Mark Wachholz

A Berlin writer first

Mark Wachholz was born and raised in Berlin, and he spent more than twenty years writing before he made a single AI film^[2]. He studied screenwriting at filmArche in Berlin^[4], and on the Judeslist podcast he describes a journey that began with rejection by traditional film schools^[35]. His bios describe the same thread through all of it: stories about how systems shape society, history and identity^[3][2].

The writing came in many forms. He published three novels between 2006 and 2009^[3]. He co-wrote the computer games Drakensang and Satinvas Ketten, which filmArche describes as award-winning^[4]. In 2014 he published Höllentrips aus der Postmoderne, billed as the first basic description of the dark drama genre, and in 2017 the indie action thriller Immigration Game, for which he co-wrote the story, ran in cinemas^[4]. filmArche also lists series projects, Land of Giants and Superblack, and a Lovecraft adaptation, The Dreamlands^[4]. In November 2019 he went back to filmArche to give a lecture on postmodern film and the future of cinema^[4].

Particle Panic

He opened the Particle Panic YouTube channel in August 2022, and its first upload was not AI at all: a fourteen-minute video essay on gender in Denis Villeneuve's Sicario, co-written with Katharina Pietsch, Tyll Zybura and Katti Jisuk Seo^[1][24]. The channel's description is five words long: "My mission is pure cinema."^[1]

His first AI film, Beauty Will Save the World, was made for Runway's first Gen:48 challenge in October 2023 and reached the finals. Its paper-feathered rainbow fox, Beauty, is still his channel avatar^[17][1]. Gen:48 became a habit: Empire, about a young woman who becomes a secret psychonaut after the Empire bans dreams, came out of the second edition in February 2024, and Breathkeeper, set in 100,000 BCE with dialogue in an AI-invented language, out of the third^[18][19].

Trailers for series that do not exist yet

In 2024 he found a format that suited a writer: the concept trailer for an unmade series. The Day the World Prayed imagines a UN historian who finds proof that Jesus never existed and the global crisis of faith that follows^[16]. Riefenstahl is a concept trailer for a limited series about Leni Riefenstahl and her pact with Nazi propaganda^[15]. His YouTube descriptions credit both with prizes from AI trailer competitions that year^[16][15].

Then came the commission. Copernicus is the director's cut of a concept trailer for a TV series based on James Mahu's novel about the first self-aware silicon intelligence, made for Cosmic Vibe Media, his first client, and premiered to investors at the Hollywood and Asia Entertainment Forum in Incheon on 21 October 2024^[13]. It has passed 900,000 views, about four in five of every view his channel has ever had^[1]. The same autumn he made the horror short Unblind, a teaser for a feature script he co-wrote with Tyll Zybura and Katti Jisuk Seo, and ElevenLabs published a creator spotlight on how he used its sound effects model to make voices: whispers, and a mother shouting through a door^[14][5].

In January 2025 his shots were part of Dear Dad, the Secret Level showreel directed by Jason Zada that premiered on the Digital Hollywood panel at CES. He published his own cut to show "the differences between the two video models I used - Kling and Minimax - each of which excelled in specific shots"^[22].

My mission is pure cinema.

Mark Wachholz^[1]

The Cinema That Never Was

His breakout came in April 2025. The Cinema That Never Was is a five-minute video essay that mourns the films nobody ever wrote: rapt silent-era audiences, a burning piano, a temple dancer, a full house in saris, all from an alternate history of cinema that never happened^[12]. He says the script was "hallucinated (beautifully) in one go by GPT-4o, based on my ideas and concept"^[12]. His MEDIENTAGE bio says it caught the attention of Alex Proyas, John Gaeta and Jeffrey Silver and won grand prizes at the OMNI and Artefact festivals and the 2025 Korea AI Content Awards^[3]; his YouTube description lists around twenty more^[12]. Curious Refuge added it to its AI film gallery, and in November 2025 the Italian site Agenda Digitale discussed it in an essay on the truth inside AI's mistakes^[33][32].

Céremony

Céremony, released on 21 December 2025, is his most ambitious film. In the near future the only survivor of a city erased in a strike, a 12-year-old girl, is interviewed for the world, and she is always shown through a soft anime filter. In the interrogation scene the filter falls away^[11]. He calls it a visual fable about aesthetic capture, desensitisation and the cost of protecting the world from the reality of trauma^[11]. It was a Top 12 finalist, from 3,500 entries, for the $1,000,000 AI Film Award run by the 1 Billion Followers Summit and Google Gemini in January 2026^[2][3].

2026: Seedance, Shanghai and the festivals

The Interview, published on 3 April 2026, is a deliberately simple test: one woman, in close-up, answering an unseen interviewer, to ask "How far are we from natural acting in AI films?"^[10]. He made it with early access to Seedance 2.0, and Dreamina used it in its Seedance 2.0 launch campaign^[10]. With more than 72,000 views it is his second most watched upload^[1]. Children of a Dead Star followed in May: a trailer set in 1979, where an East German surveillance station intercepts an alien signal that is really a language virus able to colonise minds^[9].

In May 2026 the Shanghai International Film Festival launched a new unit, the AI Backlot, which paired film professionals with AI creators. Four teams were picked from about 500 applicants, and Mark was paired with the Beijing director Hou Zuxin as team Bicycle Kids^[6]. "We need to make good films," he told Jiefang Daily. "As long as the quality is solid, they can absolutely be submitted to traditional festivals."^[6] Over four weeks they made A Message for the Butterfly, a documentary of ideas about a caterpillar dissolving in the chrysalis, Zhuangzi's butterfly dream, and memory as a message sent to a creature we have not yet become^[7].

In August his concept trailer The Wind Before the Name made the Top 50 shortlist of the Future Vision XPRIZE^[8]. On 26 September he published Five Minutes of Spring, a 13-minute short in which eleven-year-old Mara, on the last afternoon of her world, rewrites the heroic ending of Iphigenia^[28]. He is a speaker at MEDIENTAGE München and a SPARKS presenter for the ACM SIGGRAPH Digital Arts Community^[3][2].

On AI LIVE

AI LIVE has reviewed three of his films. Children of a Dead Star played on Ep. 124, where Chris praised the sound design and the trailer edit^[29]. The Wind Before the Name was in the Future Vision XPRIZE special, Ep. 129, with Mark watching in the live chat; Chris called it the most original entry of the day and the audience put it joint second^[30]. Ep. 133 closed on A Message for the Butterfly, with Chris announcing its Grand Prix at the first Shaike Film Festival, rating Mark on Simon Meyer's level for short film and calling him one of the most awarded AI directors the show had not yet had on^[31].

I think he's probably one of the most awarded AI directors in the space that we haven't had on.

Chris Branch, AI LIVE Ep. 133^[31]