GRUB

GRUB is a dark fantasy short film of about twenty minutes (the film's page gives 19 minutes 53 seconds, 1920x1080 at 24 frames per second, in English with English subtitles), written, directed, prompted and edited by Simone Paradiso. It went up on his YouTube channel on 13 September 2026 and can be watched there free, with the film's own page at grub-film.netlify.app. The page presents it as a single short that was written as the first hour of a series.

The YouTube description says it was made with Higgsfield, with music from Suno, voices from ElevenLabs, and the edit, grade and titles done in DaVinci Resolve and Photoshop. Paradiso's page sets out the order of work: the script and dialogue written and locked in scenes before any frame was generated; every character, prop and location built once as a reusable reference element and tagged into each shot, so the creature in minute two is the same one in minute nineteen; each shot prompted as a block of time, with start and end frames fixed by hand when a cut needed it; and the cut assembled in DaVinci Resolve. A single custom print-emulation LUT was applied to the whole picture, and the on-screen identity cards for planet, dealer, species and substance were rendered frame by frame from code, with their own alphabet and sound design. Dialogue was transcribed with word-level timing and the subtitle cues rebuilt by hand. The page counts one person across the whole pipeline and no stock footage.

Paradiso is an Italian AI filmmaker and director who trades as LUCID, and his channel's About page describes him as an AI movie creator. His earlier short GO HOME, a science-fiction story of four teenagers who find a military bunker in New York in 1999, was named among the ten finalists of the Reply AI Film Festival's 2026 edition, according to the festival's announcement, which credits Higgsfield Soul Cinema, GPT Image 2.0 and Seedance 2.0 for that film. His page also offers him for narrative shorts, brand films, music videos and title sequences.

The YouTube title and description present GRUB as an official entry to the Higgsfield Global Film Festival 2026. Higgsfield's own guide describes that contest as a $1,000,000 prize pool for short films generated entirely on its platform, with submissions open from 10 August to 15 September 2026, a jury that includes Edwin Catmull, Phedon Papamichael and Paul W.S. Anderson, and winners to be announced in the last week of October 2026, date to be confirmed. YouTube showed 113,211 views for the film when read on 12 October 2026; the record had 106,222 on 6 October.

The film's page argues for why the format matters: because a new planet in an AI pipeline costs what a new location costs, creature builds, set extensions and crowd work stop deciding how ambitious a series is allowed to be, and the next nineteen minutes can be set anywhere in any style. That is the maker's own case rather than an outside assessment, and no outlet coverage of the film was found.