LOS ANGELES - Studying at the film school where Oscar-nominated "Sinners" director Ryan Coogler honed his craft, SiJia Zheng dreams of winning an Academy Award.
Now with the recent developments in artificial intelligence, he can see a shortcut to achieving his ambition.
"That's a chance for beginners like me who can use AI to just make a film and to announce to the world that I have the ability to be a director," he told AFP.
Zheng, who hails from China, is one of a burgeoning class of students at USC's School of Cinematic Arts, studying animation in a place that has long been a training ground for future Pixar and DreamWorks talent.
He has used his time at the Los Angeles university to learn about the emerging field of AI animation.
That has included producing his seven-minute short film "Torment" about a masked killer terrorising a high school.
The film, which was recognised at the LA Shorts festival, was generated entirely by AI -- in just one week.
Zheng recorded himself in front of a green screen and then asked the software to modify his face to make him into all the different characters in the movie.
The technology also allowed him to set his story in an Asian school and have scenes in a swimming pool -- two things that would have cost a fortune if he had filmed them traditionally.
"As a student, it's impossible to have that much money" to produce a film, he said.
Not everyone in Hollywood feels so positively about AI.
The technology was one of the key sticking points in the writers' and actors' strikes that paralysed Hollywood in 2023.
Guillermo del Toro, the director of "Frankenstein," which will compete for the best picture Oscar on Sunday, is notoriously anti-AI, insisting he would "rather die" than use it.
Zheng insists, however, that it doesn't replace the filmmaking spark.
"AI is just a tool, and people can use it to become even better."
The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the body that will hand out the Oscars in Hollywood on March 15, seems to agree -- last year the body updated its rules to say it was neutral on the technology.
"Generative Artificial Intelligence and other digital tools...neither help nor harm the chances of achieving a nomination," it said last April.