I had a great week.

Startups are hard, but at their core, they’re simple: build something people want.

The difficulty isn’t understanding that objective. It’s figuring out what people actually want, distinguishing polite encouragement from genuine demand, and building something valuable enough that they change their behavior to use it.

You can surround that work with complexity—fundraising, strategy, hiring, positioning. Those things matter, but none can substitute for making something people want. An impressive team, a compelling pitch, and enormous effort don’t absolve you of that requirement.

That’s what I mean by simple. Not that there are few things to do, or that success is guaranteed if you get the product right. But that there’s a clear organizing principle against which to judge the work: are we making something people genuinely want, and getting better at delivering it to them?

And this week it was a resounding yes.

PS - To celebrate our IBC win (best of show, baby!), we have a promotion running until next Sunday, Oct 4.

Every Eddie credit pack from $45 and up comes with 5% extra credits!

The bonus is added automatically at checkout.

Buy credits →

Also this week:

Adobe swallows Topaz Labs, James Gray talks about returning to shooting film because he thinks digital changes acting, Canon patented a camera designed to prove its pictures are real, and someone compiled 35 years of Hollywood spec sales into a 517-page PDF.

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YouTube wants to A/B test the actual edit. Creators can soon upload up to three cuts of the same video and see which opening holds attention best. Titles and thumbnails have been rumored to be optimised this way for years but this goes a step further.

Adobe officially owns Topaz Labs. It’s a deal worth around $340 million and brings Topaz’s video upscaling and restoration models deeper into Creative Cloud. Topaz stays as a standalone brand for now (literally just for now), which is normally the reassuring sentence you hear immediately after a software company gets bought.

Vimeo On Demand stopped taking money. New purchases ended September 21 and the service will shut completely on November 20. Any films you “bought” will disappear with it unless the filmmaker enabled downloads.

James Gray went back to film because digital changed the acting. After shooting Armageddon Time digitally, Gray returned to film for Paper Tiger. He argues that film stock puts an actual cost on every second and everybody on set can feel it. This is nothing new but interesting to see an established filmmaker return to film instead of the other way around.

Scott Myers catalogued 35 years of Hollywood spec deals for free. Screenwriter Scott Myers has released a free 517-page archive of 2,560 verified spec sales and options from 1991 to 2025, complete with buyers, genres, representation, reported prices and more than 2,400 loglines.

One indie film is travelling around America on a single DVD. After Handle With Care struggled on the festival circuit, filmmaker Matthew James Thompson is sending a DVD copy of the film around America inside a peli-case. Inside the case viewers can find a portable player and handwritten notes from previous watchers Only 90 people signed up so far.

Who gets the screen?

Most indie films never get real distribution.

Which makes two theatrical experiments announced earlier this month more interesting now that Vimeo’s direct-distribution experiment is effectively dead.

AMC, the world’s largest cinema chain, just created its own distribution company in Leawood Films and the model is deliberately low risk. AMC will not finance your movie or develop your script.

They’re only taking on financed and completed films, then they’ll use their marketing muscle and a cinema footprint of nearly 9,500 screens to actually get them in front of people.

The first releases won’t be till 2027 or even 2028, but it’s worth tracking this. AMC becoming the distributor itself could kickstart a future where the exhibitor and distributor are the same thing.

Saying that, Regal Cinemas are testing almost the opposite idea.

Its Future of Distribution pilot with IFTA and France’s CNC will give otherwise-unused screens and showtimes to a neutral programmer whose sole job is to fill seats.

That means zero loyalty to studio relationships and no requirement to favour the normal release slate. The programmer can choose a range of different types of films such as wide releases, docs, repertory films or special events.

The trial starts in selected markets later this year, with results expected in 2027.

Then there’s Vimeo.

When Vimeo On Demand launched in 2013, the vision was a present where you’d be able to upload your film and sell directly to viewers with no meddling distributors involved.

I think we’ve all come to find that removing the gatekeeper doesn’t magically create an audience.

Meanwhile, in cameras

Canon patented a camera that can prove its pictures are real. The design uses two sensors shooting simultaneously, creating a second reference image that helps verify just how much a photograph has been altered.

Canon also wants your fingerprint on the camera. Another patent puts biometric sensors into the grip or thumb rest, potentially unlocking personalised settings or securing shared bodies. Face ID for cameras next?

A hacker built a digital camera specifically to behave more like film. Camera hacker Malcom Jay built the WLV-01 which is 3D-printed camera with lens mounts and even a waist-level finder.

This week we’re watching

Wingsuit world champion Espen Fadnes flying down Norway’s Trollstigen Road at more than 200 km per hour, bombing past a cyclist and a bus on the way down.

The branded stunt for Zing Toothpaste used 15 camera angles, including GoPro Hero13s, Mission1 Pros and Max2s.

Not quite sure how this promotes a toothpaste but it’s a cool watch :)

Retail Therapy: the $260 telescope for your phone

Qivika is a 300g smart telescope that can clip to your phone and gives it 24× optical magnification. They claim up to a 3,000mm-equivalent view, with an app that can identify birds and guide you around the night sky.

Currently on Kickstarter for under $260.

Probably not replacing your 600mm wildlife lens but much easier to put in your coat pocket.

Back from IBC. It was exhuastingilerating. My friends asked how was the city, did you check out the Anne Frank museum, did you ride a bike along the canals? Nope. I flew in. Conference all day. Work all night (cause I was jet-lagged). Back to the conference. Rinse and repeat. Flew out.

But it was fun. I find it super energizing meeting existing and potential customers and running demos.

And we had something big to show:

We launched v4. And it won Best in Show at IBC!

That’s the trifecta of wins this year: IBC, CineGear, and NAB.

We finally got around to updating our YouTube channel with new how-to videos, here’s the playlist.

When you play with v4, let me know what you think. It is immensely more capable than previous versions.

—Shamir
CEO & Co-founder, Eddie AI

PS: want to check out something new?

Also this week

Reuters let newsrooms edit archive footage by talking to it, Sony has 7,000 FX5 orders to fill. TIFF’s new market produced a bidding war and an AI Val Kilmer film. The greatest summer box office of all time and Yellowstone is apparently fishing lens caps out of hot springs.

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Avid put Media Composer in Chrome. Google Cloud now sits underneath a browser version of the editor, with Gemini and BigQuery being wired in for search and automation. Avid’s own survey says 79% of professional editors are already using AI.

Reuters made its archive editable by talking to it. The footage plugs into CuttingRoom’s browser editor, where a newsroom can ask an AI to find a clip, edit and reformat it for whichever platform needs it next.

OpenAI buys camera company for $300 million. Glass Imaging was founded by former Apple engineers and runs neural processing directly on RAW sensor data.

Sony has 7,000 FX5 pre-order backlog. Demand’s strong enough that later orders could slip towards the end of the year or beyond.

Heavyweight auteurs back €30 million indie cinema bailout fund. IRIS has Almodóvar, Sofia Coppola, Scorsese, Sean Baker, Jane Campion and Denis Villeneuve on its international council, with a target of raising €30 million to support vulnerable arthouses over the next three years.

Hollywood technically just had its biggest summer ever*. *Records have become much, much easier due to ticket prices and, of course, inflation. Regardless, the North American summer box office reached roughly $4.765 billion, beating out 2013’s summer record by $9.3 million.

Toronto goes shopping

TIFF launched its first proper market this year, backed by C$23 million in federal funding and more than 800 buyers.

But for the first few days, hardly anyone was actually buying.

Then River happened.

The Midnight Madness horror film arrived with IFC/Shudder already holding rights, but the Toronto response was strong enough to effectively put it back on the table. Sony reportedly bid $8 million before Universal and Blumhouse Atomic Monster went above $10 million.

A decent receipt for a film market that has spent years unofficially operating out of hotel bars.

Whether TIFF’s market actually sticks is the real question. And Stephen Follows has, as ever, done the far better deep dive on the market itself.

He went snooping through three years of Canadian government accounts, 145 public statements and attendance data from rival markets, and came away convinced it will.

The headline numbers from his research:

• 3,377 companies were listed as attending on opening day, up 63% on last year.

• Only about a third of AFM's regulars showed up, so Toronto is pulling a different crowd rather than poaching the same one.

I personally know quite a few AFM regulars who have never been to TIFF.

Read full dive below:

StephenFollows.com - Using data to explain the film industry

Is TIFF’s market here to stay?

I am writing this as I fly out of Toronto, after spending five days at the film industry’s brand-new major market, TIFF: The Market, attached to the 51st Toronto International Film Festival…

Read more

14 days ago · 17 likes · Stephen Follows

Down the road, Criterion opened an actual video store.

Cinema Cellar at 129 John Street is the company’s first permanent Canadian retail home, and it spent the festival stocked with the physical catalogue. Last year’s Criterion Mobile Closet drew more than 1,000 visitors in a few days, with 80% of them under 30.

Some even bought their first disc despite owning nothing capable of playing it. Cute.

AI Val Kilmer film

Buyers at TIFF were offered As Deep As The Grave, which features an authorised AI recreation of the late Val Kilmer after illness prevented him from filming the role. His family approved the performance and his estate is being compensated.

Imagine reading that sentence five years ago.

Meanwhile, in cameras

Pentax killed its DSLRs so it can make more DSLRs. Ricoh discontinued the current K-series while promising a new generation built around an “entirely new concept.”

A photographer took a $500 Dyson toothbrush (yup) street shooting. The new CameraJet has a tiny camera built into the brush so you can inspect your teeth. A photographer who goes by the name All Gear No Skill took it outside instead, using screenshots of the live phone feed as street photos because the app cannot actually record anything.

“The best camera is the one you have with you” gone too far?

IBC had a music video shot with 75 RED cameras. On RED’s stand, DP Neirin Jones showed how he surrounded artist DeathbyRomy with 75 V-RAPTOR X bodies shooting 8K, then used the volumetric capture to move the camera virtually after the performance had already happened.

Anamorphic lenses now know about TikTok. Sirui’s Saturn V2 rotates its anamorphic element internally, so the same lens gives you the correct aspect ratio squeeze and oval bokeh whether you’re framing horizontal or vertical.

Someone built a machine for making almost-35mm film at home. A 3D-printed perforator punches sprocket holes into photographic paper so it can run through a film camera. It can be powered by a cordless drill, which feels appropriately artisanal.

Yellowstone removed 54 lens caps from its hot springs this year, along with hundreds of hats and thousands of other objects.

This week we’re watching

Two boys heading out into London and the video simply follows them. That’s it.

It plays like a tiny narrative film and eventually folds straight into Ezra Collective’s next track, Black Flag.

Fin Melluish’s edit is patient enough to let the night feel lived-in before reminding you this is technically still a music video.

Retail Therapy: the $2,299 robot legs

Hypershell’s Halo is a consumer exoskeleton with four motors assisting your hips and knees as you walk or carry weight. It predicts movement in 0.2 seconds and folds into a backpack with a claimed range of up to 20km.

Advertised mainly for hiking but also doubles as location-shoot equipment for anyone tired of carrying Peli case uphill.

Pre-orders are open at $2,299, shipping from late November.

Eddie v4 launched yesterday and in time for IBC 2026 where we will have a booth (7.A38) and be speaking (learn more).

My favorite three big updates:

• cloud-synced projects, accessible anywhere with anyone on your team. Hi iphone app | web | Mac | Windows | API

• support for editing many more video types like b-roll based, montages, weddings, etc.

