Everyone's a Director: A Trip to the Moon, recreated by 4.8 Million Votes

We re-create Georges Méliès’ Le Voyage dans la Lune (1902), the first science- fiction film, as two complete short films in which every aesthetic decision is delegated to a human preference ranking. The production runs on FilmArena, our live, task-specific preference leaderboard in which over 4.8 million blind pairwise votes rank 55 generative image and video models across 24 production tasks. For each of the film’s fourteen tableaux, a classifier decides what kind of shot it is, and the leaderboard decides which model has earned the right to make it. Version 1 animates human-staged reference frames with each task’s top-ranked video model; Version 2 withholds all reference imagery, reconstructing every set, character, and motion from language alone through ranked image and video models. The final rankings of which model is picked is picked by the agent is decided by millions of voters who never knew they were directing a film.