At AI Creator Day, Dorothy Pang showed a 50-second stop-motion short she made in about a day. It follows a sponge getting ready for a date, set in her own kitchen sink. The creative director and AI filmmaker walked through the build live in CapCut Video Studio, part of the popular video editing app, with Ana Kley, CapCut’s creators and partnerships operations lead. CapCut presented the session.
Pang, a creative lead on a Hollywood feature made with a hybrid AI approach, said the tools open the door to odd ideas. “It lets me make that strange little film that I never would have been able to convince anyone to finance,” she said.
She hands the assistant written briefs for the script and directing style before it drafts a shot list. “I like to think about AI assistants like an employee. If I hired someone tomorrow to work for me, how would I actually set them up for success?” Pang said.
She iterates at low resolution to save credits and locks a shot before paying for full quality. The cut stays hers. “Editing for me is still sacred,” she said.
Pang is more interested in new looks than copies of old ones. “Instead of asking AI to recreate things that we’ve already seen before, I’m more interested in asking, how can we create things we’ve never seen before,” she said. And she’s made peace with constant change. “On all the big teams I work on, we assume the workflow might change next week completely, and we’re completely OK with it.”
TheWrap and What’s Trending presented AI Creator Day 2026 at the DGA Theater in Los Angeles on Sept. 29, the day before TheGrill. Sponsors included Artlist, Cantina, CapCut, Fairground Entertainment, Native Foreign, pocket.watch, Rebel Audio, UTA and Wispr Flow, the official voice partner, whose Notetaker captured the quotes in this story.
