Episode two of the SBS weekend drama "Agent Kim Reactivated" opens with a three-minute flashback to 2008. In it, So Ji-sub's Manager Kim, on a solo covert mission in North Korea, ambushes a convoy in a mountain tunnel, overpowers a bodyguard, abducts a hardline official and drives off a bridge into a river. The scene packs in most action staples: a chase, shooting, a fistfight and an escape under water. So filmed none of it. The whole sequence was generated with AI, which The Korea Times calls a first for Korean drama.
Morpheus Studio, set up by visual effects specialists, made it on AICRON, the AI video platform it launched in February 2026. Its vice president and AI supervising director, Ryu Jae-hwan, previously won awards supervising effects on films such as "1947 Boston" and "Flu". He told Hankook Ilbo in a 16 July interview that ordinary VFX adds computer images to filmed footage, whereas AI goes straight from text to video. Even So's face came from prompts, without a reference photo. The producers had approached several AI video firms because they did not want to cut Kim's backstory under tight shooting limits. Ryu said he worried about risking a commercial show until the director gave his team full freedom.
Everyone on screen apart from So is synthetic, and the goal was that nothing should look AI-made, even in close-up. Ryu admits the faces do not match exactly in the underlying data, but says viewers do not notice. Violence was the hardest part, because the tools at first refused to show it and only recently learned to render gunfire convincingly. When they would not render blood, the team asked for bursts of ketchup. The rough cut took two months, one of them spent on concept images of the vehicles, tunnel, bridge, mountains and river ice. They generated more than 2,000 shots to get fewer than 300 usable ones.
Ryu said they directed it like live action, because viewers sense a wrong rhythm however real the images look. More creators have tried AI video since the episode aired, he said, and the industry will soon be unable to ignore it. The piece first ran in sister paper Hankook Ilbo and was translated with AI.
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