Dave Clark spent a long time in rooms trying to get his own scripts made. He went to Pratt, worked as a creative director in advertising, then moved into directing commercials and brand films for Coca-Cola, HP and Intel. After the pandemic he moved to LA to pitch himself as a writer-director.
One of those meetings is where the AI work started. As he told it in a No Film School interview at Adobe MAX, the people across the table said, "I love your script, but I can't visualize it." Then: "Within a week, I discovered generative AI text-to-image."
He's now co-founder and chief creative officer of Promise, an AI film studio, and he posts as @Diesol on X and on his YouTube channel. This piece goes back to an early one. Borrowing Time is a three-minute sci-fi short from January 2024, built on a story his father told him, and a few weeks after it came out Clark walked through exactly how he made it.
The story his father told him
That walkthrough was on Dan Shipper's How Do You Use ChatGPT? podcast in February 2024. "It was actually … a story that my father told me … as I was growing up," Clark said. His mother is Korean and his father is Black, and his father, then in his 70s, grew up in the segregation era.
When his father was 12 or 13, Clark said, he winked or whistled at a white woman in a convenience store and got into serious trouble for it. Around a year later, someone else was punished over the disappearance of a white woman, on what people believe was a false accusation. "Wrong place, wrong time … it could have been my father that … went to jail for the rest of his life," Clark said.
Clark calls himself a huge sci-fi nerd, so he flipped it. What if his father had gone to prison, and Clark, as a lawyer in the present day, could travel back and defend him? "If I was a lawyer in the present … I was able to go back in time and like represent him in court, like, that's a cool story," he said.
His YouTube description for the film is shorter: "This is based on a true story from My Father's life during the 1960s dealing with the hardships of being Black and in the wrong place at the wrong time."
The film is letterboxed wide and lit like late afternoon. A man in a fedora stands with a woman in front of a porch with the sun behind them, a crowd carries torches at night, an old white man in a dark robe watches with his hands folded. Then it turns: a man lies in a glass pod, a ring of light opens, and the end credits run over painted scenes of crowds, soldiers and skeletons.
Why he made it with AI
Clark told Shipper a studio would have passed on it. Pitch it in Hollywood, he said, and they'd call it a period piece they've seen before, "and plus … you're not [Steven Spielberg], so sorry, you're not going to make that movie." His answer to that: "But I think because of AI I'm able to visualize it."
He was straight about why he got into AI filmmaking at all. "A little bit of necessity … it was a little bit of … seeing a lane, you know, being a person of color," he said. When a Black filmmaker says they want to direct horror, he added, everyone's answer is Jordan Peele.
He also treats every short as development for something bigger. "Everything that I create, it's an IP, it's an extension of my creative ideas that I have in a notebook," he said.
The tapes his father brought home
His dad shows up earlier in the story too. Clark grew up in Frankfurt in the 1980s, and on the Brothers' Saga podcast this month he said his father, who was in the military, would come back from trips abroad with VHS tapes of whatever new movies he could find. Around 1989 he brought home Predator, Alien and the first Terminator, when Clark was five or six.
"I think Predator was the first movie I remember ever seeing," he said. He had no idea how any of it was made: "when you're watching that as a kid … you think it's magical." Joel Hynek, the visual effects supervisor on Predator, now works with him at Promise, he said.
That podcast is also where he described the moment the pitch-room problem met the tools. "There was nothing more exciting, I think, than being a director and … actually being able to create the image in your head and put it in front of somebody as you're trying to pitch your story."
He played the judge and the mother
Several of the voices in Borrowing Time are Clark's own. ElevenLabs had just added speech-to-speech, which he thinks was still in beta when he used it, and it let him perform a line the way he heard it and then swap the voice.
"The white judge in the movie was my voice. It was just voice to voice," he told Shipper. "And the woman, the mother, was my voice."
The narration skipped the conversion. "The voice over was just my plain voice … it sounded better and more natural to have like the natural pauses," he said.
He was going for something different from the stock voices he kept hearing. "A lot of people tend to use the ones that sound like AI," he said. He didn't claim the method was clean, either: "sometimes yeah it's not perfect but you kind of hear it in your head."
The film's end credits list D-ID and HeyGen next to ElevenLabs. Clark isn't the only filmmaker we've covered who puts himself into the raw material; Kavan the Kid photographs himself in masks he owns before anything gets generated.
