The Indian Institute of Creative Technologies (IICT) and YouTube have unveiled the first four short films under their Create with AI programme, putting AI-powered storytelling in the spotlight.
Launched in November 2025, the initiative aims to help Indian creators experiment with emerging technologies and build new filmmaking workflows. The four films, developed by Eleventh Door Studio, Avium Studios, Karthik Kult Kreations and Kalpanik Films, were unveiled at the IICT theatre in Mumbai and released on the filmmakers’ YouTube channels and IICT’s channel.
The programme pairs IICT’s infrastructure and faculty mentorship with YouTube’s AI tools, software and credits, giving studios room to experiment across concept development, visualisation, production and post-production. Audiences can also go behind the scenes to explore the tools, techniques and creative decisions powering the films.
Filmmaker Rajesh Mapuskar (Chiranjeevi Hanuman: The Eternal) attended the showcase and interacted with the creative teams.
IICT CEO Dr. Vishwas Deoskar shared, “India has the opportunity to lead the next chapter of AI-led filmmaking. The Create with AI programme brings together institutional mentorship and access to advanced AI tools, giving Indian creative studios the opportunity to experiment, build capabilities and develop new filmmaking workflows. This is an important step towards creating an ecosystem that can place India at the forefront of AI-driven storytelling.”
YouTube managing director – India Gunjan Soni stated, “India has always been an extraordinary storytelling nation, but we are now seeing independent creators build production powerhouses on their own terms. Generative AI fundamentally removes production bottlenecks, giving creators valuable time back to focus on writing, world-building, and craft. Our partnership with IICT demonstrates what happens when fearless Indian storytelling meets frontier technology to produce world-class cinema on an independent scale.”
The productivity pitch has numbers to back it. A Gen Media India, digital marketing, content creation, and influencer agencies in India rather than a single official national entity, report by Public First and Google, a policy, research, opinion and strategy consultancy, estimates that generative media tools could boost productivity among creative workers in India by 20 per cent, saving around 390 hours a year nearly ten working weeks that could be redirected towards storytelling.
IICT COO Ninad Raikar mentioned, “The question for us was never whether AI will replace creativity, but what becomes possible when we equip creators with these new tools. Create with AI was designed as a hands-on experiment, bringing together Google and YouTube’s AI technologies, IICT’s infrastructure and faculty mentorship, and the imagination of filmmakers.”
Established with the ministry of information & broadcasting, the government of Maharashtra, Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry (Ficci) and Confederation of Indian Industry (CII), IICT serves as India’s national centre of excellence for animation, visual effects, gaming, comics and extended reality (AVGC-XR). Its first campus began operating at the National Film Development Corporation of India (NFDC) complex in July 2025, while a permanent 10-acre campus is being developed at film city, Goregaon. The institute currently offers 18 courses and partners with leading global technology and media companies.
