Mike Bennion

Mike Bennion is a British sculptor and painter living in the United States who began making films with AI after discovering it in autumn 2024. Earlier in his career he directed television commercials in London, then stepped away from filmmaking to become a stay-at-home father and sculptor in America. He has said he did not pick AI so much as it picked him.

In an August 2026 RealmIQ interview tied to the CLOWD Masters series, he described an image-first process in which stories grow out of pictures rather than a fixed screenplay, likening it to improvised jazz, and a preference for realism and understated human storytelling over spectacle. His earlier work includes Memento Mori and two visual poems set to music from Peter Gabriel's album Passion: Before Night Falls (2025), which draws on Sergei Parajanov's The Colour of Pomegranates, and Carpe Diem (2026), framed as a reply to Memento Mori and set to "Wall of Breath".

His short Kev is an intimate look at Kev's experience of blindness, centred on the people, relationships and everyday moments that matter most to him. It was named one of ten finalists of the third Reply AI Film Festival in July 2026, chosen from more than 3,000 entries. The festival listed Midjourney, Nano Banana, Kling, Veo 3 and ElevenLabs as its tools and said AI made it possible to produce a personal film that would otherwise have been too costly and complex.