• pay as you go. Buy credits as you need. No subscription lock-in.

My picks for the coolest new features:

• Eddie can join your Blackmagic Cloud or Adobe Premiere Productions projects as another teammate and edit together with them concurrently

• You can export an edit from Eddie to Frame.io. Feedback notes left in Frame.io are accessible to Eddie who can then implement them.

• Eddie can search stock libraries, generate b-roll sequences, and generate music cutting shots to the beat.

All the updates are here. Sign up and receive free credit.

—Shamir

This week:

IBC 2026 starts tomorrow, sending around 45,000 people to Amsterdam to obsess over the unsexy machinery behind video. Reuters turns 70 years of footage into an AI-searchable archive and TIFF’s first real film market.

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Adobe puts AI generators inside the timeline. Premiere 26.5 can now generate video without ever leaving the timeline, using Firefly and models like Veo and Runway.

Reuters and ITN put 70 years of broadcast history through AI search. Reuters will make ITN’s archive available through Reuters Connect from January 2027 and digitise another 12,000 hours of footage.

TIFF finally has a real market, and sellers are already asking why. The market opens with a C$23 million federal funding injection and nearly 1000 buyers. You’re probably thinking, “Didn’t TIFF already have a market?” . Well, it did. Unofficially. Hiding in hotel bars and restaurants but this time they’re formalising it six weeks before AFM.

Destination IBC

The show began at the Royal Lancaster Hotel, London in 1967, just as European TV turned to color and live satellite broadcasting made television feel planetary.

Its founders from EMI, Marconi and Rank wanted something more useful than a gear exhibition so they created a tech conference owned by the people actually building the tech.

That dynamic remains today as IBC is still owned by six industry bodies which include the Royal Television Society and the IET.

If NAB sells scale and CES sells whatever consumer tech wants us to believe in next, then IBC sells plumbing behind all of that.

That’s the boring stuff like signal transport or codecs. And asset management. And captioning. Camera control. Metadata. Ok, I won’t bore you further.

None of it is sexy but that’s precisely the point.

Most viewers will never know which bit of IBC tech made a broadcast work.But they will notice the second their stream buffers or their video doesn’t load. That’s what IBC’s really about.

That invisible plumbing is what made the show indispensable, and eventually too big for its original home.

IBC left London for Amsterdam in ‘92 and this year it expects roughly 45,000 attendees and 1,300 exhibitors across 14 halls.

Arguably the most interesting hall this year is Hall 14. “Future Tech”.

It’s the fastest-growing part of the show, and its Accelerator projects offer a pretty clean view of where video tech could be heading next.

One project brings together some of the big boys such as BBC, Vodafone and RAI to test open 5G APIs that can prioritise professional video feeds when networks get crowded.

Another, FRAMES, is working with companies including AMD and Eddie AI to make footage archives searchable by AI agents.

Another builds production-accurate digital twins of studios using LiDAR. Another uses AI agents to turn one live feed into multiple versions.

The logical endpoint here seems to be “one source, hundreds of edits”.

That same logic is already reaching post-production. Adobe now generates video and sound inside Premiere. Blackmagic is letting AI assistants act on Resolve projects. Avid is adding governed agentic workflows while pulling Baselight colour closer to Media Composer.

If you were worried about AI fusing with post workflows, it is far too late :)

Irish cinema screens The Odyssey at 5:20am because tickets were €4. ODEON Blanchardstown stayed open continuously for National Cinema Weekend, adding 24 overnight shows and running 109 screenings across the weekend. Options included The Odyssey in IMAX at 1:20am and 5:20am and the €4 promotion ultimately generated 281,140 admissions across Ireland.

A film that auditioned 392,000 people finally premiered. Ilya Khrzhanovsky’s DAU finally reached Venice after nearly 20 years. The production originally built a 12,000 sq meter Soviet institute, cast 10,000 non-actors and shot 700+ hours without a conventional script.

This week we’re watching

More than 1,700 artists submitted no-AI trading card visuals, with the results collected into one long showcase and a physical card game alongside it.

Apparently the most radical creative constraint in 2026 is “please make it yourself.”

Also watching:

The Gamers Nexus 135-minute investigation into LG smart TVs.

They found the TV could keep listening even when the screen looked off. The investigation also found it poking around the home network and identifying other connected devices.

Long watch, but suddenly dumb TVs look underrated.

Retail Therapy: The search tool for drives you forgot you owned

Hedge are previewing Canopy at IBC, an offline-first app that indexes footage across drives and keeps it searchable even when the storage is disconnected.

Search “spoon,” and in theory it can show you every spoon you’ve ever filmed on your drive.

Not for sale yet, but probably more useful than just another SSD.

If you’re at IBC, it’s worth checking out. Hall 7, booth 7.A36.

Eddie AI will be at IBC next week!! And we have a big update for you.

IBC:

Where: Booth 7.A38, Hall 7, Sept 11-14, 2026

Talk: Shamir Allibhai on the Future Tech Stage — Saturday, September 12, 14:15

Meet: one-on-one meeting booking

Drink: 6-8pm, Sunday, Sept 13 | RSVP

Full details: https://www.heyeddie.ai/blog/eddie-ai-at-ibc-2026

—Shamir
CEO & Co-founder, Eddie AI

Also this week:

Phil Tippett’s Stars Wars and Jurassic park inventory gets emptied out. GoPro is becoming a defence company. Google waves hundreds of millions at studios for the right to train on their IP. And AMC got tired of waiting for movies, so decided to distribute them..themselves.

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AMC is becoming a distributor. The world’s biggest cinema chain just launched Leawood Films and will acquire theatrical rights to completed movies on a distribution-only basis. The Taylor Swift Eras Tour films stands as the POC which AMC pushed through its own network to $261.6 million worldwide.

Sundance and TikTok open Global Micro-Series Challenge. Five winners get $5K each and a Sundance Collab course package. The money isn’t meaningless but Sundance now putting its name on verticals is the real draw. Deadline September 10.

Google offers Hollywood hundreds of millions for AI rights. The company is in talks with all the big boys (Disney, Universal, Warner Bros etc) about licensing IP, although talent rights and studio caution have stalled any deals.

GoPro improves optics

Mere days after Markiplier emerged as its largest shareholder, GoPro agreed to merge with Starman Optical in a deal that gives existing shareholders $285 million in cash, leaves them with roughly 10% of the combined company and clears $92 million of debt.

Closing is targeted for year-end.

The interesting part is what Starman appears to be buying beyond the HERO.

GoPro has spent two decades building more than 2,500 US patents around small sensors and optics designed to survive abuse. Those capabilities now sit squarely inside markets that are expanding far beyond action cameras.

That makes this feel less like an exit from cameras than a reclassification of what GoPro actually is. The HERO can remain the consumer-facing brand while the deeper tech stack gets sold into much less visible applications.

GoPro starts to look like watch companies whose real business is the movement inside the case.

There’s also something slightly bleak about that shift.

The action camera was arguably one of the most democratic imaging devices ever made, cheap enough to be everywhere and tough enough to go almost anywhere.

Its next chapter may still involve cameras, but increasingly for customers and use cases the public will never see.

Phil Tippett’s 40 year-old Berkeley workshop gets raided. The studio behind creatures from Star Wars and Jurassic Park is sadly shutting up shop, with decades of models and production material being auctioned off. Possible reasons include consolidation and the broader migration away from physical effects work.

StudioCanal has turned archive into a label. They claim they’ve got the largest film library outside the U.S., spanning more than 18K titles, with 1,000 films restored in 4K. Terminator 2 is coming back in practically every format available.

Apple streams live baseball in Immersive Video. Select Friday Night Baseball games are being broadcast to Vision Pro in 8K 3D with a 180-degree field of view and Spatial Audio. The tech may be impressive, but the early reviews aren’t convinced. The Verge called the debut “visually pretty remarkable” but questioned why anyone would want to watch a three-hour baseball game with a heavy headset strapped to their face.

CODEX sells CFexpress cards now. They’re best known for proprietary media on high-end cinema cameras but just launched Type A and Type B cards alongside a USB4 reader, with sustained writes up to 3,000MB/s and Type B pricing from $538. It also arrives in the middle of the ongoing storage crisis through 2026.

Blackmagic turns iPad into wireless director’s monitor. Video Assist 2.3 adds NDI over Wi-Fi, remote record triggering and vertical monitoring without a transmitter or capture card, with the Pro tier at $199.99 a year. Another specialist box just became an app.

This week we’re watching:

Studio Heartbreak’s 15-minute animated short lands online three years after raising more than $400K on Kickstarter and making the festival rounds, including HollyShorts.

A very 2020s short-film release arc, with the audience arriving first and the free public release coming last.

Retail Therapy: The toothbrush that snitches

My dentist has been asking me about flossing for years. “Yeah, yeah”

Dyson’s new CameraJet makes that lie harder to maintain. A tiny camera under the brush head scans 28 images a second for gaps between your teeth, then fires a targeted jet of mouthrinse within 100 milliseconds.

Dyson says 9 in 10 people do not floss as much as they should so a lot of you will be getting caught out with this.

The app is where things get really invasive. You get live camera footage, coverage maps and feedback on the areas you keep missing. Dyson says no images are recorded or stored, either on the toothbrush or in the cloud.

Hmm..

$499.99 at Dyson.

Did you hear?

Eddie is now friends with ChatGPT and Claude. Has a slick iPhone app. And the biz model is now primarily pay-as-you-go so it is way more flexible plus the price was reduced a lot.

Prompt from within ChatGPT and Claude and tag the Eddie plugin/connector/MCP to create video edits.

ChatGPT and Claude already have your video project’s knowledge. You may have used them to develop the story and prep for the interviews. So you can use them to prompt Eddie. Assuming you brought in your media into Eddie, Eddie will then do that edit for you per the requested prompt.

In the case of ChatGPT you can actually see the edits within ChatGPT.

Here’s how to setup Eddie for ChatGPT/Claude.

Have a great weekend.

—Shamir

Also this week:

The Aussie company that invented the fluid tripod head way back in ‘46 is about to shut down. China’s bizarro YouTube picked the same week YouTube made getting paid harder to fling its doors open to the West. Also, New York’s City Hall made a Wes Anderson-style doc about a tenant union and nobody seems sure why.

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Bilibili goes global. China’s YouTube alternative drops ID checks and relaunches its international app. They’ve hired community managers in LA and London but what’s most interesting is the Studio tool, which auto-translates your uploads into Chinese and puts you in front of a few hundred million people YouTube will never reach as long as it’s blocked on the mainland.

Yahoo now distributes docs. They teamed with The Nonfiction Hotlist to pick 20 shorts out of nearly a thousand submissions and stream them to its 700 million monthly visitors. They also did a festival screening at the American Dream mall in New Jersey last weekend.

Filmmakers accuse Letterboxd and TMDB of deleting their films for no reason. Dan Hentschel says his films keep getting pulled from both platforms without explanation. His film Sister vanished the day after he publicly mentioned it was listed, and Joel Haver says his self-distributed work was removed while other YouTube-distributed films stay up.

The people who sell screen time won’t buy it for their kids

Everyone reading this newsletter makes or uses screen time for a living. Whatever you call the work - films, docs, branded content, verticals, literally whatever. It ends up on somebody’s screen, distributed through infrastructure owned by a fairly small group of companies.

