Years in the making
The Well took years to make, with the duo's workflow changing as the tools did: they began with the early platform ComfyUI and later moved to Kling 3.0 and Nano Banana.
Source: filmmaker.substack.com17 Oct 2026 · 2,825 works · 695 news indexed
German director who, with Daniel Titz as Dorian & Daniel, made The Well, an AI-generated noir short that won Gold at Runway's 2026 AI Festival.
Biography
Dorian Lebherz is a German director who works in tandem with Daniel Titz as Dorian & Daniel. In a 2017 Horizont interview he said he started out, like many teenagers, making very short films, and that he was living about 30 km from Ludwigsburg when he applied to the Filmakademie Baden-Württemberg, where he met Titz on the first day of the advertising-direction course. Das Rund's profile of the duo says Dorian is from southern Germany and lives in Berlin.
Their student spec ad Dear Brother for Johnnie Walker won the Young Director Award Gold Screen Award in 2016, and Shots reported in 2017 on their Volvo spec ABC of Death, which appears among D&AD's 2017 direction entries. According to Visie, a Samsung campaign they directed earned five D&AD pencils including a Yellow Pencil, and two Gold Lions at Cannes; their Reset reel lists clients such as Sony, KFC, BMW and Erste Bank.
In 2026 the duo's AI-generated noir short The Well, in which a rabbit detective looks into the killing of a wolf, won Gold at Runway's AI Festival. Filmmaker says the film was made over several years, moving from early ComfyUI workflows to Kling 3.0 and Nano Banana, and reports that the pair do not want to be pigeonholed as AI filmmakers and plan a first feature that will not be fully synthetic.
Process
Years in the making
The Well took years to make, with the duo's workflow changing as the tools did: they began with the early platform ComfyUI and later moved to Kling 3.0 and Nano Banana.
Source: filmmaker.substack.comAI as a tool, not a label
The duo say they do not want to be pigeonholed as AI filmmakers; their first feature is planned not to be fully synthetic, keeping on-set work and using AI for visual effects.
Source: filmmaker.substack.com