Apertus
Fully open: weights, training data and recipes. Over 1,000 languages, including Swiss German and Romansh.
Hugging Face ↗This is where I experiment with friends and partners on the tools we will use to make films in the future. Open, unfinished, under construction.
The AI Lab is a workbench, not a showroom. We test where artificial intelligence really makes filmmaking better, and we also show where it doesn’t.
Projects come together with changing partners from film, technology and design. Some become finished work, others stay experiments. Both belong here.
Principle: craft leads, the machine assists. Every AI-assisted work is labelled as such.
Testing new models and methods before they reach a production.
Short films, previz and visual tests that show what is technically and artistically possible.
Workflows for restoration, upscaling and pre-production that help other teams too.
First scenes, fully generated. Three tones we are exploring: Swiss absurdist comedy, Italian-Swiss horror and analogue sci-fi with an 80s look.
Raw material, no edit, no grade. We want to see how far visual language, light and timing already go today, and where craft has to take over again.
We don’t just want to use European AI, we want to help build it. And we want to make it understandable: what a model can do, where its data comes from and where its limits are.
Models like Apertus and Teuken show there is an alternative to closed black boxes: open weights, documented training data, many languages instead of English only. That attitude fits film. Anyone restoring an archive wants to know what happens to every frame.
Our contribution: we test these models on real tasks from film, archives and communication, give feedback to the developer teams and document the results so that non-technical people understand them too.
Fully open: weights, training data and recipes. Over 1,000 languages, including Swiss German and Romansh.
Hugging Face ↗Trained for all 24 official EU languages, open source under Apache 2.0.
Hugging Face ↗Open models for all EU languages, funded by EU programmes.
eurollm.io ↗We prefer models whose weights and data are public.
Switzerland has four national languages, this site five. AI has to handle that too.
Every step is documented and labelled.
Data from archives and productions stays where it belongs.
The animation above: a film strip made of particles that turns into a latent space and a lens. Written directly in WebGL.
Restoring and upscaling VHS and Hi8 footage with Topaz AI, side by side with classic restoration.
From treatment to moving storyboard: concept with Claude, text with Apertus, images with generative models.
The first finished project from the AI Studio. It will appear here once it is approved.
Visual study in retro-futurism: laser grids, neon, chrome and VHS glitches. Inspired by the synth cinema of Seth Ickerman × Carpenter Brut (Turbo Killer, Blood Machines). The neon elements on this page are the first test.
Swiss absurdist comedy: a man, a sound level meter and a neighbourhood that is too loud. Three generated scenes in the Screening Room.
Italian-Swiss horror in the style of 1984, borrowing from body horror: a freight train, a tunnel, a man in the last carriage. Two look tests.
Analogue sci-fi horror, 1984: a technician among test equipment and CRT monitors picks up a signal that shouldn’t exist. A story very close to our restoration work with tubes and tape machines.