Now, about the people running them.

The NY Times pulled together a decade’s worth of their own statements this week, and the finding is hard to miss.

The executives who built the attention economy ration it at home. Zuckerberg limits his children’s passive screen time. Peter Thiel reportedly caps his kids at 90 minutes a week. Even Bill Gates held phones back until his kids were 14.

Evan Spiegel’s toddler gets no screens at all.

Let’s go back to Zuckerberg a second.

“I don’t generally want my kids to be sitting in front of a TV or computer for a long period of time,” he has said. Interacting with people is good, he argued, but passively consuming content “just going from video to video” doesn’t carry the same benefits.

“From video to video”.

Zucker isn’t really describing tech as he’s really describing a feed. The Feed. Coming from the man who arguably invented it. What he’s ruling out for his own kids is the delivery system, the version of watching where nobody chose anything and nothing was ever meant to end.

That’s the double position.

At work, these companies sell abundance. At home, their executives behave as if their children’s attention is the scarcest resource in the house.

That distinction matters for filmmakers because we’ve spent years being told that shorter, faster, more frequent and more frictionless is simply what the audience wants. The engagement data appears to reward endless consumption.

Maybe it does but apparently the dinner table doesn’t.

American repertory cinema rewrites the Asian film canon. Distributors like Big World Pictures and Arbelos are putting filmmakers like Tsai Ming-liang and Toshio Matsumoto into US theaters. In some cases for the first time ever. Only running at 15 to 30 screens.

Mayor Mamdani’s video team made a 13-minute documentary about New York tenants. It follows Brooklyn renters organizing against a landlord with more than 5,000 hazardous violations, Wes Anderson-style sunflower-yellow title cards and a pizzicato score.

The most interesting thing is that it’s 13 minutes long and basically just… a doc with no campaign attached to it.

Dana Harris-Bridson leaves IndieWire after 16 years as editor-in-chief. In that time it went from a Silver Lake apartment to PMC ownership, Emmy-nominated video and a Netflix series. She says she’s off to build something new.

The company that invented the fluid-action tripod head is closing after 72 years. Australia’s Miller Camera Support Equipment pioneered the design that still underpins basically every fluid head used today. Owners Mark and Diane Clementson are retiring, with final trading on September 25.

This week we’re watching:

Directed by Dave Meyers and Cam Erickson.

A kaleidoscopic descent into an opulent house party where the guests have no faces and the whole thing slowly turns into a nightmare.

The credits originally listed three “AI artists” which was later changed to “VFX artists” alongside studios that openly use generative AI.

So far nobody knows exactly where AI was used - can you spot it?

Retail Therapy: Cooling vest for hottest summer on record

England had its hottest ever June, Spain a joint-record hottest month, and parts of France didn’t even drop below 30.6°C (85 fahrenheit) overnight.

For crews, that’s translated pretty quickly into long days, exterior locations in sauna-like conditions.

The Ergodyne Chill-Its 6210 is a phase-change cooling vest designed for exactly that. Its cooling packs hold the torso at a steady 64°F for up to two hours, without needing airflow, so it works in humid heat as well as dry.

The whole thing weighs under three pounds and can fit under PPE.

Cop for $185 here.

Also this week:

Roku launched an AI TV channel, Hollywood signs peace deal with ByteDance, Coyote vs. Acme finally gets theatrical and 85-year-old Miyazaki comes to work every day but nobody knows what he’s making.

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ByteDance and Hollywood make peace over AI video. ByteDance sign deal with Motion Picture Association strengthening copyright protections across AI video and image tools.

AI shrinks microdrama cost to $60K. Microdramas are now reportedly taking only three to four weeks from start to finish at a price of $60K compared to a previous high of $300K.

Tubi releases 13,000+ hours of halloween horror Their original features and creator exclusives will launch across five international markets at once. Tubi is clearly treating free ad-supported horror more than seasonal novelty now.

Dedicated 24/7 AI-generated channel launches on Roku Fairground AI will mix AI shorts with AI commercials and the most interesting thing is that there’s literally 0 human oversight in terms of what airs.

Coyote vs. Acme is finally in theatres. A film that spent years in limbo before Ketchup Entertainment picked it up, finally gets its cinema release. The New Yorker describes it as a fast, funny throwback, but the story around its release is more interesting. The closing credits thank “everyone who posted, shared, held up signs, and spoke out when it counted.” For a movie about a coyote taking a corporation to court, being rescued from corporate shelving by public pressure feels almost too neat.

Avid bins bin-locking

For many years, Avid’s stronghold on the editing world was about prestige and collaboration.

Several editors and assistants could work within the same project without stepping on each other’s changes and a big part of that workflow was down to its bin-locking feature. Boring stuff but kept shared workflows from descending into chaos.

If you were wondering why many post houses still use Avid, bin-locking was a major reason why.

But thanks to the launch of Media Composer 2026.8, that feature comes with a catch.

Bin locking on the Ultimate tier only works with Avid’s own NEXIS storage so companies using third-party storage will have to move up to the more expensive Enterprise tier to keep using a workflow they already had.

You’ve now got two choices. Either you buy into Avid’s storage ecosystem, or pay more for the software.

Check out Avid's origin story

The sharpest critics so far are the team behind Mimiq, the third-party tool that lets Media Composer users get Avid-style bin locking. They describe the change as a walled garden disguised as a licensing update, arguing that it squeezes precisely the wrong customers.

Smaller companies certainly won’t welcome another jump in extra software costs, while larger teams with expensive storage infrastructure have little reason to replace perfectly good hardware just to satisfy a licence requirement.

The update does leave companies like Blackmagic in an interesting position.

DaVinci Resolve already offers collaboration without locking users into a proprietary storage stack. Avid’s premium once bought more than prestige through workflow discipline and reliability, but changes like this make the value gap much harder to defend.

Even Stubio Ghibli staff don’t know what Miyazaki’s working on The Boy and the Heron was released nearly 3 years ago but no new project has been announced. At 85 years old, Miyazaki still comes to the studio daily but nobody knows what he’s working on right now.

The DJI ban expands to robots and more cameras. The US crackdown is expanding beyond drones into gimbals and robotic devices, while new tariffs from September 3 could add 25% to 100% in duties.

YouTube changes what a “view” means. From August 24, a view will count the exact moment a video starts playing. Videos will have bigger public numbers but less actual engagement, and more pressure to optimize for clicks.

Blockbuster rebuilt by former employee, expands nationwide. Free Blockbuster started with a single blue-and-yellow dispenser in LA in 2019 but now has dozens of locations across North America. Blockbuster’s trademark owners don’t care which might be the smartest brand decision anyone has made with that trademark in twenty years.

LA’s cinema revival extends well past the Cinerama Dome. The Bruin in Westwood and multiple venues in the long-dormant Downtown Theatre District are being eyed for reopening. Even a film student who spent seven years campaigning for the Dome landed a job helping reopen the Bruin himself.

Ottawa’s pioneering IMAX theatre may not survive long enough to show The Odyssey at true scale . The Canadian Museum of History’s screen has been running since ‘89 and was one of IMAX’s earliest adopters but faces an uncertain future just as Nolan’s IMAX-native epic hands the format its biggest cultural moment in years.

This week we’re watching:

Indie developer Grow Now! Games created a custom engine that renders 3D objects using ASCII characters, then used it to build a walkable cyberpunk city.

Housed in a single HTML file using JavaScript and Canvas, it calculates perspective, depth, collisions, and hidden surfaces in real time.

We hope he turns the prototype into a game we can all play.

Retail Therapy: The gacha camera

Kodak has turned the camera into a blind box.

The Charmera - a Millennium is a 30-gram keychain digital camera sold gacha-style. Each box holds one of seven randomly assigned Y2K designs and a full set of six boxes guarantees no repeats which tells you this is aimed at collectors first and photographers a close second.

It is a real camera, though. Featuring 1440 x 1080 stills and 30fps AVI video plus a date stamp for maximum 2001.

Kodak spent a century selling people film they hadn’t shot yet and now it’s selling them cameras they haven’t seen yet

Find out more here.

Happy Saturday.

It’s been a busy week at Eddie AI: lots of updates including making it much faster to from import to being ready to edit and to the timeline editor to support complex pro workflows, elegantly. (If you haven’t tried Eddie in awhile, you’ll be surprised by how much it has evolved.)

But a validating moment for me this week was my wife wanted to edit a video for her best friend Zahra, who is getting married today. The edit is a collection of all their friends remembering special moments over the years with Zahra. My wife used Eddie, of course. She asked it for two different arcs. She chose the one which interspersed soundbites from all the friends together versus the one where each friends’ video plays back to back.

She tinkered a bit with generative music options and then had Eddie cut it to the track she wanted. It did, with auto-ducking. She added intro and outro titles and tweaked the color. Then she sent the MP4 export to Zahra’s fiancé to play at the wedding today.

The whole edit took her 25% of the time she would have spent in CapCut. And she got a better edit as she had more capabilities at her disposal.

At least my wife now knows what I am actually doing every single day. ;)

Speaking of wife and updates: Eddie AI won for best post production tech at CineGear! We made a video and I mentioned her in it as she says I don’t celebrate my wins enough:

This week we also released our latest long form article, a celebration of the movers and shakers who sought to push, pull and cajole our industry forward. This one is on that bookstore that became a movie studio. Make sure to check it out.

Have a really great weekend.

—Shamir

Co-founder & CEO, Eddie AI, the AI AE for video pros (and those who make wedding videos for their friends ;) )

Also this week:

Eli Roth said he hand-drew his animation when the credits said otherwise. Letterboxd locked 30 million users. Matthew McConaughey gets his own cinema. And YouTube just made it twice as hard to get paid.

Render Reel

YouTube overhauls Partner Program and creators aren’t pleased. From February 2027, earning from Shorts requires 10 million qualified views in the previous 90 days and new applicants need 8,000 watch hours or 20 million Shorts views. This is roughly double the previous standard and YouTube says total payouts will rise. Critics aren’t too sure.

Eli Roth got caught using AI in Ice Cream Man after claiming he’d hand-drawn the animated sequences himself. He told Polygon he personally drew the Fleischer-style loop cycles but once the credits revealed AI VFX firm Dark Half, that became “I misspoke. AI was used in a very small portion of a few scenes.” The film opened at 32% on Rotten Tomatoes so the cover-up is currently outperforming the crime.

RED Camera RAW patent crumbles in Japan

Compressed RAW has been one of the most fiercely guarded pieces of IP in the camera business. So well guarded that Nikon’s eventual answer to was to completely acquire RED, the company that held it the patent.

Panasonic then took the patent to Japan’s Intellectual Property High Court and won.

The court found that RED couldn’t sufficiently distinguish its patent from a piece of prior art designed for something as entirely mundane as reducing memory usage with buffered images.

Both of RED’s key technical distinctions failed examination.

Pre-demosaic processing was already present in the earlier reference and the “pre-emphasis” preprocessing step was also drawn too broadly to exclude ordinary gamma correction.

The ruling only applies in Japan and doesn't touch RED and Nikon's patents anywhere else but the jurisdiction isn't really what makes this interesting.

Patent fights in this industry almost always end in private settlements, and every settlement keeps the patent's actual strength a secret. But that’s not what happening here as there’s no settlement.

