Verena Puhm screened the trailer for “Nobody Dies on Mars,” a feature pitch that placed runner-up at XPRIZE Future Vision days before AI Creator Day.
The founder and CEO of Matriarch walked the room through how she made it.
Her process starts the traditional way, watching people and studying art. Then she uses AI to generate a character and test it before the script is written. “I can create a character and follow the character and say, ‘What would that character do if they were in this situation or that situation?'” she said.
Puhm treats each project as a test of which tools are best that week, and lately ByteDance’s video model Seedance has been winning. “Most of the videos right now were Seedance 2.5 because it is currently the best, but that can change. Next week it could be any of the other tools again,” she said.
Her feelings about AI agents are mixed. “I love agents, but I hate agents. I have, like, this battle sometimes with them where they think they know better what I want,” Puhm said.
What she wants most is memory. “We do not want to reiterate every time, ‘This is Frank. I told you this is Frank.'”
All that testing leaves a trail. “My downloads folder is the worst folder of all times. Like, it’s a grave, but also I find everything in there,” she said.
ADVERTISEMENT
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.
