AI video company Higgsfield used Siggraph 2026 to present Kök Börü, its first animated short, a 15-minute historical drama set among nomads in 15th-century Central Asia.
The story centres on a mother who loses one of her daughters to wolves in a blizzard and, years later, finds that the feared child raised by the pack is that same girl. The title borrows the name of the traditional Central Asian horseback game on Unesco's heritage list. Shakhnazar Borboev, Amina Ömirjan and Stepan Abramov directed with a team of 12, and Kazakh actors voiced the characters.
Higgsfield's tools generated the first character designs, sets and layouts, which artists then reworked by hand on tablets. Actors' filmed movements were carried onto the animated characters with the company's Motion Control feature, without mocap suits, and the whole pipeline ran through its Cinema Studio software on Nvidia hardware.
The company claims the approach squeezed a job it puts at one to two years and up to $2 million into two weeks, and its chief executive says the aim is to give more artists the means to make work at this scale rather than replace them.
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