Secret Apartment shows how a 60-minute AI film was built

A 60-minute feature film, made almost entirely by one person in under three months and assembled from clips that were mostly seconds long, has won two awards at a film festival in Bali. The awards made news across the Philippines. For anyone who makes these films, the question worth answering is how a feature gets built from clips that run seconds at a time.

Filipino filmmaker Vincent Soberano won the inaugural Bold Vision Award and the Gold Award for Best AI Major Motion Picture at the fifth season of the Bali International AI Film Festival (BIAIFF) for Secret Apartment, a 60-minute erotic psychological drama made with generative AI. ABS-CBN carried the double win on October 12, the Daily Tribune on October 14 and GMA Network on October 16.

The festival's competitive field was large. Secret Apartment emerged from more than 1,000 entries from dozens of countries, according to GMA Network and the Daily Tribune. The Gold Award for Best AI Major Motion Picture was introduced in Season 5 specifically to recognize AI filmmaking that runs past short-form into feature length.

What Vincent Soberano won

BIAIFF runs seasonally out of Ubud, Bali, and puts winning films on a cinema screen rather than only online. The organizer's FilmFreeway page lists a live 4K screening at Cinema Paradiso in Ubud before a paying audience, filmmaker spotlight interviews and sponsored software prizes. There is no cash prize. The ticketing page for Season 5 put the screening at Paradiso Ubud on September 30, 2026, with tickets at 120,000 Indonesian rupiah, 100,000 for locals.

The festival is led by founder and festival director Ben Makinen, a PBS-distributed filmmaker whose work is released through his label Bmakin Film. In its citation, the festival said it was proud to present its first-ever Bold Vision Award to Soberano's film. The Tribune described that award as one established to honor filmmakers who push emerging cinematic tools into uncharted territory.

Secret Apartment is set in modern Taipei and follows a young university student who begins an affair with a real estate tycoon engaged to her older cousin. Soberano told the press it drew in part on Marguerite Duras' novel The Lover and the 2018 romantic comedy-drama Crazy Rich Asians. It stars Azela Lee and Michael Wu and was produced by Scene 8 Studios / Seq 8 Studios Corp.

How a 60-minute film gets built from 15-second clips

The mechanics are the story for anyone who has tried to hold a narrative together across more than a handful of generations.

Soberano told the Tribune he built the film in "episodic chunks," writing and generating it as a miniseries before realizing the parts added up to a feature. "In the end, it looked like a one-hour pilot episode but also a full-length feature movie," he said. He described the project to GMA Network as an accident of experimentation: "I kind of stumbled into creating a full-length movie when I was experimenting with Higgsfield's Cinema Studio. I gave it a simple prompt for a small scene with a short backstory between two unlikely lovers and it gave me several video clips that would go on to be my inspiration for the movie."

The unit he was working in was small. According to the Tribune, the finished 60 minutes were assembled from many clips of about 15 seconds each, generated separately and stitched together in the edit. That is the central constraint of feature-length AI filmmaking today: the tools produce shots measured in seconds, and a feature is thousands of them.

What broke first: keeping the same face across hundreds of clips

Character continuity was the first wall. Holding the same face, body and wardrobe across hundreds of short generations is, according to the Tribune, a huge challenge for AI filmmakers.

Soberano said he solved it himself, down to fine details like intricate tattoos, by developing his own workflow and toolsets, including software applications he built to support the project. Both GMA and the Tribune credit him with clearing problems that had stopped other AI filmmakers.

Higgsfield's own documentation shows where the built-in answer lives. The company's help center describes an Elements system that lets a creator save a character, location or prop once and reuse it across shots and projects so the same face or setting appears in every generation. Cinema Studio 4.0, the version Soberano named, accepts up to 50 references and generates clips of up to 30 seconds, the docs say. The system is designed to make continuity a reusable asset rather than a fresh prompt each time.

What broke second: the scenes the models refused

The film's explicit scenes hit a different kind of wall. Soberano told the Tribune that generating sexually explicit scenes is flagged and rejected by all the major AI models, and GMA reported the same: the content is refused outright. He worked around it with his own workflow and the software he built, without describing what the workaround produces.

The refusal layer shapes which films can be made at all. Higgsfield's help center documents a related block on its own platform, a generation stopped with a message about protected content, with the fix being to remove real faces or recognizable copyrighted material from the prompt. Soberano's answer was to build outside the tools he was using.

The tools Soberano named

The stack, as he described it to GMA and the Tribune: Higgsfield's Cinema Studio, with the models Seedance 2.0, Nano Banana Pro and Cinema Studio 4, plus CapCut for AI-enhanced editing and Songer for musical scoring. Soberano wrote, directed, generated, edited and composed the whole film himself in less than three months.

One version worth flagging for anyone copying the stack: Higgsfield's help center says Cinema Studio 4.0 runs on Seedance 2.5, while Soberano names Seedance 2.0 among the models he used. Those may be separate uses rather than a contradiction, and the sources do not settle it.

What a creator can take from it

Three things carry over, and all of them are structural.

Chunk the story before you generate it. Soberano's route to 60 minutes was a miniseries built episode by episode, which gave each block a small enough scope to survive the tools' clip-length limit. Treat continuity as infrastructure, not inspiration. The face that stays the same across a feature is an asset you save and reuse, which is the logic behind Higgsfield's Elements system and behind the custom software Soberano says he built. And plan for the parts the models will not generate. A project with content the major models refuse needs a workflow built around that refusal from the start.

Soberano is already moving past the all-AI approach. He told GMA he is now developing what he calls hybrid filmmaking, combining real human actors with AI-generated elements, and his company Scene 8 Studio is building a library of AI elements for those productions, with plans to license the intellectual property to other film producers and studios.

Secret Apartment is expected to arrive on AI film platforms, including a version cut for vertical drama platforms, according to GMA Network. Soberano's awards follow BIAIFF's September 30, 2026 screening at Paradiso Ubud.