Window Seat

Window Seat is a 61-minute black-and-white serio-comic thriller drama released on 21 July 2023, written, directed, edited and produced by the American filmmaker Hooroo Jackson. He billed it as the first feature film made entirely with AI, both picture and performances, a claim that rests on his own press and essays. It was put out free on YouTube and on a pay-what-you-want basis on Gumroad; a 2023 trade piece said formal distribution was being explored, and Jackson's July 2026 essay names no current platform.

By Jackson's account he wrote the script in late 2022 as a live-action screenplay, going through ten to thirty drafts, and made it in 2023 with Runway's Gen-2 video model and ElevenLabs voices. He generated the dialogue first and treated it as a radio play, then built the picture over it from roughly 4,000 clips of about five seconds each, cut in Final Cut Pro. Lines took 25 to 100 takes, which he compared to a slot machine, and lip-sync came from prompting rather than a lip-sync tool. In a 2023 interview he described the dinosaur in a museum scene walking out of the shot and, later, characters whose faces changed shape or whose bodies were cut in half, one of which he kept with a samurai-slice sound. Runway's model changed mid-production, so the look shifts across the film, and ChatGPT helped with some jokes and insults. The ensemble voices came from voice cloning, with a rule that output could not resemble the real source person; Raiden's Irish-sounding voice, he says, was unplanned. He lists the tools in the closing credits and no crew.

Jackson is a filmmaker whose first film, Aimy in a Cage, won the Director's Prize at the 2015 Portland Film Festival, according to SHOOT. He began in June 2023 by recreating the Titan OceanGate implosion entirely with AI, a short that led to calls for a feature. The budget he gives varies: $190 and 23 days of one person's work in the 2023 SHOOT piece, a "hundred-dollar budget" to FilmInk, and $100 or $95 in his 2026 essay, where the $100 is tied to a month of Runway's unlimited plan. He completed the film on 19 July 2023, released it two days later with paid advertising, and says a later revision cut the closing line "Viva la cinema." On YouTube the film had 9,609 views when read on 6 October 2026.

Reception was modest. FilmInk, writing in 2024, said the film "wasn't received with much enthusiasm" and drew online criticism, which Jackson says pushed him toward his next project, DreadClub: Vampire's Verdict. In his 2026 essay he reports that festivals unanimously rejected it, that the AI community largely ignored it, that its trailer was banned from Reddit, and that Letterboxd removed it; these are his claims, not independently confirmed here. The same essay cites a 100% Rotten Tomatoes score from three critics, including a mixed Film Threat review and a three-star review from Ronak Kotecha that called it an uneven experiment.

Its place in the story of AI cinema is mainly as an early marker. The essay frames it as the start of AI feature films and argues that history belongs to whoever documented it, while acknowledging that the "first" claim is disputed on the page itself.