And the arguments are now on record making this case a rare public view on exactly where a court decided the moat was thinner than claimed.

Relatedly, Nikon cut its full-year camera forecast after sales dropped 22% in a single quarter. Body sales fell from 270K to 210K units year-on-year and they also trimmed its estimate for the entire global interchangeable-lens market by 300K units which is a huge revision to make in three months.

A car photography company is suing Midjourney for allegedly training on tens of thousands of its images. EVOX Productions has pretty much shot every US car model since 2000 and they’re accusing Midjourney of stripping watermarks before training. And then also building a product that competes directly with EVOX’s licensing business. Midjourney is already fighting Disney and Warner Bros. so this isn’t great timing.

A filmmaker shot a feature horror film entirely on an iPhone using Blackmagic’s free camera app. James Demitri’s Fire Alive was shot in five days (edited in two) and took finalist honours at SF3 Film festival. He says the app’s locked exposure and white balance outperformed some of his larger-format productions in low light.

Letterboxd crashed for six hours, locking out 30 million users. Over 1,000 complaints hit DownDetector within the hour and the outage lands weeks after reports of possible acquisition. Some corners of social media tried connecting the dots.

Steven Soderbergh’s $24.99 Jaws app launched back in June and remains one of best film education apps around. Every day of the production is broken down with Spielberg’s own notes, and even includes an epilogue Soderbergh wrote himself.

Disney lets TikTok creators use its film clips for first time. Titles include properties like Star Wars and Toy Story. The move follows the collapse of its OpenAI/Sora deal, and makes it clear that Hollywood is moving from marketing at fans to arming them.

Alamo Drafthouse names theatre after Matthew McConaughey. The Austin Mueller location will now be named the Matthew McConaughey Cinema, with the actor introducing an early screening of The Rivals of Amziah King. He joins a list of filmmakers like Christopher Nolan and Spike Lee in Alamo’s tradition of naming screens after them.

This week we’re watching:

The phenakistoscope was a 19th-century trick (predating cinema) that faked motion using sequential drawings and a strobing glimpse but in 2026 Artist Yohei Kisanuki has revived the trick entirely by hand.

Kisanuki only usess ink and arithmetic but it’s the same optical loophole the entire moving image is built on.

Great watch that proves some tricks never needed an update.

Retail Therapy: Gold-plated surveillance

Dubai luxury house Caviar has done to Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses what Cavalli did to everything else.

Underneath the gold, it’s still a camera on your face and the recording indicator is still a tiny LED nobody across the room will ever clock (hopefully).

$6,139 at caviar.global.

Amazon is one of the world’s most ambitious and unusual companies. It began as an online retailer, now powers a huge share of the internet, and somehow also became the home of James Bond and The Lord of the Rings.

My colleague Efosa dug into the unlikely origins and rise of Amazon Studios—from a crowdsourced platform where anyone could submit a script to one of Hollywood’s biggest players.

I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I did.

—Shamir
Co-Founder & CEO
Eddie AI, the AI video editor for video pros

Sherman Oaks, 2010.

A shopping mall off the 405. The Galleria is known for two things; its food court and the freeway beside it.

Inside, in the corner of an office belonging to a movie-trivia website, sits a desk that doesn’t belong to anyone in particular.

It’s borrowed. So is the office, actually. The website is IMDb, founded by a British cinephile, bought by Amazon a decade earlier for about $55 million, a purchase nobody in Hollywood had bothered to notice.

They were about to.

The man who flew down from Seattle every couple of weeks to sit at that desk was named Roy Price, though the name didn’t mean much yet. His title, “group product manager”, gave away even less.

What he had was a thesis, a budget that barely existed, and a commute; back and forth between the khaki campuses of Seattle and the screening rooms of Beverly Hills.

Fifteen years later, the company that grew out of that desk would go on to own James Bond. Rocky. The Silence of the Lambs.

It would make its own things too, Transparent, Mrs. Maisel, a small film about grief called Manchester by the Sea and it would win Academy Awards.

It would spend $465 million on a single season of TV and $8.45 billion on a studio that had been making films since 1924.

Nobody remembers the mall anymore but this is the story of what got built there. What got broken and why the machine keeps running regardless.

The Bloodline and Twenty-Minutes

Roy Price was an exotic import to logistics-obsessed Seattle.

Born in Beverly Hills in 1967 and a literal heir to film and TV royalty. His maternal grandfather was Roy Huggins, creator of The Fugitive, The Rockford Files, and Maverick.

His father, Frank Price, was a TV titan.

Head of Universal Television in the 1970s, where he helped invent the made-for-TV movie and shepherded hits from The Virginian to Spielberg’s debut, Duel and later president of both Columbia and Universal Pictures.

You could essentially call Frank “Mr Greenlight”.

Roy’s real education started in his father’s living room, at weekly Sunday screenings of pre-release prints. What he absorbed there was the cardinal rule of the old studio system which is the supremacy of the “hunch”.

Frank would walk out of a screening after about twenty minutes if it wasn’t working.

Roy later recalled:

My father would often leave after about 20 minutes because he got the idea of whether it was working in that time.

If the living room taught him instinct then institutions taught him the system.

After Phillips Academy Andover came Harvard, where he studied English, then USC for law. He cut his teeth as an assistant at CAA, spent five years as a VP at Disney TV Animation, then made the pivot that would set up everything else; leaving Hollywood to consult at McKinsey.

It gave him a rare dual fluency as he could talk to directors and build the financial model simultaneously.

So by the time he set his sights on Amazon, most doors in Hollywood were already open to him.

A dozen execs had known Frank Price for thirty years and would have taken Roy’s call before the first ring finished.

But he didn’t make the call.

He went to amazon.com, found a job listing, and uploaded his résumé through the website like he was applying to run the register at McDonald’s.

Amazon called back and ran him through the same thirty-minute phone screen they gave every applicant. He cleared it and they flew him to Seattle; a city he had never set foot in.

The heir to Hollywood royalty had come in through the side-door and in 2004, when Amazon went looking for someone to build a digital-video business from scratch, this is who they found: not a prince cashing in his name, but a stranger who’d applied like all the rest.

A Leather Jacket in the Land of Khakis

Amazon in 2004 was not a fun place to be flamboyant.

The desks were made of hollow-core doors, and decisions got made in six-page memos over PowerPoints. The reigning gods were logistics savants who built fulfilment networks, and the culture existed to produce results over friendships

Everyone wore khaki.

Then there was Roy Price.

Clad in a black Flag tattoo, leather biker jacket (or harem pants), tennis whites - depending on the day. In meetings he’d perch on his chair like a bird, giggle at nothing before drifting off into his phone.

Colleagues settled on “eccentric.”

He was the opposite of everything Amazon optimized for.

They kept him anyway, because he had the one thing the spreadsheets couldn’t build. A black book of studios that would actually pick up.

His first job was to out-iTunes iTunes and in 2006 he launched Amazon Unbox, which let you buy or rent a movie and then (this being 2006), wait for it to download onto your PC.

Not your Mac. Just PC. Like a fax machine.

So Price did the thing he was good at.

He strong-armed the legacy studios into deals until Amazon had 50,000 titles, making it the biggest digital library going.

In 2008 it was reborn as Amazon Video on Demand with no downloads. It streamed, on a Mac, and then lived inside your TiVo and your Sony Bravia.

By 2011 it had a name you might recognize. Prime Video.

The only problem now was that Netflix was already spending real money making its own shows, and you can’t out-license your way out of that.

To actually compete, Amazon had to stop renting other people’s movies and start making their own. In 2010, they handed Roy Price a studio. He decided to build it the way Amazon built everything, which meant data.

For the son of the twenty-minute walkout, it was either the ultimate rebellion or the ultimate mistake.

And what followed became one of the strangest experiments Hollywood had ever seen.

Crowdsourcing Delusion and the Anomaly on Normal Street

Amazon Studios launched in November 2010 with a thesis that sounded great in a TED talk and terrible to anyone who’d ever actually made a movie.

The idea was to let the “crowd decide”.

The Hollywood system, Price argued, was a handful of execs greenlighting projects on relationships and gut. This was often inefficient and prone to expensive disasters.

Anyone on Planet Earth could upload a script to the Amazon Studios website and the community would review it. Promising ideas became cheap “test movies,” the test movies went in front of Amazon customers, the customers got surveyed, and the data decided what got made.

As Price told Reuters in 2012:

Our notion for what the world needs may be a roller-skating movie or a battleship film, but that could be wrong.

Better to find out before you spent $200 million.

The amateurs came in droves and over eight years, 27,000 scripts were uploaded.

And out of all 27,000, the open-door policy produced a grand total of one hit.

A children’s show called Gortimer Gibbon’s Life on Normal Street.

The script came from David Anaxagoras, a preschool teacher with an MFA who’d given up on Hollywood fifteen years earlier and decided to try one last time.

It caught the eye of Tara Sorensen, Amazon’s head of kids’ programming, who was not a disruptor at all but a veteran who’d developed hits like Rolie Polie Olie at Nelvana.

She did the traditional thing by pairing the novice with a stellar team including an Oscar-winning director and a great cast.

It ran two seasons, won a Humanitas Prize, a WGA Award, and picked up DGA nominations.

Kids’ TV became Amazon’s first real beachhead as then came Tumble Leaf, Creative Galaxy, Annedroids, all of it built the old way, by an exec with taste, for parents who just wanted something safe to put on.

But beyond kid’s programming, the well was well and truly dry.

One feature, The Wall, got optioned off the platform and released in 2017, but that was the list.

The entirety of it.

The failure said something Frank Price could’ve told them after twenty minutes in a screening room. That great work comes from a single uncompromising vision and not a consensus.

A focus group can tell you what it disliked about something that already exists but cannot conjure The Sopranos out of the air.

Meanwhile Netflix was eating the culture with House of Cards and Orange Is the New Black. These were singular and expensive visions and the exact opposite of Amazon’s spread-the-chips approach.

As Price told the Los Angeles Times in 2013:

If you’re betting on one show, it’s got to be right down the middle of the fairway. But if you’ve got 14, you can allow people to try new things.

New things, it turned out, does not win Emmys.

By 2016, Prime Video was spending $3.2 billion a year to keep losing this argument.

The algorithm had failed to dream and it was time for Roy Price to go back to his roots.

Prestige Pivot and the Sundance Savior

Roy Price decided it was time to change.

He dropped the anti-Hollywood-disruptor act and began operating like a 1970s studio mogul, courting the most idiosyncratic, uncompromising talent he could find.

Auteurs. The exact people the algorithm was built to replace.

The turn happened at Sundance in 2015. Indie film was broke and demoralized, and into Park City walked Amazon with a checkbook. Netflix insisted its movies hit the platform the same day they hit theaters, which enraged theater owners and made purist directors break out in hives.

Price offered the opposite. A real theatrical run first, then Prime.

It worked because filmmakers believed them. Spike Lee made Chi-Raq with Amazon, its first theatrical release, in December 2015.

As Spike Lee told Variety in 2016:

Maybe I’m old-fashioned, but I like my films to be in a theater first before people watch it on an iPhone.

On the TV side, Price became less reliant on the crowdsourced pilot experiment and instead hired people who actually knew what they were doing.

Joey Soloway made Transparent, the teams behind Bosch and The Man in the High Castle delivered prestige hits, and eventually Amy Sherman-Palladino made The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel.

