Alex Naghavi has been a creative director for more than 17 years. She started as an intern at the design and venture studio Josephmark, led the 2012 redesign of Myspace, led the RCA Records brand refresh, and became the studio's Executive Creative Director and a partner. Clients on her own about page include Google, Spotify, Sony and Red Bull.
Her first AI films came out about a year and a half ago. On 6 September 2026, Le Drip, made with the filmmaker and performer Ezra Li, took second place at the Reply AI Film Festival in Venice, out of more than 3,000 shorts from 76 countries.
That's a short run from first film to a podium at Venice. It's worth studying because of how much of her old job she brought with her. She did the art direction and the titles, organized the whole film as a system of per-shot workflows, and kept handing pieces of it to specialists: a screenwriter, a sound designer, a Foley artist and a colorist.
A fish that wants to die
The idea came from Jessie Hughes, a screenwriter friend of Alex's in Australia. In a conversation with Altera Festival, Alex said she'd asked Jessie for short film ideas, and the one that stuck was barely a logline: "it's a fish in a sink that wants to die but is being kept alive by a dripping tap."
Alex spent months on it alone, pulling references. Then she stalled. "I had made a really bad animatic that was just silent," she said, and the plan at that point was a silent film carried by sound design and pictures.
She showed that animatic to Ezra, who started improvising the fish's inner monologue over it, as a Frenchman. She asked Ezra to write the screenplay. The finished film is in French, with the fish going back and forth with the tap about God and dying, while outside the window a harbor town carries on.
The film's YouTube credits split the work out. Story by Jessie Hughes. Screenplay, editing and the fish's voice by Ezra Li. Art direction, producing and titles by Alex. Both directed, and both are credited as the generative artists.
Ezra Li and the voice of the fish
Ezra came to AI from acting and traditional film. Ezra said the move came about a year before the Altera talk, out of frustration with how little say actors get, and that a lot of that work involves motion capture so there's always a human performance in it.
For Le Drip he would not use a generated voice. "I was very, very, very adamant about not generating a voiceover." He recorded hours of takes in a friend's car in a London parking lot, in French, a language he says he doesn't really speak. ElevenLabs was then used to transform the voice, and he's specific about what that means: "it is fully like my intonations, my voice and then morphing it."
Before Le Drip, Ezra's short HOME won the Grand Prix at Runway's Gen:48 Fourth Edition, according to Altera's video notes. Ezra is on Instagram as @ezra.li.
The two met in the first cohort of Google's Flow Sessions residency, which Google started as a pilot in September 2025 with unlimited access to its Flow filmmaking tool, mentorship and workshops. In Google's write-up of that cohort, Alex is quoted: "The people shaping what’s next aren’t the ones who know the most — they’re the ones brave enough to experiment."
Every shot got its own workflow
Most of Le Drip was built in the Flora canvas, a node-based workspace where you wire models together. Alex compared it to ComfyUI, but more consumer-facing. Inside it they ran Nano Banana for images, Claude for prompting and Seedance for video, according to the film's credits.
What she set up in there was a structure:
"the whole structure of the film is basically in Flora and it's shot by shot. So every shot has its own sequence for image generation and video generation."
With a two-person team, she said, it kept every prompt in one place, attached to its shot. Nobody had to go "scouring all of these various like chat histories for the exact prompt that worked for that shot."
It also let them work across tools without losing track. Both are Runway Creative Partners, and Ezra had access to Adobe's tools, so they'd pull prompts out of Flora and run them wherever they had credits: Runway, Adobe, Leonardo. The credits also list Runway for storyboarding, Adobe for video and sound, and a custom end-credits tool they built in Google AI Studio.
Seventy shots in one weekend
That setup paid off near the end. They were about 90 percent done, with all the video coming out of Kling, and Alex invited Ezra over to finish the last 10 percent. Seedance 2.0 had launched in the US the day before, and Ezra suggested testing a shot.
"This is like far superior. And we didn't even change the prompting or anything." Alex said Seedance held to the frames and got the painterly, stop-motion movement they'd been after.
"So we ended up redoing all like 70 shots basically that weekend." She credits the Flora setup for making that possible. Every shot's prompts were already sitting in its own node chain, ready to point at a different model.
Ezra was cutting the whole time, laying the voiceover down first to set the pace, then dropping in generations, or placeholder images, as they came. "When I'm editing, it kind of feels more like I'm fingerpainting," Ezra said, moving shots around Alex's storyboard as the edit needed. If a shot stopped working, they made another one: "Your pickups are just doing more generations."
Bringing in people with craft
Ezra brought in the sound designer Laurent Delforge, a co-worker from Brussels. Delforge tested generative sound and decided it wasn't getting the close, ASMR feel of a fish in a sink, and called in Olivier Thys, and they recorded live Foley, so a lot of what you hear in the film was made by hand in a workshop.
The last person on was the colorist, James Foundoulis. Even when every generated image is accurate, they said, the color shifts between shots, and the grade pulled it together.
Alex has already thought about doing that part differently. She'd like to bring a colorist in during image generation next time: "why don't we get the colorist in when we're doing the image generations and make sure that we have really good consistency."
She also says outright that she isn't from film, and that's part of why she likes building a crew. "Because I don't come from film, it's a real pleasure to collaborate with people," she said. Ezra added that the table read for Le Drip was her first one, and she read the stage directions.
Years of product and brand work first
Alex said she'd been playing with generative tools since around 2019, from GANs to Stable Diffusion to Midjourney, "using my background in I guess image making and like design to start to create these new visuals in this new medium." She took a Curious Refuge course in 2024 and didn't finish it.
The design background is long. In a 2013 Broadsheet interview, she talked about the Myspace relaunch, which merged music, photos and video into one place: "We took the idea of a mixtape and built it into something that is like this sensory memory bank."
In a Working Women Agency Q&A this year, she put her early-adopter habit this way: "I wanted to understand tools from the inside—and how I could use them as a new advantage in my creative toolkit." The same piece says she's since moved in-house at Block, and she's building an AI mockup startup, Seamless Studio, on the side.
The films before Le Drip
Her YouTube channel holds the run. Gentle is a short about a woman's grief after her sister's stillbirth, written by Sara DeCou, with Alex on direction, editing, producing and visuals. She credits Midjourney, Runway, Kling and Topaz for it. It won a Silver Cloud award at the OMNI festival in Sydney, where it was recognised by George Miller.
Feast was made in 48 hours for Runway's Gen:48 Fourth Edition, where it was a People's Choice Honoree. Alex wrote, directed and edited it, set it in a black desert, and in the video's notes calls it a silent opera.
Depths, made with Midjourney and Runway, is a slow deep-sea piece where she did the visuals, edit and sound herself. She points out the texture she added on purpose: "An intentionally pixelated, dust-like texture runs through the film," as she wrote in the Depths video notes.
There's also Railbound, built from the photographer Mike Brodie's pictures of young train-hoppers, with the director Jonathan Perry. Trending LA reported that Alex was the visual director and AI artist, and used Google Flow during the residency to turn the stills into moving sequences.
What's next
Le Drip also won Best Animated Film at Altera Festival in Atlanta, which published that conversation. Asked what's next, Alex said she wants to try other genres, and named one: "the next thing I want to work on is something in horror."
She's looking for writers to do it with. "I know what I can bring to the table is definitely like strong visual direction."
You can follow her on Instagram as @alexnaghavi and on Threads, and see her design work at alexnaghavi.com.