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TLDR;
Machine Cinema is running a GenJam at Edge Esmeralda on Friday June 12, 12 to 4 PM.
Learn AI filmmaking tools, make a short film with a team, and screen it. Best clip wins a prize.
The theme is Dream Town: each team sketches a future worth living in. No AI or film making experience needed.
Join the warm-up session the day before; “The AI Creative Stack: The AI Tools Making us More Creative and Connected” which covers the tools changing how video, images, and 3D get made. Check the Community Calendar for details.
Open to all Edge Esmeralda attendees. Apply at edgeesmeralda.com (May 30 to June 27, Healdsburg, CA).
Machine Cinema readers: use discount code EE26-GENJAM-30 when applying.
On Friday June 12, Machine Cinema is running a GenJam at Edge Esmeralda, a month-long popup village in Healdsburg. All filmmakers, artists, technologists, and builders are welcome.
A GenJam is Machine Cinema’s signature four-hour format: a crash course on AI filmmaking tools and generative video, a team sprint to make a short, and a screening where every team shows what they built, with the best clip winning a prize.
The theme for this event is Dream Town.
There are three tracks:
Vibe Code Residency - Make an Ad for your business SMB
Touch Grass - Make a Solarpunk future with AI
Futurative - Make a meditation video with AI
Why Dream Town
Each team will build out a specific town in their short film: streets, people, weather, what life there looks like day-to-day. The premise is that imagined futures shape real ones, and most of what’s being imagined right now leans dystopian or hedged.
Dream Town is an honest swing in the other direction. Think how Star Trek showed a generation what cell phones and space travel could be, and they went and built them.
At Edge Esmeralda, we bring people together to prototype a future they would actually want to live in. This event will focus on creating the trailers for that future.
How to Participate
The GenJam runs Friday June 12, 10am to 2pm. It’s open to anyone with an Edge Esmeralda ticket, and no prior experience with AI tools is needed. If you haven’t got your ticket yet, you can grab one at edgeesmeralda.com.
The day before, we’re running a setup session called The AI Creative Stack: The AI Tools Making Us More Creative and Connected. The talk runs through the tools changing how video, images, and 3D get made, and the shifts they’re causing across the creator economy, Hollywood, ads, and video gaming. It’s the perfect warm-up to Friday’s jam.
Both sessions live on the Community Calendar. Check there for venue and any last-minute updates.
For the Machine Cinephiles reading this
Edge City convenes people working at the frontiers of tech, science, and society in popup villages across the globe. Participants come from AI, biotech, crypto, philosophy, governance, hard tech, and more. The idea is that if you put curious people from totally different fields in the same place long enough, the work starts compounding. They’ve hosted popups in Thailand, Argentina, Bhutan, Austin, and Denver, with past attendees including Vitalik Buterin, Grimes, and Laura Deming. (Read more here.)
Edge Esmeralda is the annual flagship popup in Healdsburg, California, running May 30 through June 27 with 500+ builders, creators, researchers, and artists. It’s co-organized with the Esmeralda Institute, a separate project building a permanent walkable village about ninety minutes north of San Francisco. The popup is a living prototype for that vision.
The week our GenJam lands in (June 8-14) is themed Intelligence and Autonomy: AI, governance, hard tech, privacy.
For the Edge City regulars reading this
Machine Cinema is a collective of over 20,000 filmmakers, artists, gamers, and storytellers using AI to make things together. They’ve run over 150 events in 30+ countries and recently published a market map of 250+ AI creative tools.
Their signature format is the GenJam: a four-hour workshop-meets-hackathon where you learn a new AI tool in hour one, sprint on a team project in hours two and three, and screen what you made in hour four. You leave with a finished piece and, ideally, some friends. Cofounder Minh Do calls the approach AIRL (AI in Real Life), and the core bet is simple: bringing people together in person to create with AI is more interesting than doing either alone.
Why this collab makes sense
Both communities are running the same experiment from opposite ends. Edge City wants to know what happens when curious people share a place long enough that the work compounds. Machine Cinema wants to know what happens when creative people are in the same room long enough to ship something with tools few people taken the time to master yet.
So on June 12, AI filmmakers end up working next to biotech researchers, governance designers, and founders. The prompt is Dream Town: a sketch of a future you’d want to live in. The kind of place a generation might see in your film and then want to build.
Bring a laptop. Don’t bring a plan. We’ll see what shows up on screen.
See you in Healdsburg ☀️
Cross-published with Machine Cinema and Edge Esmeralda.
Very excited for this!