All of which required corporate heresy.

Standing inside one of the most data-obsessed companies on earth, Price told the press the data was, at best, “helpful” and that you could easily ask it to decide things it had no business deciding, like how a romantic scene should play.

Data could price a pair of shoes but couldn’t time a joke or land a tragedy. He was running his father’s gut on Jeff Bezos’s infinite loot.

It worked. Brilliantly.

Amazon Studios went from industry punchline to fourteen Best Series wins across the Globes and Emmys.

Then Kenneth Lonergan’s Manchester by the Sea won two Oscars and made Amazon the first streamer ever nominated for Best Picture.

That weird guy in the leather jacket was now a king.

But as most kings fall, they’re rarely brought down by the cavalry.

Suit Strikes Back

Every rebellion needs an antagonist, and Price’s turned out to be the one King above him. Jeff Bezos.

The Oscars and Emmys were cute. But they were also, to Bezos, beside the point. Transparent and Mozart in the Jungle delighted critics on two coasts but didn’t add the tens of millions of global subscribers that would actually move Prime’s economics.

Bezos wanted bigger shows with bigger audiences.

And by 2017 he was pushing Amazon toward established IP with enormous built-in audiences. A month after Price left, Amazon paid a reported $250 million for the television rights to The Lord of the Rings, the opening move in a series expected to cost around $1 billion.

In other words, the quirky auteur era was over.

So here was the standoff; the Seattle metrics machine wanted blockbusters chosen by data, while Price ran his $7 billion budget like a 70s studio chief who answered to no one.

He’d never had more power, but had never been more out of step with his own employer.

But it wasn't the standoff with Bezos that would end Price. It was a five-minute car ride in San Diego, two years earlier.

That Uber Ride in San Diego

July 2015, at Comic-Con.

Amazon was there promoting The Man in the High Castle, its alternate-history adaptation of the Philip K. Dick novel. Representing the production was Isa Hackett; the show’s executive producer, and Dick’s daughter.

After a cast dinner on July 10th, Hackett and Price ended up in an Uber ride to an Amazon party, along with another senior exec.

What happened in that Uber is the most contested 5 minutes of Roy’s life.

By Hackett’s account, given in detail to The Hollywood Reporter two years later, Price propositioned her repeatedly and at one point allegedly telling her:

You will love my dick.

She rebuffed him, telling the head of the studio she was a married lesbian with children.

By Price’s account, which he has never stopped giving, most recently in a long 2026 essay of his own, it was party banter, some of it riffing on the title of a show Amazon then had in development, I Love Dick.

Price Point

Who Really Ought to be “Disgraced”?

According to The Hollywood Reporter (I learned the other day), I am “disgraced.” However, in The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, I am not “disgraced.” I don’t feel disgraced. But let’s get into it…

Read more

4 months ago · 91 likes · 34 comments · Roy Price

He says he never propositioned her, that the most damning line surfaced only in the 2017 telling, and that she approached him, not the other way around.

Both accounts cannot be true.

Three people were in the car.

Two have given irreconcilable accounts publicly but the third, Amazon executive Michael Paull, has never publicly resolved the dispute.

What isn’t in dispute is what Hackett did next. She reported it to Amazon within hours.

The company retained an outside investigator, Christine Farrell, who interviewed Hackett and others who’d been at the dinner and the party.

Then the file went quiet.

Hackett was never told the outcome and Price was not fired but he was barred from events tied to her shows.

He kept his budget, his leather jacket, and his Emmys.

For two years, it held.

A Campfire Extinguished

In early October 2017, the Weinstein exposés in The New York Times and The New Yorker detonated around the industry, and the old code of silence collapsed almost overnight.

Hackett took her account to The Hollywood Reporter, which published it on Thursday, October 12th.

Price was in Santa Barbara when it ran, at Bezos’s invitation-only “Campfire” retreat. The call came fast. and Amazon was badly exposed.

They had been co-financing projects with Weinstein at that very moment, and could not afford to be seen looking away.

By that afternoon Price was on leave.

COO Albert Cheng was installed as interim head. A London showcase was scrapped. The next day, Price’s fiancée called off their wedding. Over the weekend, THR reported further accounts of similar conduct.

By Tuesday, October 17th, Amazon had accepted his resignation.

The whole thing took five days. Hackett declined to sue, saying she’d achieved what she set out to do.

Price left America for nearly three years.

He has denied the allegation at every turn. In a 2020 Los Angeles Times interview, where he called it a failed joke mistaken for predation.

Hackett stands by her account. Price denies propositioning her and denies saying the line attributed to him. Amazon investigated the incident in 2015, but its findings were never made public, and Michael Paull, the third person in the car, has never publicly settled the dispute. The public record therefore does not establish which account is correct.

Either way, the machine wasn’t about to find out.

Death to Algorithm

In February 2018, Amazon replaced Price with Jennifer Salke, a former president of NBC Entertainment and a broadcast veteran built for big budgets and broad appeal, exactly Bezos’s new mandate.

The indie darlings went first; Mozart in the Jungle was canceled. Then, on April 13, 2018, Amazon emailed its community of amateur writers to announce it was closing the open-call submission program for good.

Submissions already in play were honored through that June, but the “movie studio of the future” was becoming a thing of the past.

Shutting the open door was an admission that the whole crowdsourcing thesis had failed.

To beat Netflix, HBO, and the looming Disney+, Amazon would write enormous checks to established production companies, playing the very Hollywood game Price had been hired to disrupt, and had, in the end, become.

Ghost, Lion and the Machine

Roy Price’s legacy is a peculiar one.

He changed how the world streams content by restructuring the most data-obsessed company on earth from the ground up and making the algorithm dream.

Then the machine kept running without him, and got better at being a machine.

Freed of the man in the leather jacket who kept arguing against it, it finally did what it had always wanted to.

In 2021 they spent $8.45 billion on MGM, the roaring lion, James Bond, Rocky, a near-century of cinema in a single transaction.

Amazon had spent fifteen years and a fortune trying to manufacture a legacy and learned that you can’t. So they bought one.

Roy Price has a theory about why the open door failed. In his eyes the idea wasn’t wrong, but it was too early.

Ask a stranger to make their script watchable in 2012 and you got a storyboard nobody looked at.

Ask a machine now and you might have a trailer by the afternoon. Run Amazon’s open-door experiment today, Price argues, and the economics look very different:

People would be much more capable of generating things.

So perhaps the bet wasn’t dead. Just early.

It’s now bigger, automated, with a straight face and on the same idea that started at that borrowed desk.

That the next great story is out there in the noise, findable by machine, if the machine is strong enough.

Maybe a model finally does what Frank Price did from his couch in twenty minutes.

Or maybe Amazon is about to learn what it costs to be wrong at scale, faster now, and in much higher resolution.

Did you hear? Eddie AI can now implement your team’s comments left in Frame.io. 🤯

Also this week:

Netflix is being sued for $105 million after someone walked out the LA office with unencrypted Nicolas Cage movie. Sony spent $100 million on domes. A cinema that spent two years squatting its own building now legally owns it, thanks to Tarantino. And thirty years after Jamiroquai’s floor started moving, Jay Kay is back in a new virtual insanity.

Render Reel

Adobe’s new Color Mode brings pro grading into the edit sans colorist. The mode was unveiled at this year’s NAB and it keeps grading entirely inside Premiere with a complete visual map of your sequence. Three years of development with input from hundreds of editors, now in public beta. Adobe’s pitch “You are a color person.”

Netflix gets sued for $105 million after unencrypted Nicolas Cage film was stolen from the LA office. A hard drive containing Fortitude, a WWII spy thriller, walked out of the Sunset Bronson offices last month. Netflix says the producers delivered it “without proper industry-standard safeguards”; the producers say Netflix told them to hand over an unencrypted copy, then lost it. Either way, the film is now radioactive and every potential distributor has to be told a stolen master is floating around before release.

The first $1 million AI film festival

For a century, film festivals paid in prestige with money coming later (if it came at all).

But this week Higgsfield just flipped the script.

Its Global Film Festival, with submissions opening August 7, puts $1,000,000 in cash behind short AI films.

• $500,000 for first place,

• Fourteen total winners

• Minimum runtime of three minutes,

• Must be made from scratch in 24-days, entirely on Higgsfield..

You can edit with external software but you can’t create new content with it. And when the deadline passes, every submission goes public and is open for anyone on the platform to inspect the files and reuse.

Read that again.

This means every entrant is essentially publishing their rushes.

As an anti-cheating mechanism, your generation history is your proof of work. This might be the largest public reckoning AI filmmaking has ever had.

Every eligible entry also grants Higgsfield a perpetual licence to use the film in its marketing.

Cynical minds might rightly state this is a $1 million marketing scheme. But on the flip side, this is real cash with entries judged on merit, in a corner of the industry where “AI filmmaker” still isn’t a job title.

And at least, radical transparency beats the black box every other platform offers.

Winners are announced in late September.

The squatters won: Paris’s La Clef cinema, occupied illegally since 2019, now owns its building outright.

Filmmaker

La Clef Revival Occupies the Cinema

Enjoy this latest excerpt from our summer issue, and subscribe today…

Read more

2 months ago · 45 likes · Filmmaker Magazine and Botagoz Koilybayeva

Evicted in 2022, the collective crowdfunded with help from Tarantino, Wang Bing, and Céline Sciamma. It reopened in January and instead of ads before screenings, they project what the cinema actually needs. A bigger fridge. 35mm splicers. Gardening tools. Yes.

Deaf Crocodile and Antenna! are opening a physical shop and microcinema in Kansas City. Deaf Crocodile is the boutique label behind those excellent Soviet animation restorations. Set it next to the La Clef story above, we’re seeing a small but real trend of physical community film spaces opening rather than closing.

Someone rebuilt Blockbuster as a browsable 3D website and it’s more useful than it sounds. Bingebuster is a fully walkable virtual video store with aisles for genre classics. You can even pull a VHS case off the shelf and read the back. Click the tape and it sends you to whichever streamer actually has it.

Gen Z is propping up the box office and Variety’s data backs up what everyone’s been saying anecdotally. Younger audiences are turning out for theatrical in numbers that would have seemed impossible mid-pandemic, driving this year’s biggest surprises with the likes of Obsession, Backrooms, The Odyssey (obviously less of a surprise) all over-performing with an audience raised on streaming who apparently still want to leave the house for it.

Sofia Coppola’s short film award just closed community reviews and 25 finalists made the cut. Coppola herself will now pick the winner from that top 1%. The prize winner will receive $20,000 to produce the short alongside mentorship, and distribution on DCP+.

The Hollywood Reporter’s critics ranked the 25 best documentaries ever made Man With a Movie Camera, Shoah, Hoop Dreams, Grizzly Man, and Stop Making Sense round out the list.

What do we think?

This week we’re watching:

Thirty years ago, Jonathan Glazer put Jamiroquai frontman Jay Kay in a grey room and made your brain give up in “Virtual Insanity,”. Four VMAs, three decades near the top of every greatest-music-videos list later Beefeater has brought Jay Kay back for the 30th anniversary.

Their new promo for its non-alcoholic 0.0 directed by duo Julien & Quentin takes him out the grey room for the first time.

And we finally learn what that famous outstretched hand was reaching for… a bottle of gin with the gin removed..

Retail Therapy: The phone that wants to be ignored

A phone. Real keyboard. Aluminum body. Fewer notifications. Coming soon.

