AiCandy isn’t predicting the future of filmmaking. It’s creating it.
When Kent Boswell and Marcus Tesoriero met up for a beer in Cannes over two years ago, they found themselves talking about a subject that seemed to be dominating almost every conversation around them: Artificial Intelligence. Back then the technology was still in its awkward early stages. AI-generated humans had too many fingers, movement was unpredictable and the idea of using it for serious commercial filmmaking was easy to dismiss.
Boswell and Tesoriero saw something different.
With decades of experience spanning advertising, production, technology and creativity, the pair believed AI had the potential to solve a growing crisis facing the industry.
For AiCandy co-founder Marcus Tesoriero, the opportunity was clear: “Advertising budgets were coming down while expectations around film craft and quality were going up,” he says. “There were great ideas being left behind because they were simply too expensive or impractical to produce. We realised AiCandy could fundamentally change that equation. That’s where our mantra, ‘We Make the Impossible’, came from.”
“We could see where things were heading,” says AiCandy co-founder Kent Boswell. “Two years back, there was obviously a long way for the technology to go, but we believed AI was going to become an incredibly powerful filmmaking tool to help pioneer a new era of filmmaking.”
That Cannes conversation became the starting point for AiCandy over a year ago, when the pair launched as Australia’s first AI-powered creative film production company. Rather than treating AI as a shortcut or replacement for traditional filmmaking, AiCandy built its model around experienced filmmakers, creatives, producers and specialist AI artists.
That background has become an important point of difference for the company to any competitors in the market. Tesoriero and Boswell brought decades of award-winning advertising, filmmaking, storytelling and production experience into AI, rather than approaching AI filmmaking purely through a technology lens.
“We think that experience really matters,” says Tesoriero. “There are a handful of new players attempting to enter this space from a tech and digi production background. We came at it from the other direction. We’ve spent our entire careers developing ideas, innovating tech and crafting stories through film, and now we’re using AI to push bigger ideas further and expand what’s creatively possible.”
Storytelling, direction, performance, cinematography, production design, editing, sound and visual craft remain at the heart of the process. AI simply introduces a new set of tools to push those disciplines further.
“AI is just a tool,” says Boswell. “We’re hands-on throughout the entire process. The idea still matters. Storytelling still matters. Taste still matters. Craft still matters. What excites us is as filmmakers we now have an entirely new creative language to work with.”
One year later, AiCandy is producing work for agencies, brands and organisations across Europe, USA and the Asia Pacific region, supported by an exclusive global roster of specialist AI directors and AI artists.
For Boswell, the attraction remains the same: creative possibility: “I think most people get into this industry because they want to make bold, ambitious work. Over time, practical production limitations can slowly reduce the scale of those ideas. AI gives us another way to open that door again.”
AiCandy’s work reflects that philosophy. Its projects have featured everything from ice skaters gliding across Sydney Harbour to submerged cities, surreal creatures, cinematic fantasy worlds and larger-than-life characters that would traditionally be incredibly complex to bring to life.
For Tesoriero, it brings back a freedom he remembers from early in his advertising career.
“When you’re a young creative, you don’t necessarily think about how much an idea costs,” he says. “You might imagine an enormous scene on a beach, an aircraft flying overhead or something spectacular crashing through the ocean, and then somebody explains why it can’t be made. AI changes that conversation. Suddenly you can revisit ideas that once would have gone into the bottom drawer forever.”
That shift is also broadening what is creatively possible. AI filmmaking is enabling brands and agencies to explore increasingly ambitious visual ideas that may previously have been considered too difficult or complex to produce.
“Creativity has now become the great equaliser,” says Tesoriero. “It’s less about how much budget you have and more about how powerful the idea is. Whether you’re a global brand or a smaller challenger, a great idea can now travel much further.”
One project that demonstrated that potential was AiCandy’s climate film for the United Nations. The film imagines the consequences of the world failing to achieve its 2030 Sustainable Development Goals, presenting a haunting climate-changed future.
After the film was screened during an AiCandy keynote at SXSW Sydney, an audience member approached Boswell to tell him how it had moved him to tears. “That really stayed with me,” Boswell says. “It was the first time a complete stranger had come up to me and said something we’d created had genuinely moved them.”
For a technology that is sometimes characterised as cold, automated or threatening to creativity, it was a powerful reminder of what ultimately matters. “If the work can make somebody feel something, connect with an idea or see the world differently, then we’ve done our job,” Boswell says.
The tools will continue to change rapidly, and the proprietary filmmaking workflows AiCandy uses today will almost certainly look different again in another year. But for Boswell and Tesoriero, the ambition remains simple: help pioneer a new era of filmmaking where technology elevates film craft rather than replacing it.
“We genuinely believe this is one of the most exciting moments the creative industry has ever experienced,” says Tesoriero. “For the first time in a long time, the conversation is becoming less about why an idea can’t be made and more about how we can make it happen.”
Marcus Tesoriero (left) and Kent Boswell: “We genuinely believe this is one of the most exciting moments the creative industry has ever experienced.”
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