Steve Balderson

Steve Balderson is an American film director, born in Manhattan, Kansas, in 1975 and raised in nearby Wamego until his family moved back to Manhattan when he was twelve. He studied at CalArts but left without graduating after a stretch of one-on-one study with his dean, Hartmut Bitomsky. Wikipedia says that after leaving in 1996 he returned to Kansas to direct his debut feature, Pep Squad.

His independent features include Firecracker (2005), which premiered at Raindance and received a Special Jury Award on Roger Ebert's list of the best films of 2005, as well as Stuck!, The Casserole Club, El Ganzo, Alchemy of the Spirit (2022) and Sex Love Venice. His company Dikenga Films, which he founded, says it has produced and released more than 20 features.

BRAINSTARE, which he directed from a screenplay by Joseph Suglia, is a sci-fi thriller set in a corporate world where a person's consciousness can be scanned and sold. A January 2026 Dikenga Films press release says AI generated all of its imagery, performances, sets, sound, voices and music, while people wrote, directed and edited it, and that every word of Suglia's script is spoken on screen. Neither the release nor FilmInk names the AI tools used.

Balderson told FilmInk he planned it like a live-action shoot, with months of storyboards, blocking and lighting work, then built a consistent library of AI "actors" and settings and directed each shot through prompts, rewording when the model misread emotional cues or hit content restrictions. The film was released online worldwide, including on Vimeo On Demand. A June 2026 review on 366 Weird Movies found the visuals acceptable but faulted the pacing and script.