workflow and technical framework, making a key technical contribution to the award-winning film.
Li’s background centers on AI infrastructure, distributed systems, game development, and large-scale production systems for interactive applications. Rather than approaching AI filmmaking as a process of simply generating images or videos, he applied engineering and production-pipeline methodologies familiar from software and game development to make the creative process more structured, repeatable, and controllable.
During the production of Ulysses, Li developed a systematic workflow that connected storyboard images and character references with image and video generation. The process included model selection, prompt structuring, intermediate keyframes, motion testing, and consistency checks. These methods helped address persistent challenges in AI filmmaking, particularly maintaining character identity, visual continuity, motion logic, and narrative consistency across different shots.
This engineering-driven approach was especially important for a film centered on a single NPC whose identity and emotional presence had to remain recognizable throughout the story. By improving the controllability and continuity of the production process, Li’s framework helped translate the artistic concept into a coherent cinematic character—an important contribution to Ulysses and its Best Supporting Character Award.
Li’s contribution demonstrates the convergence of AI infrastructure, distributed systems, game-production methods, and next-generation media. His work on Ulysses shows how engineering principles from scalable software and interactive systems can enable more reliable, consistent, and controllable AI-driven filmmaking.