Michał Owerczuk took part in Gen Jam™ San Francisco - Shanghai, a four-hour AI filmmaking hackathon organized by Machine Cinema and hosted by Minh Do and Michael Trainor. The online competition challenged participants to go from concept to screening under themes covering San Francisco, Shanghai, International Cooperation, Overseas Travels, and International Friends.
Joining late and without a team, Owerczuk chose to compete solo. Wanting to bridge cultures without relying on dialogue, and bringing a Polish element into the contest between American and Chinese participants, he placed composer Fryderyk Chopin at the emotional core of the film.
Completing the two-plus minute film in four hours required assembling an end-to-end production pipeline from scratch. Owerczuk brainstormed the script using Anthropic Claude, trained a quick LoRA on a Stability AI SDXL ink painting style generated in ComfyUI, and built an agent using Claude Code and OpenAI Codex with GPT Image 2 to maintain character consistency across shots. For sound, he fed cut fragments of Chopin compositions into the video model to dictate emotional tone, layering Wispr Flow to guide the rest of the generation.
Owerczuk won all three categories across both the American and Chinese voting. The sweep marks his fourth Gen Jam victory, following previous wins in Hilversum, All USA Online, and the International Super Bowl Gen Jam, and his first time claiming all three awards while competing solo.
Original source: LinkedIn.
Source: LinkedIn (opens in a new tab). Facts checked against the source on .
