Given Again

Given Again is a seven-minute experimental short film, released in 2023 and written, directed, edited and scored by Jake Oleson, with Michelle Nova Luna in the lead. It was published publicly on 22 March 2023 according to Radiance Fields, appeared on Beyond the Short in the Art & Experimental section, and is on YouTube. Directors' Library lists it as an April 2023 release in its Creative Shorts category.

Oleson says he made it in four weeks, with no script and no crew, using Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF), a machine-learning technique that builds photorealistic 3D models from sets of photographs. Radiance Fields reports that it was shot entirely with Luma AI's NeRF platform, and Directors' Library and Oleson's site both credit Luma AI. Oleson found that the models broke apart when he changed the original image dataset and used the shattered landscapes as the film's look. The same article praises the camera-path editor and the fidelity in low light. Colour is credited to Jared Rosenthal and the sound mix to Aneek Thapar.

Oleson is a film director and multidisciplinary artist based in Brooklyn, New York, who says he began directing documentaries, short films and commercials at 18 and lists clients including Airbnb, Facebook, P&G, Gatorade, RL Grime and Zayn Malik. He also makes electronic music. He says the film grew out of 2019, when he learned that the father who died when he was nine was not his biological father; Given Again is, he says, his first personal project since. His site says he has since performed Given Again as a live audio-visual show, including at SIGGRAPH. In June 2023 he released a NeRF music video for RL Grime's Pour Your Heart Out, which Radiance Fields called his second official NeRF release.

The film was shown at the first Artificial Intelligence Film Festival, powered by Runway, whose New York evening was held on 21 February 2023, where it won Silver; Generation took the Grand Prix and Checkpoint Gold. An Independent Shorts Awards page listed it as a new entry on 3 March 2023. On YouTube, where it is titled Given Again | Neural Radiance Field (NeRF) Short Film, the record shows 4,888 views as of 2 October 2026. MIT Technology Review's June 2023 piece on AI-generated video called it "the dreamlike Given Again" among the festival's highlights. Oleson released the soundtrack as the three-track Given Again EP on Mesh on 1 May 2026, his second release on the label after the Currents EP of July 2025.

Radiance Fields described it as, to its knowledge, the first 100% NeRF short film, and argued it shows NeRF's viability as a storytelling medium for creators, expecting more NeRF-based releases to follow.