Busan directors split live action and Kling AI in hybrid workflows

Creators of Rendering Love and Natasha described combining live action with Kling AI at the Asian Contents & Film Market (ACFM) in Busan. Their accounts keep live action for character performances and use Kling for virtual-idol stage shows, snowstorms and crowds. The accounts come from Deadline's 14 October partner-content article and a 13 October press release about the session, distributed through MarketersMedia. Both promote Kling AI, so they are not independent verification. Motion Engineering Today has not viewed the footage.

Kling AI and ACFM co-hosted the panel, titled "New Cinematic Possibilities: Reimagining Filmmaking with Kling AI", during the 31st Busan International Film Festival. Deadline says the two-hour session took place on the Sunday before its report.

Where the live-action line falls

Sang Wook Lee, who heads MBC C&I's AI Contents Lab, presented Rendering Love. The short-form series was co-developed with Barunson E&A, the company behind Parasite. Lee told the panel that the team shoots the real world in live action and uses AI for the stage performances of LEVRIT, a virtual idol group. According to Deadline, Lee said Kling's Motion Control moved movements filmed with real performers onto the virtual characters before those shots were blended into the live-action story. The release says the aim was to preserve dancers' movements and small physical details, and paraphrases Lee as saying AI transfers an actor's performance rather than replacing it. In this context, motion control means Kling's performance-transfer feature for AI video, not camera rigs or industrial motion systems.

Harry Hyun, founder of the startup MooAm, described Natasha, a planned 100-minute period romance thriller set in the winter of 1944 under Japanese colonial rule. Deadline reports that Hyun's approach keeps live action for character scenes that depend on nuanced performance, while Kling generates expensive settings such as a snowstorm and large crowd scenes. The film is described as in development. Neither source gives a production schedule or release date.

Director Sung-Soo Kim, whose credits include 12.12: The Day, made his first AI film, the short Worm Train, about an office worker who turns into a giant insect on his commute. Deadline reports that Kim halted the project in March because the AI tools he had could generate the insect but not its collisions with packed subway passengers. The release says he started on Kling 3.0 and resumed in September with Kling 4.0, rebuilding the abandoned subway scene with a Kling 4.0 Preview. Deadline says Kim worked AI into a conventional workflow built on the director's vision and collaboration with specialists.

Chinese animation director Wei Li also presented a 105-minute animated feature. He said Kling's native 4K generation helped with wide shots in which small faces would otherwise lose definition on a cinema screen. The two sources disagree on the film's title and character count, so this report leaves both out.

Kling 4.0 claims are the vendor's

The release says Kling 4.0 is starting early-access beta testing. It does not say who can join the beta, what it costs or when the model will be generally available. The release attributes these features to Kling 4.0:

• an Omni Reference function supporting up to 10 keyframes and up to 15 multimodal references, including images, video and audio, for character consistency across shots and episodes
• 10-bit HDR output, which the release says preserves shadow detail in backlit and night scenes and leaves more room for colour grading
• a 21:9 aspect ratio

The release also describes Kling's native 4K generation without naming its model version.

Deadline adds All-in-One Reference and video-to-video (V2V) to the tools named for Natasha. These are vendor and filmmaker descriptions. No published tests, side-by-side comparisons or production-cost figures accompany them, and neither source addresses rights or licensing terms for generated material. Before treating Kling 4.0 as ready for a pipeline, production teams would need beta access terms, output licensing conditions and finished footage from Rendering Love or Natasha to assess.

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AI-assisted, reviewed by Codex (25-post review authorized by JJ Rooney, 14 October 2026) on 14 October 2026.