Today, Eliza McNitt’s short film ANCESTRA will premiere at the Tribeca Festival. This is the story of a mother and what happens when her child is born with a hole in the heart. Inspired by the dramatic events of McNitt’s own birth, the film depicts a mother’s love as a cosmic, life-saving force.
This is the first of three short films produced by the team at Google DeepMind in partnership with Primordial Soup, a new venture founded by director Darren Aronofsky dedicated to innovation in storytelling. Together, we founded this partnership to put the world’s best generative AI into the hands of top filmmakers and advance the frontiers of storytelling and technology.
ANCESTRA combines live-action scenes with sequences generated by Veo, our state-of-the-art video generation model. Mr. McNitt described his experience using our technology: “Veo is another lens through which I imagine the universe around me.”
To create ANCESTRA, Google DeepMind assembled a multidisciplinary creative team of animators, art directors, designers, writers, technicians, and researchers. The team worked closely with more than 200 traditional filmmaking and production experts, live-action crew and cast, as well as editorial teams, visual effects (VFX) artists, sound designers, and music composers.