That’s the whole write-up. Felt wrong to do more.

Sign up for early bird pricing.

Also this week:

Sony’s reviving the Cinerama Dome, Swaybox Studios workers won one of the largest animation union drives in recent history, Atari signed a 10-film deal with Universal, and a DJI clone company pulled its lookalike camera days after FCC come knocking.

Render Reel

A UK videographer built a free app that tells you when you can wipe memory card. Stow copies a card to two drives simultaneously, then verifies every byte on both destinations against the original. This is something macOS and Windows could never actually do on their own. It’s free and you don’t need an account. Worth a look.

Sony launches the FX5. A full-frame cinema camera with 15+ stops of dynamic range. First, the FX series supports Open Gate shooting and in-camera X-OCN recording, plus three base ISOs and AI-powered autofocus using human pose estimation. 5K at 60fps, 4K at 120fps. It costs €6,000 with the new XLR handle unit and officially ships in August.

Nvidia built AI tool that detects AI video with 92% accuracy. Footage compressed to 50% drops accuracy to 82% accuracy, which is exactly the compression level most footage you watch online is at. The Synthetic Video Detector processes 1080p in 22 milliseconds using two Meta vision transformers, and Nvidia’s already working with Wowza to bring it into live broadcast.

Sony to bring Cinerama Dome and Hollywood Arclight back from dead. The Culver City studio is in talks to lease the extinct venue, with Sony-owned Alamo Drafthouse likely operating it. The Dome, built in 1963 is the only concrete geodesic dome on Earth but has sat dark since Decurion’s 2020 bankruptcy. Amazon and AMC both passed before, but this year’s box office ( strongest since 2019) appears to have changed Sony’s math.

Swaybox Studios workers in Louisiana voted to unionize with IATSE, 71.4% in favour. 136 workers in favour across animation, and VFX which is one of the largest organising wins in recent film history. The stop-motion studio is currently making a $90 million Warner Bros. Animation feature.

Now is the best time to start collecting Blu-rays and the reason has nothing to do with nostalgia.

That’s the argument Josh Nichols makes in a piece on Longplay Tech worth reading in full.

His starting number should make you pause.

4K Blu-ray sales in the US rose 12% in 2025 which is far from a rounding error. It’s the same shape vinyl took a decade into its own supposed extinction, before the pivot from dollar-bin curiosity to boutique $30-40 pressings.

Nichols argues physical media isn’t disappearing at all. There are hosts of people who actually want to own something, and the pricing hasn’t quite made sense yett.

The tech case laid out is more concrete than most nostalgia arguments. Streaming delivers 4K at roughly 15–25 Mbps but a standard Blu-ray runs 25–35 Mbps.

A 4K UHD disc can easily clear 100 Mbps. And that gap is the difference between a carefully graded dark scene and a muddy smear of artifacts.

Over 150 titles vanished from Netflix in January 2026 alone but your blu-ray disc won’t care that a licensing deal expired. Nothing vanishes from your shelf unless you want it to.

The argument for acting now rather than later, is supply.

Two decades of Blu-ray and DVD collections are flooding thrift stores and resale sites right now and none of it gets restocked. Once the cheap copies sell out, that’s it unless a studio for some reason wants to run a reprint.

The problem is this:

The titles popular enough to justify a studio reprint, get premium 4K remasters at premium prices, and everything else simply stops existing in physical form at all.

It’s the same arc vinyl followed with dollar-bin records at thrift stores throughout the 2000s, then a slow climb back to “cool” through the mid-2010s.

New records now routinely run $25–40.

Nichols’ contention is that Blu-ray is sitting at that exact hinge point right now. The window he describes is open but might not be for very long.

Worth reading the full piece for his full buying guide.

Atari signs deal with Universal to develop 10 classic games into films. Titles include Asteroids, Breakout, Pong, and more, aimed at big-scale action-adventure. First up’s an original spec script from Matt Reilly and Carl Hampe, produced by Entertainment 360. Producer Guymon Casady: “the best Atari games dropped you into a world and let your imagination do the rest.”

A director re-cut his film after Cannes reviews tore into its CGI, and the new version just became South Korea’s fastest-grossing film ever.

Director Na Hong-jin re-cut his sci-fi epic Hope after Cannes reviews destroyed CGI creature work and the new version just became South Korea’s fastest-grossing film ever. The changes were small, but the ticket sales weren’t: 2.6 million in five days. A critic at IndieWire saw both cuts and found the second act now “played from beginning to end like one of the best action films in years.” Neon releases it in North America September 10.

A DJI clone company pulls Osmo Pocket lookalike after the FCC came knocking. Xtra stopped preorders for the Muse 2 Pro and started issuing refunds days after the FCC issued bans targeting companies selling undisclosed DJ copycats. The company won’t say where its tech actually came from. Hmmmm…

This week we’re watching:

A 1958 Douglas DC-6B, back on American soil for the first time in nearly 70 years, filmed this year from the glass nose of a WWII-era A26 bomber on a Bolex H16 loaded with Kodak Vision3.

Modern New York shot through 1950s glass, shrunk down to the exact grain and colour of the era the plane came from.

The iPhone footage they also shot alongside is worth seeing too.

Retail Therapy: The POV camera that lets you see what you’re shooting

The VibeLens MusicCam Pro straps a 4K camera to your head and streams live preview to your phone, finally solving the “point and pray” problem every action cam has had since GoPro.

55g, IP68, 32GB onboard. For the shooter who’s done guessing.

Available at vibelens.net.

I’ve loved IMAX since I was a kid going to museums on field trips. And it’s been cool to see their evolution over the years, including into Hollywood films.

I hope you, too, enjoy the feature.

—Shamir

Also this week:

Backrooms’ director stops A24 from copyright striking Backrooms’ fanboys, Luke Skywalker’s lightsaber sells for record $3.75 million, Musicbed’s 30-day film challenge went live with $65K , and Netflix reveals 300 of its titles are using generative AI.

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Netflix deliberately made Stranger Things look worse. For the show’s 10th anniversary, Netflix released a “VHS Special Edition” of Season 1 in 4:3 aspect ratio which reimagines the show in VHS quality. “Rewatch Season 1 like it’s 1983”

300 Netflix titles using generative AI. Ted Sarandos announced that most of AI usage is in post, including a Tom Hanks documentary with 17 mins of AI-augmented footage. This news comes after Ben Affleck’s InterPositive was bought by Netflix for $587 million.

The History of IMAX

At Expo 67 in Montreal, a group of Canadian filmmakers wowed audiences with multi-screen spectacles that required banks of synched projectors but they failed constantly.

Graeme Ferguson, Roman Kroitor, and Robert Kerr decided the answer to their problems was one enormous image from one enormous machine.

They decided to turn 70mm film sideways, running it horizontally through the projector so each frame spanned 15 perforations instead of five. It was three times the negative area of standard 70mm and nine times bigger than 35mm.

The result was the largest moving image ever put in front of our eyes.

For its first three decades, IMAX lived almost entirely in museum exhibits and science centres. A prime example of this is a film we covered a few weeks back. To Fly!, the 1976 aerial documentary that flew a camera through the St. Louis Gateway Arch and has played daily at the Smithsonian for fifty years.

Hollywood always had practical problems with IMAX.

1. The cameras were enormous.

2. They were LOUD.

3. They only held three minutes of film.

But things changed in 2002 when IMAX began its DMR process which involved remastering conventional features onto giant screens, and slowly the brand migrated from museums to the multiplex.

Then Christopher Nolan started treating the limitations as a challenge and became the first filmmaker to use IMAX cameras on a major feature film with The Dark Knight in ’08. He would go on to use IMAX cameras for sections of every feature film he’s shot ever since.

But with The Odyssey’s premiere last week, he’s taken his love for IMAX even further.

The Odyssey is the first feature in history shot entirely with IMAX film cameras and was only possible because IMAX built an entirely new camera.

Enter Keighley.

Named after David Keighley, the IMAX executive who died three weeks after finishing his work on the film.

The camera is roughly 30% quieter than its predecessor which means capturing crisp dialogue whilst shooting is a genuine possibility.

“You can be shooting a foot from an actor’s face while they’re whispering and get usable sound,” Nolan says. “What that opens up are intimate moments of performance on the world’s most beautiful format.”

The machine itself is a beautiful contradiction.

It’s a fully mechanical film camera with 5.6 feet of celluloid moving per second with 360 perforations every second at 24 frames. All monitored through a modern LCD interface that would look at home on an ARRI ALEXA.

Each Odyssey print was reported to cost $80,000 playing in the only theaters on earth still equipped for 15-perf projection. Twenty-five of them are in America and even one Las Vegas theater spent $32,000 on humidifiers just to keep its print in check.

The BFI IMAX in London sold £750,000 of tickets in 24 hours, tripling its Oppenheimer record.

Somewhere in this story is the whole argument about cinema’s future. IMAX spent sixty years as the format too impractical for movies but it is now being survived by being the thing screens at home could never replicate.

Kane Parsons stopped A24 from copyright striking Backrooms community. A24 issued takedowns of yellow-wallpaper fan art predating the movie, until Parsons told them to hold fire. The studio blamed an outsourced anti-piracy error and confirmed it makes no ownership claim over the wallpaper or community works.

Luke Skywalker’s lightsaber sells for a record $3.75 million. The biggest auction haul for an on-screen Star Wars prop.

Musicbed’s 30-day film challenge goes live with $65K+ up for grabs. Filmmakers, you’ve got until August 14th to pick a track and make a short visual. The winners will take $15K cash grants plus gear and subscriptions.

This week we’re watching:

Before Her or the Fatboy Slim video or Jackass, Spike Jonze was that guy blowing things up in skate videos with no money.

The doc traces how low-tech FX and a total disregard for how skate videos were “supposed” to look ended up reshaping the entire genre.

Retail Therapy: A motion control rig that fits in carry-on

The Krone X Compact packs floor movement, and precise camera control into a single travel-sized system.

You can programme a path and it’ll repeat the move exactly, whether that’s a slow push through a product shot or an orbit around a subject that would otherwise need a second operator.

Available at edelkrone.com.

I hope you’re having an epic week.

—Shamir

Also this week:

A workprint of The Last Boy Scout surfaced because Warner shipped the wrong print to a college film club, Alamo Drafthouse launched a distribution arm for festival films nobody bought, Wes Anderson is screening Bottle Rocket to save a 1947 Houston cinema, and SanDisk’s 8TB SD cards are finally shipping two years late and needing a new reader.

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Insta360 and Bambu Lab launched a 3D printing challenge for Luna Ultra accessories. Design a mount or mod for the 8K gimbal camera and submit to MakerWorld by August 9, no printer required. Smart collaboration or free R&D, depending on your mood. Probably both.

Netflix in early talks to buy Letterboxd. Sony, Paramount Skydance, TPG, and Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian are also reportedly circling, with LionTree floating a $250 million valuation which is roughly 5x what Tiny paid for its majority stake in 2023.

SanDisk’s 8TB SD cards are finally, actually, probably shipping. Announced in 2024, missed 2025 entirely, now confirmed at Computex with 4TB microSD versions alongside. The catch is that they’ll likely require next-gen SD Express readers, so your existing gear won’t read them.

