Life Finds a Way

Three prompts. Forty-eight hours.
One world built from scratch.

When Runway launched GEN:48 — their first-ever AI film contest — the brief was as thrilling as it was brutal: make a short film, at least 80% Runway tools, in 48 hours. To level the field, every filmmaker was handed three creative constraints to build from — a character, a place, and an object.

I drew an alien, an abandoned swimming pool, and an old photograph. Then I went looking for the story that connected them.

Here's what I found. Humanity, searching for somewhere new to live, builds biodomes on a distant world — sealed paradises with homes, gardens, swimming pools. But the domes begin to fail. The people leave. And in the still water of those abandoned pools, untouched and undisturbed, something unexpected stirs: new life, alien and strange, quietly evolving in the absence of the humans who left it behind. The film follows the research teams who return — to discover, and to catalogue, the lifeforms blooming in the ruins of a dream.

The old photograph? The thread back to the people who were once there. The trace of the world that had to end for a new one to begin.

GEN:48 drew over 1,000 applicants and more than 800 finished films, made against the clock by AI filmmakers around the world. Twenty were chosen as finalists.

Mine was one of them.