Expert Aleksi Hyvärinen Talks at Amman About How AI Is Rewriting Indie Filmmaking

“Some days I’m really excited about the possibilities,” says Finnish producer Aleksi Hyvärinen. “The next day, I’m like, ‘Wait, is this even a good thing?’” That tension, between optimism and unease, set the tone for a two-day workshop at this year’s Amman International Film Festival, where Hyvärinen led a session titled AI and Filmmaking: A Grounded Guide as part of the festival’s Amman Film Industry Days program.

Hyvärinen, who co-founded The Alchemist, a Nordic creative studio combining storytelling and AI to create “emotionally intelligent” content for film, TV, and branded media, guided the workshop that skipped coding and tech demos in favor of a far more nuanced goal: getting real about what AI means for the future of storytelling. “It turned into two days of discussion,” Hyvärinen recalls. “We didn’t dive into generating videos or learning software. That’s not where the real urgency lies. What people needed was context, grounding, and space to reflect.”

Reactions to AI

Hyvärinen, who has produced films like “The Twin,” “Lake Bodom,” and Netflix’s “Hold Your Breath: The Ice Dive,” has hosted similar AI sessions across Europe, including in Croatia, Cyprus, Finland, the Netherlands, and, now, Jordan. While each group brings a different cultural backdrop, the spectrum of reactions is surprisingly consistent: “Some were ready to dive in. Some were totally skeptical. Most were like me: living in the grey zone, just trying to figure it out.” Yet no matter the stance, one takeaway keeps surfacing: “People leave saying, ‘I need to know more about this.’ Whether they love AI or fear it, they know it’s not going away.”

That urgency resonated with many in the room. “Before the workshop, I had a medium level of familiarity with AI tools, mostly out of curiosity,” said Anwaar Al-Shawabkeh, a Jordanian filmmaker (“Start Now”). “But those two days truly shifted my perception! After going through the tools with Aleksi, I felt it had become true and there is no way to avoid it.”

How AI Is Reshaping Workflow

One of the workshop’s central goals was to demystify how AI is actually being used in filmmaking and to draw a sharp line between what’s possible now and what remains hype. Participants explored tools like Google Veo and Google Flow, as well as 4D Gaussian Splatting, an astonishing new method that allows filmmakers to create 3D environments from just a few flat images. “You can shoot a simple 2D scene,” Hyvärinen explains, “and later reframe it, change the camera angle, zoom in. It becomes a full 3D model.”

But it wasn’t just the flashy stuff. A significant part of the workshop focused on non-generative AI, tools that don’t create new media but help organize and accelerate existing workflows. Think AI for de-rushing 300 hours of raw documentary footage, automatically cataloging dialogue and scenes. “It’s often overlooked in the ethical conversation,” he says. “While non-generative AI tools aren’t free from ethical or copyright concerns, they typically don’t carry the same weight or creative implications as generative AI.”

AI: A Cost-Cutter When the Industry Faces Budget Constraints

When asked where he draws the line between assistance and authorship, Hyvärinen cites a fellow Finnish writer, Katri Manninen, who compares AI to having a human assistant in a Hollywood writers’ room. “If you’d credit a human for that level of input, then AI shouldn’t be doing it either,” he says emphatically. “You can’t let it cross that creative line.”

That said, he uses it often as a brainstorming partner. “It’s amazing at surfacing ideas quickly. But once you dig in, you see it’s generic. There’s no voice. No point of view. Storytelling is all about point of view.”