San Sebastian’s Zinemaldia and Technology Startup Competition Winners

Lithuanian sound design platform Sonic Alchemist has won the European competition at this year’s San Sebastian’s Zinemaldia & Technology Startup Challenge. Spanish dubbing software Dubme won the local competition for the series. Both projects generated €10,000 ($11,168) in purses.

A special mention entrepreneur award of €3,000 ($3,350) went to Danish company Kaspar K1, an editing program that allows filmmakers to search through thousands of hours of footage using text commands.

In addition to their cash prize, this year’s winners are conditionally entitled to free access to an incubation area for the first year after visiting one of the Business Innovation Centers (BIC) of the Basque Technology Park Network. They are also now eligible to receive possible funding of up to €500,000 ($559,000) to develop their projects from subsidies managed by the Basque BIC Network and supported by the Basque Government’s Department of Economic Development, Sustainability and Environment, through SPRI and the Provincial Councils.

San Sebastian Film Festival In 2019, Zinemaldia & Technology launched the Startup Challenge and the first winner was LargoAI, an artificial intelligence-based company. Not much seems to have changed in the five years since then, other than AI’s transformation from a popular technology to the most talked-about force in the audiovisual industry. It’s no different in San Sebastian, where every Zinemaldia & Tech presentation, roundtable and water cooler discussion focuses on artificial intelligence.

With its ubiquitous rise, AI has become the bogeyman for many working in the industry. No one in Thursday’s presentations claimed otherwise, and most of the day’s presentations included assurances that their software was developed within an ethical and legal framework. When this issue was not addressed during the presentation, the first question from the event’s judges often concerned the legality of the promoted product.

Another trend prevalent in much of the day’s discussion was the rise of independent content creators as a commercial force in the movie industry. Nearly half of the day’s presentations included B2C business plans not only for major media companies but also for digital-first solo creators like YouTubers, influencers, and independent animators.

This year’s European winner, Sonic Alchemist, uses computer vision to synchronize and adapt sound effects for film and create editable multi-track sketches. Kaspar K1 works like a search engine, scanning an editor’s image library for specific shots, and will eventually allow for AI-generated rough cuts using the original footage.

Other European submissions came from Filmanize, a UK-based company that has developed a platform that allows filmmakers to streamline the filmmaking process by semi-automating pre-production, script analysis and call sheet creation. Phont is a German-developed software that has honed the long-unchanged art of subtitle display by using artificial intelligence to animate text on the screen, similar to the use of comic book fonts to convey emotion on the page. Thol is a sound design suite for content creators and companies that scans video footage and creates sound effects to match the on-screen action.

Spanish winner Dubme was one of the most professional presentations of the day by company executive Elías Moreno, YouTube’s former 10-year head of Southern Europe. Dubme’s ambitious goal is to “eliminate language barriers in professional audiovisual content using artificial intelligence and human professionals” by streamlining and greatly reducing the cost of dubbing.

Another Spanish startup, Current Anima, received special mention. The software package allows users to create 3D virtual videos using text prompts. Emotional Movies, from the Professor Octopus AI Laboratory in Spain, is a new audiovisual format that adapts to what’s happening on the screen by tracking users’ emotions across video games and movies. Hulahoop is an investment platform that allows any user to invest in film projects and can deliver a return on investment by cataloging each person’s stake via blockchain. The last talk of the day came from Vocality, which creates cloned voices with generative AI.