OneDay dropped a five-minute AI-powered short on YouTube less than a month after Ukraine’s secret drone strikes on Russia.
The film, The Decisive Moment: Spiders in the Sky, dramatizes Operation Spiderweb — an 18-month covert mission where 117 drones built inside Russia attacked five air bases. The strikes reportedly wrecked a third of Russia’s strategic cruise missile carriers, causing billions in damage using $400 drones.
UK director Samir Mallal led the project. Using Google’s new AI video tool Veo3 alongside OpenAI’s Sora and MidJourney, the team created nearly all visuals through AI. The film blends hard facts with dramatic, even humorous touches — like showing Master Chief from Halo running through an airbase, referencing the drone count’s nod to the game’s main character. 
Mallal calls it “Mission: Impossible for the news,” made in under a week for around $50K — lightning-fast turnaround unheard of in traditional doc production.
“I wanted to use these new tools to tell a cinematic version of the news,”
Samir Mallal said.“I was thinking: what if Vice launched in 2025.”
The film sticks to reported details from Ukraine’s mission, including using AI-generated likenesses of real generals. But it’s clearly marked as an “interpretation,” mixing fact with creative license amid ongoing conflict.
“We are telling a truth, regardless of whether it is factual, and there’s a difference,”
Mallal explained.“As artists, our job is not to express facts. Our job is to tell a story and bring our point of view to it
and let people interpret things on an emotional and immersive level.”
Spiders in the Sky is the first in a planned series on current events made fast, with a second film already underway about Israel’s recent Tehran bombing.
The project flips the script: one director, armed with AI, skipping traditional green lights, tackling hot geopolitical stories in near real-time.
“As somebody who’s been working in the industry for 30 years and always having had to go out and get permission to tell the story that I want to tell, I don’t want to have to get permission anymore,”
Mallal said.“I want to be the studio and make the work that I want to make and I don’t want it watered down.
I think we’re entering this new era where one artist or a small team of artists, in this case, with the right tools, can do what used to take 100 people and a green light.”
Watch The Decisive Moment: Spiders in the Sky on YouTube here.