Wes Anderson to screen Bottle Rocket in Houston to save a 1947 movie theater. The one-night benefit on July 17 marks 30 years since his debut and will fund the preservation of the Garden Oaks Theater. Anderson picked the accompanying shorts himself and will do a pre-show conversation. Hometown filmmaker rescues hometown cinema is the kind of story that shouldn’t be rare but is.

A workprint of The Last Boy Scout was discovered by accident. A college film club asked Warner for a print of Tony Scott’s action comedy and Warner shipped the pre-release workprint by mistake, complete with different edits and more violence. Arrow is now trying to get it cleared for the upcoming 4K release. Somewhere in a warehouse, an archivist is having a very bad week and film fans are having a great one.

Alamo Drafthouse launched a distribution arm for festival films nobody bought. Alamo Exclusives will give limited nationwide runs to unacquired titles from Sundance, SXSW, Cannes, TIFF, and Fantastic Fest, with marketing support included. First up is a Butthole Surfers documentary (they’re an actual band btw). Between this, the animated shorts programme, and the phone petition, the Sony-owned chain keeps doing more for independent film than most distributors.

Cameras of God?

Every World Cup doubles as a broadcast technology expo, and this one is no exception.

Switzerland 1954 was the first televised tournament, and Mexico 1970 was the first beamed around the world by satellite in colour which is why Pelé’s yellow shirt became global memory rather than merely Brazilian history.

By ‘86, slow-mo replay had turned Maradona’s Hand of God into the most litigated image in sport. For the first time, millions of people at home had better information than the officials running the match, and that gap became football’s central technical problem.

Frank Lampard’s disallowed goal for England against Germany in 2010 made it impossible to ignore any longer.

The ball crossed the line by half a metre and everyone watching knew it except the referee. It was a decision so egregious that goal-line technology arrived in 2014, and Video Assistant Referee in 2018, and semi-automated offside in 2022, each sold the same thing:

Humans miss things, our cameras don’t.

This World Cup completes that argument, then turns it inside out.

The Adidas Trionda ball contains a sensor measuring movement 500 times a second, working alongside 16 optical-tracking cameras per stadium that collect 29 data points per player. The ball needs charging with roughly 90 minutes plugged in buys six hours of play, a sentence that would’ve gotten you laughed out of any pub in 1998.

In the round of 32, the system cancelled a Croatia equaliser by detecting a touch that neither the naked eye nor replay could resolve.

Then came Norway.

During the quarter-final against England, a clearance appeared, to Norway’s goalkeeper, its bench, and virtually everyone watching, to strike the overhead camera cable and drop vertically out of the sky.

England recovered the ball and Jude Bellingham scored England’s equaliser. FIFA’s conclusion was that the sensor recorded no spike, therefore there was no contact.

Norway coach Ståle Solbakken supplied the line of the tournament: “If there has been nothing there in the chip, what can I say against that?”

Quite a lot, theoretically. In practice, nothing.

For seventy years cameras were the correction to human fallibility. Now the camera is just one witness among competing systems, and when every human eye said the ball hit the wire, the telemetry overruled them all.

The accused object was itself broadcast infrastructure, investigated by cameras and acquitted by a chip inside the ball.

Who knows what World Cup 2030 will look like in terms of video tech?

The next tournament spans six countries and three continents, but the bigger shift is from filmed matches to rendered ones. Volumetric capture can already reconstruct live action in three dimensions and generate viewpoints where no physical camera existed.

FIFA is producing virtual replays from tracking data, and AI systems are cutting different feeds for different audiences.

The endpoint is a World Cup without a single definitive broadcast.

One viewer watches from the referee’s eyeline, another from a synthetic seat floating above the penalty area, while an AI director follows your favourite player and reframes it all vertically for your phone.

Every version generated from the same underlying model of the pitch.

The 1954 tournament asked whether football could survive being televised. The 2030 one might ask whether it needs cameras at all.

P.S Spain vs Messi in the final on Sunday - who you got?

European broadcasters issued guidelines against sexualising female athletes on camera. European Athletics and the EBU are advising against prolonged body close-ups, low-angle shots, and slow-mo replays that add nothing to the sport.

Neon launches Neon TV. Tom Quinn stays as CEO, fresh off a seventh consecutive Palme d’Or. Months after calling an A24-Neon merger “ridiculous,” the anti-consolidation studio is quietly becoming a mini-major on its own terms.

Dances With Wolves is getting a four-hour director’s cut at Locarno. The 4K restoration adds 30 minutes of unseen material. We covered director’s cuts you’ll never see a few issues back but here’s one that actually escaped the vault 36 years later.

This week we’re watching:

Artist Olga Sizoy’s handmade “Inception rig” is a photography setup built from more than a dozen layered cut-out city images that she shot through with an iPhone.

Subjects appear suspended inside a folding skyline with streets stacking on streets like the Paris scene from Nolan’s film, except this is cardboard and clever depth staging rather than VFX.

Thirty seconds on Instagram that’ll actually make you want to build something.

Retail Therapy: The 200-inch screen that weighs 93 grams

The URXR One is a pair of spatial display glasses that turn your laptop, handheld, or console into a private 200-inch screen.

Micro-OLED panels at 2448 x 2064 per eye, a 90-degree field of view, and a tracking chip that locks the display in physical space so it doesn’t chase you around the room.

One USB-C cable with hand tracking instead of a controller.

Heading to Kickstarter in August at urxr.com.

Also this week:

PlayStation made Hideo Kojima feel “sad”. A Netflix director went to prison after spending $11 million intended for a sci-fi series on crypto and cars. Meanwhile, Spielberg and Amazon won an 11-studio bidding war for The Mandela Catalogue, the latest YouTube horror series headed for cinemas.

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Vimeo’s parent company just IPO’d at $18 billion valuation. Bending Spoons hit the Nasdaq at $29 a share and surged 40% on its first day. Their portfolio includes Vimeo, Eventbrite, and AOL (yes, that AOL).

One of Europe’s biggest short film buyers ends short film support. Spain’s Movistar Plus, which has been a key acquirer of international short film co-productions for nearly 30 years, is sadly axing its short film programme.

Hideo Kojima says he is “really sad” about PlayStation phasing out physical discs and worried about what replaces them. Speaking at a film festival in Italy, the Death Stranding director argued that digital downloads still leave players with data stored on their own hardware. Streaming doesn’t as access can disappear the moment a platform changes its terms or shuts down. This comes after PlayStation recently announced it will stop manufacturing physical game discs in January 2028.

The Hollywood director who defrauded Netflix of $11 million just got two and a half years in prison. Carl Erik Rinsch, who directed 47 Ronin, was given $55 million by Netflix to make a sci-fi series called White Horse. He told them he needed $11 million more to finish it but spent it on Rolls Royces, crypto, and mattresses costing hundreds of thousands of dollars.

A doc about the man who invented the steadicam is finally in production

Before 1974, a smooth moving shot meant a dolly track. You had to lay rails, push a cart, and the camera went exactly as far as the track allowed.

Then a guy called Garrett Brown based out of a barn in Philadelphia built a contraption that let an operator walk, run, climb stairs, and move through space with a camera that seemed to float.

He called it the Steadicam and became the first person to operate it on a film set.

The shots he made with it are ones you already know even if you’ve never heard his name.

Think Rocky running up the museum steps. Or the Overlook Hotel corridor shots in The Shining. Or the speeder bike chase in Return of the Jedi.

Every gimbal you’ve ever held, every stabiliser on every drone, every smartphone rig that promises “cinematic” footage, all traces back to Brown in that barn.

A generation of camera operators now knows the gimbal in their hands far better than the mechanical rig that birthed them all. Which is exactly why a documentary about Brown is now in production.

Thank You Mr. Brown, directed by longtime collaborator Andrew Schwartz, is currently shooting in Philadelphia, New York, and LA with Francis Ford Coppola executive producing.

Schwartz describes Brown as equal parts Einstein and Forrest Gump, which is either the best or worst pitch for a documentary subject and in this case it might be both.

The film connects the threads between that barn workshop and every stabilised shot being taken today.

No release date yet but it’s something worth tracking.

Spielberg and Amazon land YouTube series, The Mandela Catalogue in 11-studio bidding war. The YouTube analog horror series has over 100 million views and is now getting the feature treatment, with creator Alex Kister directing. It’s the third major YouTube-to-theatrical horror deal this year after Backrooms ($331M worldwide) and Obsession ($374M).

A British indie film has collapsed, leaving crew owed more than £300,000 and no one agrees who is to blame. The Climb, originally set to star Cara Delevingne, was due to shoot at Cinecittà using virtual production technology but the financing never arrived and the production company was later liquidated. The financier blames the producer. The producer blames the financier, but the crew aren’t taking sides.

This week we’re watching:

US National archives video clip for To Fly!, the 27-minute IMAX documentary that turns 50 this week. Without it, Christopher Nolan’s filmography as we know it probably doesn’t exist.

In 1976, Greg MacGillivray and Jim Freeman strapped fridge-sized cameras to helicopters, flew one through the St. Louis Gateway Arch without permission, and made a $590,000 film that has since been seen by more than 100 million people.

When the Smithsonian tried to remove it from the National Air and Space Museum, visitors revolted and the Washington Post got involved.

Nolan, who saw it as a child at a theme-park IMAX, remembers watching the entire audience lean in unison as the camera swept over a ridge.

He later called MacGillivray for advice before shooting The Dark Knight’s aerial sequences. Now, as The Odyssey becomes the first feature shot entirely on IMAX 70mm, it will share daily showtimes with To Fly! at that same Smithsonian theatre.

A small, slightly rogue documentary about flight, still casting a very long shadow.

P.S. There’s something deeply ironic about one of the first major IMAX releases only being available online as a 240p promo clip.

Retail Therapy: The instrument that fits in your lunch break

The Enya Cyber-G Pocket is a foldable smart guitar with 14 chord pads, auto-beats, and a built-in 20W speaker system, all weighing less than two pounds.

You can also play individual notes in solo mode or just use it as a Bluetooth speaker when you run out of musical ambition.

It has fifteen-plus tones including piano and guzheng, five drum kits, eight-hour battery, and a fold that gets it small enough for a sling bag.

Available on enyamusicglobal.com for $199.

Wanted to share something new here first: Review, from Eddie AI.

It’s long irked me that timestamped-comments on videos cost sooooooo much. Each time my inner voice would shout: WTF! It’s just text at specific moments. It’s not rocket science!

At some point I became the problem. You can’t complain about something over and over. Do something about it.

So that inner voice turned into action.

And we built it. It’s free. No limitations or catches. It’s built for teams. And has a novel feature that I think you’ll love.

If you’ve had that same inner voice, try Review. Let me know what you think.

—Shamir

Also this week:

PlayStation deletes 551 movies customers thought they owned, an LA camera rental house closed after 19 years citing everything from COVID to big tech CEOs, and Christopher Nolan told Universal to skip influencer screenings for The Odyssey entirely.

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Adobe acquires Topaz Labs. The deal brings Topaz’s AI enhancement models into Firefly, Creative Cloud, and Premiere. A potential landmark for filmmakers as Topaz’s tech can now run large AI models locally on consumer hardware.

A thousand industry professionals pushed back on AI voice clauses for child actors on Peppa Pig, think UK’s Sesame Street, and got parent company Hasbro to respond publicly within days. New contracts would have let the studio clone children’s voices in perpetuity but the collective response was fast enough to set a norm.