Cutting around four-second clips
In early 2024 Runway generated about four seconds at a time, and Shipper asked whether that pushed every AI film into the same rhythm of short shots. Clark's workaround ran through Topaz Labs. He'd export a Runway clip at 4K, convert it from 24 frames per second to 60 or sometimes 120, and then slow it down or speed it up in the edit.
The time-travel scenes in Borrowing Time, with light whipping around the frame, were made that way, with Oppenheimer as the reference. He generated them at a high frame rate and stretched them in post. That gave him some shots running around eight seconds and some running one, so the film doesn't play as "3-second clip after 3-second clip after 3-second clip."
He took the idea from directors he loves: Tony Scott's quick cuts in Man on Fire, Zack Snyder's 300 and Dawn of the Dead. "I loved how they did the editing," he said.
He's still on it two years later. In a June 2026 video on keeping lighting consistent, he wrote that "editing is where tension is actually created. How long you stay on a face. When you cut. When you don't cut."
Tools he credits himself on Borrowing Time
Midjourney · Runway · Pika · D-ID · HeyGen · ElevenLabs · Topaz Labs · Adobe Premiere
From the film's own end credits ("visualized using the following AI tools," plus "edited in Adobe Premiere"), and Topaz Labs from his February 2024 interview with Dan Shipper.
The family portrait
Borrowing Time wasn't the last film he made about his dad. For Father's Day 2026 he posted a short built from a real family portrait taken in the late 1980s. "My Black dad, my Korean mom, my sister, and me. A military family living in West Germany," he wrote.
The video steps into the photo and out into the memories around it: riding in his dad's black Cutlass on the Autobahn, family trips to Holland, military base playgrounds, Monopoly on the patio. He gave it to his father as a gift.
In the description he wrote: "One thing I've learned with AI is that the technology itself isn't emotional. The emotion comes from the context you bring to it."
From an Adidas spec spot to Promise
Promise started with a viral video. Clark told No Film School that a spec spot he made for Adidas went "mega viral on Reddit and LinkedIn," and George Strompolos, who had founded the creator network Fullscreen, commented, "I think there's a business here."
About a year of conversations later, they decided to build a studio around generative AI, and Strompolos brought in Jamie Byrne from his YouTube days. Promise launched in November 2024 with backing from Peter Chernin's North Road and Andreessen Horowitz, Tubefilter reported.
He still describes himself as a set director first. "I still love shooting on set, and directing actors is my favorite thing to do," he told No Film School.
Freelancers and My Friend, Zeph
In 2025 Google asked him to make a film with Flow, its AI filmmaking tool, for Google I/O, and to give feedback on the product while he did it. The result was Freelancers, his short made in Flow: two estranged adopted brothers, "one methodical, the other loud and brash," who compare careers as international hitmen over dinner and work out that they've both been hired for the same job. It screened at Tribeca's Behind the Lens event with films by Junie Lau and Henry Daubrez.
"My mind is still blown by the level of control," he told IndieWire in an interview before the launch.
My Friend, Zeph went the other way, with actors back in the frame. It premiered at Adobe MAX 2025: a teenage girl about to leave for college, a father who left when she was young, and a childhood toy robot. In the making-of video Clark says, "Being a father myself to a young daughter, I wanted to show that even when you're an adult, you still have to remember what it was to be a child."
They shot the actors on location and on blue screen, with generated backgrounds he could swap out on set. For the flashbacks they de-aged the lead actress with Nano Banana inside Firefly, "with her permission, based on her childhood photos," and animated her and the robot in Veo. Clark told No Film School the hard part was getting the generated backgrounds into the same color space as the live action, 8-bit to 16-bit, so the film could pass QC at a streamer.
What he's making now
In July he posted Plume, a 21-minute sci-fi short. It's his longest fully generated film so far, and he wrote, directed and edited it himself. "I've been chasing this idea for years, and for the first time, I finally had the tools to tell it the way I imagined," he wrote.
Next is Touch Grass, a horror film he's directing as a hybrid production. On the Saga podcast he said the title came from his son, a big gamer, whose friends are always telling each other to go outside and touch some grass. He thinks the story suits a hybrid production because "in a sense we're living in a hybrid world, right? We're either always connected or we're talking to our … LLMs."
He was careful about who the villain is. "I always hate movies where it's like AI is a bad guy," he said, and then, "AI can be bad if you use it in a bad way."
The story follows a young woman just out of college whose first job, at a company called Cadence, is creating AI personalities. She finds out the company answers to something called the feed, which Clark describes as an ancient organism that existed before the internet and has learned to use algorithmic prediction to lure people, her would-be influencer friends included, into lives they think they want.