iGen Film Festival is a Miami youth film festival in Historic Overtown, now in its 11th year. It educates young people about filmmaking in front of and behind the lens, and spotlights people of color in film, arts and culture. AI image tools were already in students' pockets, but most of what they had seen treated AI either as a shortcut or as a threat. Shablé saw an opening for something different: a hands-on session, safe for minors and built to fit a festival schedule, that would teach students in grades 6 to 12 to use these tools with judgment.
Commune designed the workshop as a film shoot. Instead of a lecture about AI, students would make something, with the AI as the crew and the student as the director. The first edition ran at iGen in 2025. For the 2026 festival (November 5–8), the session was rebuilt with more making and less talking, and expanded to the festival's new elementary track.
The middle and high school sessions followed the same arc:
- A Real-or-AI game to open, so students sharpened their eye before making anything of their own
- A bias check on who AI casts as the hero, so students saw the assumptions built into the tool before they ever used it
- A paper shot card with a one-sentence logline, a title and a visual style, so every poster started from a real story the student wrote by hand
- A poster lab on the Miami-Dade Public Library System's Technobus, where students rotated through in groups of ten and watched their poster develop on screen, so generating an image felt like rolling camera instead of a black box
- A second take, so students named what the AI got wrong, including who it assumed the hero would be, and directed it to fix that
- A festival-wide People's Choice vote to close, so posters reached an audience beyond the room, anyone at iGen could vote from their phone, and the top three were revealed at the closing ceremony
For the festival's youngest directors, ages 6 and 7, a Little Directors version kept the same arc in simpler steps: students told their story out loud, picked a look, and learned the one big idea, that the robot is the helper and they're the boss.
The poster lab (https://lights-camera-algorithm.shableharris.com/), slides and premiere screens were designed and built from scratch for the program. That included a code-gated web app with facilitator approval and live voting, which gave the workshop one consistent identity within Commune.
The 2026 edition, run in partnership with the Miami-Dade Public Library System and its Techmobile, a 37-foot mobile technology lab, reached 75 students across 4 sessions, from grades 6–12 to the festival's first elementary group. Forty four posters premiered, People's Choice drew votes from locals and festival attendees, and the top three were revealed at the closing ceremony. [One line from an iGen organizer, MDPLS partner, teacher or student.]