Paul Trillo Rigged 50 Phones Before He Ever Prompted a Shot

Paul Trillo is an LA director who has spent his career building his own cameras. He wired 50 phones into one rig. He shot a ten-minute short from a drone in a single take. Now he makes films with AI video tools, and he treats them the same way.

He's been asking one question the whole time. "When I get my hands on something new, I ask myself what can I do now that I could never have done before?" he told shots in a 2023 Q&A.

He has five Short of the Week selections and more than a dozen Vimeo Staff Picks, per Short of the Week's review of his newest film. He's now a partner at the AI studio Asteria. He has posted his own breakdowns of how several of his AI films were made, so a lot of his method is on the record. He's @paultrillo on Instagram, and nearly all his work is on his Vimeo page.

The cameras he built first

Trillo studied experimental film. In college he paid the bills doing visual effects work. "I also liked to nerd out of the technical stuff," he told shots.

In 2014 he made Living Moments with Nokia. He lined up 50 Nokia phones in an arc and set them all off at once with a custom app. Then he wheeled the rig around New York, freezing people on the street and asking them about their day. His upload calls it "the first time that a bullet time rig has been made to be 100% mobile." The year before, he'd stitched 41 photos from the same phone into a single zoom through Manhattan.

Then came At the End of the Cul-de-Sac. A man has a meltdown in his street while the neighbors gather and argue about what to do with him. It's one ten-minute shot, filmed from a drone, with dialogue. The making-of goes from rough sketches to rehearsal to the final film. By his own note, the take you see was their rehearsal take.

In a Short List interview with Short of the Week, he said the drone film grew out of two things: the idea of public humiliation, and the fact that nobody had made a single-take drone film with dialogue. Part of the job, he said, was "reverse engineering out of the gimmick."

"I think that's part of the challenge as a storyteller: can you overcome the gimmick?" he said.

400 AI clips for one short film

In 2023 he made Thank You For Not Answering. A man leaves a voicemail for someone from his past while his memories flood and fall apart. The credits read: Written and "Directed" by Paul Trillo, with quote marks around directed.

He explained those quote marks to shots. He made it with Runway, an AI tool that turns images and text into video. "I generated over 400 clips with Runway's Gen-2 and cut them in a very deliberate way," he said. The camera moves, where people stand, which lens: those were choices he said he "can't take full credit for."

He started the script in 2020, before AI video tools existed. He broke it into moments and made a still image for each one with Stable Diffusion, an AI image generator, running on his own computer. Those stills became his storyboards, and Runway turned each one into a moving shot, changing it along the way. He named Edward Hopper, Wim Wenders, Wong Kar-wai and David Lynch as influences.

The water came from his own memory. "I don't have a great memory so when I try to recall a memory it feels like I'm swimming through the depths of the ocean," he said.

The narrator's voice came from ElevenLabs, an AI voice tool. He gave it a sample of Harry Dean Stanton's voice from the film Paris, Texas. He generated about 60 takes and cut the performance together "sentence by sentence and sometimes word by word." He was clear about where he thinks that belongs: "These tools should be used more as proof of concept rather than the final product."

A year later he went back to real actors for Notes To My Future Self, a two-screen piece for an exhibition in Madrid. His breakdown notes say he wrote each actor's own line of dialogue into the prompt for their AI background, "so that their worlds were literally being manifested by their words."

The Washed Out video, made with Sora

By March 2024 he was using OpenAI's video tool Sora. He cut 11 Sora clips into a teaser about the Golden Record, the record Carl Sagan curated and sent into space in 1977.

Then came Washed Out's "The Hardest Part," which his upload calls the first official commissioned music video made with Sora. It's one long fly-through that follows a couple through their life together. "This was an idea I had almost 10 years ago and then abandoned. Finally was able to bring it to life," he posted on X, as Tom's Guide reported. The final cut used 55 clips.

In the video's description he wrote that he "leaned into the hallucinations and Sora's dream logic to explore memories that never existed." It won the 2024 Gold Nica for AI at Prix Ars Electronica.

It also drew criticism online, including from Youth Lagoon's Trevor Powers. Trillo answered in a Rolling Stone interview, rounded up by Stereogum: "I see every technology as an opportunity to do something that is unique to the piece of tech and to open up new kinds of visual modes."

We profiled another music video director, Simon Meyer, who shot German television for years before he started generating singers.

How the Cuco film was built

Trillo's most detailed breakdown is his own narrated walkthrough of a 2025 animated film for the musician Cuco. He made it at Asteria with a team of more than 20 people. "Like any animated project, it started with storyboards," he says.

The look belongs to LA artist Paul Flores, who drew 60 original illustrations. The team trained an AI model on those drawings, "which gave us the ability to go from 60 assets to unlimited assets." They also turned the flat art into 3D and built a whole city in Flores's style, called Cuco Town. That let the camera move through it and come back to the same streets in different scenes.

"The next step was the biggest breakthrough of the whole project. We called it generative ink and paint," he says. Animators drew simple pencil drawings of the key poses. The Flores model then filled them in with his lines and colors, so nobody had to ink and color every frame by hand.

For the street crowds, they gave a model the first, middle and last frame of a movement and let it fill in the rest. Then everything went back through the model to match the hand-drawn look, which also kept the different animators' work consistent. "Everything is very iterative and dynamic with lots of trial and error," he says.

The credits under the finished film list AI model training, "Generative Ink & Paint" and AI animation as their own departments. They sit next to the 2D animators, 3D animation and compositing. He ends the breakdown on the animators: "Rather than removing them from the process, it actually allowed them to do a lot more."

Etherea and the Poppy film

His film Etherea, from January 2026, starts with real dancers. Choreographer Hokuto Konishi co-created it. The team filmed the dance from several angles, then turned the dancers into clouds. In the Etherea breakdown, Trillo says they trained a model on time-lapse photos and used depth maps of the dancers to keep the clouds in human shape. "I wanted to take advantage of the aesthetic qualities of AI while holding onto the humanity that went into crafting this," he says.

His newest is The Most Perfect Perfect Person, an 18-minute film starring the singer Poppy as herself. Worn down by fame and fans, Poppy hands her public self to Aura, an AI clone trained on everything she's made. Then she has to fight to get it back.

Short of the Week's review says Aura's lines came from a Poppy chatbot she had trained for an earlier art piece. The review also quotes his director's statement: "AI threatens to take away more than just jobs; it threatens to take away an artist's voice. We risk a real homogeneity of culture. Bots making content for bots. Originality is at stake."

The VFX breakdown has no narration, just labels over each shot. Most shots start as real footage of Poppy on built sets. The AI work sits on top: new mouth movements on a portrait shot, patched-in sections of other frames, and generated transitions between scenes.

The Poppy film is on his YouTube channel, credited to Fable Studios, Artclass and Asteria, with the VFX breakdown on his Vimeo beside it.