The program funds filmmaker-led experiments in how AI fits the craft: discovered on real projects, not designed in a lab.
Invideo, the AI video platform for serious creatives, today launched invideo Research Grants, a funding program for working filmmakers to run the experiments productions & credits never leave room for, and to publish what they discover under their own names.
The program starts from an observation familiar to anyone who has spent time on a set: production leaves no room for open questions. Budgets and schedules are built to deliver a film, not to find out what a new tool can actually do for them. As AI enters filmmaking, invideo's conviction is that how it fits the craft won't be designed in a lab. It will be discovered on real projects, by working filmmakers.
"I've spent more than a decade on film sets, and I know there are experiments nobody gets to run, because in the chaos of a production, there's no budget for finding out," said Abhishruti Shrivastava, Community Lead at invideo, who is heading the program.
Filmmaking has been here before. Every technology that entered the craft (sound, color, CGI) found its grammar the same way: working filmmakers testing it against real scenes. The techniques that came to define CGI were not designed in advance. Particle systems were invented at Lucasfilm because Star Trek II needed to show a dead planet bursting into life. Digital morphing was built because Willow needed a sorceress to pass through half a dozen bodies in a single shot. And Jurassic Park's dinosaurs went fully digital only after ILM animators ran a computer-generated T. rex test nobody had put on the schedule, one that changed Steven Spielberg's mind about what was possible. The craft absorbed each technology one unbudgeted experiment at a time.
Invideo Research Grants exists to fund exactly those experiments with credits: the ambitious ideas filmmakers have wanted to test, iterate on, and bring to life, but could never justify on a production clock or with existing credits. The questions it hopes to fund look like the ones filmmakers already carry around: How can we do extensive wide crowd shots with AI, what does this mean for synthetic performance control, Can you direct more than 5 people in a shot with consistency? Can an editor pull a missing insert shot from a model instead of calling a reshoot? How far can AI carry a cinematographer's lighting plan before the craft has to take over?
Invideo funds the research with credits; the filmmaker keeps authorship, and every finding is published under the filmmaker's own name.
"If you have an idea where filmmaking and AI meet in a way nobody's cracked yet, we want to find it," Abhishruti said. "We fund the research, and we publish what you find under your name."
Applying is deliberately simple. Filmmakers email three things to community@invideo.io:
The part of your process you want to test
The experiment you'd run to test it
A link to your work
Every submission is read. The program launches with a $200,000 grant pool for its first cohort, with applications open worldwide on a rolling basis.
The program extends invideo's deepening commitment to professional filmmaking. Earlier this year, the company hosted the inaugural India AI Film Festival in New Delhi and announced an $11 million partnership with Abundantia Entertainment's aiON division to launch an AI-driven film studio, with a slate of five films in development over three years. Working filmmakers are already producing original films and series with invideo's filmmaking agent, Agent One.
Invideo is also building a feature-length film in public, expected to hit global screens in 2026, using a hybrid filmmaking process: one that pairs traditional filmmaking craft, from writing and direction to performance, with AI-driven production on Agent One. In the hybrid model, human authorship leads every creative decision while AI handles execution at production scale: generating shots, maintaining continuity, and compressing timelines that once took months into weeks. Hybrid filmmaking is expected to define the next era of the industry, transforming how content is produced globally and in India.
About invideo
Invideo is the agentic filmmaking platform for serious creatives. Agent One, the first generation of the platform, is a creative collaborator for filmmakers and creative professionals: they direct in plain language, the way they would on a real set, and the agent executes the production at scale. Agent One orchestrates more than 200 frontier image, video, audio and music models with long-term project memory, multi-shot editing and real-time collaboration. invideo is backed by investors behind Stripe, Spotify, Flipkart and ByteDance. Learn more at invideo.io.