SHIFTERS
Episode 1 Trailer
It Used To Be Different
Teaser 2
Eike Swoboda is a director and composer who has never really separated the two. Based in Hamburg, he thinks in images: he sees a film before he builds it, then realises it down to the last detail. Years of collaborative, largely improvised filmmaking gave him a sharp instinct for what makes a scene work, and the discipline to plan every frame.
He came to film not through a school but through Station 17, the influential Hamburg art-and-music collective, where as a young volunteer he was handed a camera and told to “see what you can do with it.” Self-taught, with no crew or budget, he made music videos that soon aired on MTV and Arte. He later graduated under Wim Wenders at the HfbK Hamburg, directed for Greenpeace and Steinway & Sons, and shot, cut, and scored work for Facebook, Vodafone, Puma, and Tchibo. His own YouTube project Ein Astronaut won YouTube NextUp in 2011, reaching a wide audience years before that was common.
Since 2023, AI has become central to his work and his native creative language. For an image-first director, it is an almost limitless instrument: he sees what is in his head instantly, fluid and dreamlike, and shapes it with the eye, timing, and sound he has built over two decades. He works fluently across the current generation of generative image and video models, directing and scoring each piece end to end, and pushes every tool to find what truly holds up in production. That work has taken him from Hamburg to Hollywood: he directs for the Los Angeles AI studio NeoCinema, whose executive producers include television veterans Jeff T. Thomas (FUBAR, Designated Survivor) and Trey Callaway (CSI: NY, Supernatural). His AI shorts have also been screened at international AI film festivals, and he spoke on AI in feature filmmaking at Berlinale 2026. What ties it all together is simple: generative work with a real filmmaker behind it, story and craft first, technology as the means.