Google DeepMind's Veo AI powers Darren Aronofsky-backed short film "ANCESTRA" at Tribeca

Eliza McNitt's short film "ANCESTRA," which premiered at the Tribeca Festival, marks the debut of a new creative partnership between Google DeepMind and Primordial Soup, a storytelling venture founded by director Darren Aronofsky. The film weaves together live-action sequences with scenes generated by Veo, DeepMind's video generation model, to tell the story of a mother and child born with a congenital heart condition—inspired by McNitt's own birth.

A new creative workflow#

McNitt approached the technology as another lens for imagination. Rather than replace traditional filmmaking, the team used Veo, alongside image generation model Imagen and language model Gemini, to enhance her creative vision—analyzing archival photos from McNitt's birth to generate mood-based imagery and video sequences.

The workflow unfolded in three stages:

• Gemini parsed personal photographs to extract precise aesthetic descriptions that became prompts for image and video creation
• Imagen produced key concept art that defined the film's visual language
• Veo animated those images and rendered final shots based on additional motion and action prompts

Tailored capabilities for filmmaking#

To meet McNitt's specific needs, DeepMind developed new Veo features. Personalized video generation let the team fine-tune models to match reference imagery, enabling consistent art direction for AI-generated sequences of a baby in utero. Motion-matched video generation allowed Veo to track camera movements from virtual models—crucial for a complex scene of traversing the human body into the womb.

For scenes depicting organic holes closing (symbolizing the heart defect), Veo matched motion across reference videos in minutes, avoiding the complexity and time demands of traditional CGI.

When depicting the birth, the team composited a live-action actor with an AI-generated realistic newborn, then refined it with traditional VFX and color grading—avoiding the uncanny results typical of older baby effects techniques.

Expanding filmmaking possibilities#

"ANCESTRA" is the first of three films in the DeepMind-Primordial Soup partnership, each directed by emerging filmmakers mentored by Aronofsky. The collaboration signals a broader strategy: positioning generative AI as a tool to complement existing workflows and overcome practical barriers—whether capturing expensive locations, difficult performances, or impossible-to-film scenarios—rather than replacing the craft of filmmaking itself.