Arts & Sciences’ Matt Lenski Bets on Humans in “The Last Commercial”

The era of ‘AI filmmaking’ is well and truly upon us and, depending on your viewpoint, is either the beginning of a brave new world or the end of conventional cinema as we know it.

Imagining the more creatively apocalyptic version, but viewing it very much through a comedic lens, Arts & Sciences director Matt Lenski’s new short The Last Commercial is a deliciously wry look at the human quirks generative digital creation struggles to mimic.

The twist: the film itself combines live-action and gen AI processes, with real actors’ performances driving AI-generated characters in a world built from photoreal storyboards.

shots sat down with Lenski to find out how he kept performance at the heart of the process, where the technology needed a firm directorial hand and why ‘Beep Boop Cinema’ is no laughing matter.

What sparked the idea for The Last Commercial? Was there something in your own experience that made you want to explore the subject?
I made a film about AI replacing commercial production, using AI, then spent months directing actors – humans – and deciding whether a make-believe algae cube was reading properly on camera.

It bubbled up from a feeling I think a lot of people are having: holy shit, look what this can do, followed almost immediately by holy shit, if it can do all this faster and cheaper, what happens to us? And just to make it stranger, a lot of AI still kind of sucks… but for how long?

So I started thinking about the last human commercial. Not because I think there will literally be one (spoiler: capitalism survives), but if you want to satirise existential dread, a commercial set is basically already dressed for it.

I’ve been working with AI on films and commercials, so this wasn’t about discovering the tools. It was about building an AI process that keeps people at the centre, around what I actually care about: performance, humour, dialogue, collaboration, timing.

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