Eliza McNitt's short film “ANCESTRA” will premiere today at the Tribeca Festival. It's the story of a mother and what happens when her child is born with a hole in its heart. Inspired by the dramatic events surrounding McNitt's birth, the film portrays a mother's love as a life-saving cosmic force.
It is the first of three short films produced in cooperation between our Google DeepMind team and Primordial Soup, a new storytelling innovation venture founded by director Darren Aronofsky. Together, we founded this partnership to put the world's best generative AI in the hands of the best filmmakers to push the boundaries of storytelling and technology.
“ANCESTRA” combined live action scenes with sequences generated by Veo, our state-of-the-art video generation model. McNitt described her experience working with our technology: “Veo is another lens through which I imagine the universe around me.”
To create “ANCESTRA,” Google DeepMind assembled a cross-disciplinary creative team of animators, art directors, designers, writers, technologists and researchers who worked closely with over 200 traditional filmmaking and production experts, crew and cast, as well as an editorial team, visual effects (VFX) artists, sound designers and music composers.

