Supergirl flopped. $38 million opening against Toy Story 5‘s $70 million, worse than The Flash, barely ahead of Joker: Folie à Deux. Poor reviews, a B- CinemaScore, and reportedly trimmed significantly after test screenings. The superhero genre is already down $3.5 billion annually from its 2017-2019 peak.

Nolan’s The Odyssey is skipping influencer screenings entirely. Universal goes straight to professional critics after the premiere. The move comes after influencer blurbs for Supergirl (”best blockbuster of the summer!”) were met with “no”.

PlayStation is deleting 551 purchased movies from customers’ accounts. StudioCanal titles including Terminator 2, Total Recall, and From Dusk Till Dawn will be removed on September 1. The message literally says “purchased content” will be “deleted” as if that’s normal. Blu-ray anyone?

Sony’s first LOFIC sensor promises nearly 17 stops of dynamic range in a smartphone. The Lytia L910 uses a lateral overflow capacitor to preserve excess photovoltaic charge instead of wasting it. The innovation is smartphone-only for now, but if LOFIC architecture migrates to larger sensors…and it will.

Shadowcast Pictures is shutting down after 19 years. The LA camera rental house cited COVID, strikes, fires, Paramount-Warner merger, and AI. Production in LA is up only 10.7% quarter-on-quarter. The founder’s closing statement: “The studios are no longer run by filmmakers, but instead by big tech CEOs.” More than 80 production service companies have closed in the last five years.

California banned loud streaming ads and it only took 16 years to close the loophole

A trick older than television.

Broadcasters have always cranked ad volume because louder grabs attention, even when viewers hate it. The ad doesn’t technically exceed the programme’s peak volume but it sustains that peak for the entire spot.

Imagine a scenario where your show ranges from a whisper to a gunshot but the ad sits at gunshot level the whole time.

We’ve all watched an ad like it, where you lunge for the remote at 11pm.

Congress fixed this for traditional TV in 2010 with the CALM Act which made ads noticeably quieter. But the law only covered broadcast, cable, and satellite well, because in 2010, streaming ads didn’t really exist.

By the time Netflix, Hulu, and YouTube built ad-supported tiers, they inherited the same incentive with none of the regulation.

California’s SB 576 closes that gap and starting July, streaming platforms must match ad volume to content levels. The bill was literally inspired by a state senator’s staffer whose newborn kept getting woken up by blaring ads.

A whole origin story born out of a tired parent and a screaming baby.

Given California’s leverage over the entertainment industry, this could set a de facto national standard the same way California emissions rules shaped the entire auto industry.

Netflix now requires every profile to have its own email address. The change rolled out June 15 and some users are annoyed because they used multiple profiles to organise genres. Others are concerned it’s a data play for advertisers as Netflix’s privacy policy does say it may share email addresses with marketing companies.

Apple says it wants “better and more” content on Apple TV. Eddy Cue confirmed an F1 sequel is in development, and that Apple will continue making films for both streaming and theatrical. The incoming CEO John Ternus is apparently “a huge supporter” of the content strategy.

Sunny Side of the Doc held its final La Rochelle edition. After 37 years, the documentary market is moving to Strasbourg with 1,500 attendees from 55 countries. The organisers framed it as a moment of reinvention but there’s something poignant about the international documentary community gathering one last time in the city where it started.

This week we’re watching:

A New Hope cost $11 million in 1977 but Secondhand Movie Co. have made their own version for $12.

Cardboard sets, duct tape props, and enough charm to make you forget you’re watching someone’s living room double as the Death Star.

Eight minutes that prove the only thing you actually need to make a film is the audacity to try.

Retail Therapy: Your front door now has Face ID

The SwitchBot Lock Vision Pro is a keyless deadbolt with 3D face recognition, palm vein scanning, and fingerprint reading because apparently three biometric methods is the minimum for getting into your own house in 2026.

Face unlock takes under a second and the palm vein works contactlessly from up to 10 inches away. It stores 90 fingerprints and all of it works in total darkness.

Whether palm vein recognition on your deadbolt is security or science fiction cosplay depends entirely on how you feel about your house scanning you before it lets you in.

Available at switch-bot.com for $199.99.

I hope you’re getting to enjoy a little of the World Cup fever.

I went to the Algeria–Jordan game this week, and it was far more fun than I expected. I had forgotten how joyful the World Cup can be: people from everywhere, wearing their colors, singing for their teams, and letting themselves get completely swept up in it.

It was a good reminder that when you’re deep in the work — building, creating, grinding through the next hard thing — it’s worth coming up for air. Have some fun. Bring your teammates. Remember why any of this is worth doing in the first place.

We’ve been deep in building at Eddie AI too, and I hope to show you one or two or maybe even three new cool things next week.

Have a great rest of your week.

— Shamir

Also this week:

Nolan sold £750,000 worth of IMAX tickets at a single screen in 24 hours for Odyssey, Jordan Peele’s fourth film has a finished script, Empire made the case that Speed Racer invented the next 20 years of cinema, and Bologna’s 40-year-old festival of forgotten films is somehow capturing the streaming generation.

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Amazon dropped Luca Guadagnino’s Sam Altman film and now nobody wants it either. Artificial, starring Andrew Garfield as the OpenAI CEO, was nearly finished when Amazon walked away, months after investing $50 billion in OpenAI. Netflix, A24, and Focus have now all passed. Mubi is circling.

Jurassic World: Dominion is officially the most expensive film ever made. UK financial filings reveal Universal spent $658.8 million on the 2022 dinosaur sequel, surpassing The Force Awakens at $638.9 million. Pandemic protocols, five-month quarantines at a $600-a-night English manor, and Jeff Goldblum playing jazz piano in the lobby all contributed.

A UK film producer had 50 companies struck off, leaving crew unable to chase unpaid fees. Alan Latham’s production companies were compulsorily dissolved by Companies House after failing to file accounts which means there’s no longer an entity for creditors to claim against.

Google enters A24’s realm

This is interesting.

It’s a $75 million investment, which includes an AI research partnership and lands weeks after Backrooms. A film directed by 20-year-old YouTube creator Kane Parsons and became A24’s biggest opening ever at $118 million worldwide.

Google owns YouTube and A24 is now the studio turning YouTube creators into theatrical filmmakers.

Google gets a creative partner in A24 with actual taste to develop AI tools that don’t look like tech demos. What A24 gets beyond the benjis is unclear.

Scott Belsky, previously Chief Product Office at Adobe and now head of A24 Labs, said to the WSJ about AI in the context with their in-house tool development: “We think there are better uses that preserve creative control and support risk-taking.”

Amen.

Jordan Peele’s fourth film has a finished script and Universal is on board. No casting yet, no title or further details but after five years since Nope, two rounds of Monkeypaw layoffs, and multiple pulled release dates, at least it’s moving.

Nolan’s The Odyssey sold 28,000 tickets at BFI IMAX in 24 hours. That’s £750,000 in a single day at a single screen, doubling Dune: Part Two‘s first-day record and tripling Oppenheimer‘s. The first feature shot entirely on IMAX 70mm opens July 17. Tickets for the midnight screening sold out in under an hour.

Speed Racer raced ahead of its time and cinema is still catching up.

Empire published a gorgeous reappraisal of the Wachowskis’ 2008 flop, and the argument is hard to dismiss.

The film grossed under $100 million in the summer of Iron Man and The Dark Knight, but nearly 20 years later, now available in 4K, it still looks like nothing else.

What makes Speed Racer rare isn’t just that it’s visually ambitious. It’s that it’s a formalist film operating at blockbuster scale.

Hollywood produces plenty of movies that push storytelling boundaries. We’ve had nonlinear structure, unreliable narrators, genre subversion etc. But almost none of them challenge what a motion picture actually looks and feels like at the level of the frame itself.

Speed Racer does.

The Wachowskis treated human performances as digital assets and really created what they called Cubist cinema. The racing sequences play like animated paintings dissolving into pure colour. Transitions wipe through characters instead of cutting. Warping perspective and collapse time.

It’s a completely different idea of what a movie is allowed to be.

It’s also the kind of risk that almost never happens at $120 million.

Studios fund light narrative experimentation occasionally. Think of a Memento, or an Inception but formal experimentation at tentpole budget level is essentially extinct.

Speed Racer is one of the only examples of a major studio film that asks whether the medium itself can be reinvented, not just the plot.

Without it, we probably don’t get Scott Pilgrim, the Spider-Verse films, or Everything Everywhere All At Once.

Bologna’s festival of forgotten films is capturing the streaming generation. Il Cinema Ritrovato, now 40 years old, drew 140,000 people last year to watch restored classics in a Renaissance square. The surprise is that young audiences are the fastest-growing segment.

Christopher Nolan describing, step by step, how The Odyssey gets from camera to screen

The IMAX film goes straight from set to lab. Through the processor, the developer, the fixer and drying process. The edit happens digitally, but when the cut is locked, a list of numbers goes back to the lab where the negative is physically cut and glued together by hand.

Forty-one prints made directly from the original negative, shipped to IMAX theatres around the world.

There’s something quite grounding about watching a filmmaker who cares this much about how audiences watch his films.

Retail Therapy: The UN translator that fits in your bag

The Timekettle X1 is a standalone translation device that connects up to 20 people across 5 languages simultaneously with no app required.

In presentation mode, one device serves 50 audience members via QR code with real-time subtitles on their phones.

It processes words as they’re spoken rather than waiting for the full sentence, which makes it 60% faster than the usual pause-translate-apologise cycle.

Forty-three languages, 96 accents, offline packs for locations without Wi-Fi, and bank-grade encryption for anyone who doesn’t want their calls leaking.

Available at timekettle.co for $699.

Also this week:

DJI and Insta360 go to war patents, Tribeca screens a $2000 AI feature and Jamie Oliver enters the microdrama cookhouse. Oh and OpenAI is shooting for an Emmy.

Render Reel

Netflix told theatrical purists to work somewhere else. Film chief Dan Lin said there are filmmakers who still want theatrical and “we’ve accepted we just won’t work with” them. Exceptions exist for specific titles, but the message is as blunt as corporate messaging gets. Netflix is not becoming a theatrical studio.

Lionsgate turned John Wick into AI inventory. The studio took an equity stake in Runway and is developing AI-generated short-form projects built on existing IP, potentially including John Wick, Saw, and The Hunger Games. Your favourite mid-2000s action franchise might just become a vertical content farm.

Tribeca screens a $2,000 AI feature. Dreams of Violets, a 75-minute AI-generated film by Ash and Pooya Koosha, was built with Kling, Claude, and Gemini. Tribeca co-founder Jane Rosenthal called it “a powerful example of deeply human storytelling.” A story that would have required a six-figure budget and a full crew five years ago.

OpenAI is campaigning for an Emmy. Its tech talk show TBPN shifted into Outstanding Variety Series consideration just as nominations voting opened. Not a typo. OpenAI are buying a seat at the prestige table.

The myth of the director’s cut

Far Out Magazine ran a piece on ten mythical director’s cuts you’ll never see, and it’s a good reminder that the “director’s cut” has become more myth than an actual thing.

Brando’s three-hour One-Eyed Jacks was gutted by Paramount. Lynch disowned Dune entirely and Fincher still hates Alien 3 more than you do.

Scorsese admitted in his recent doc that he doesn’t believe in director’s cuts and accepted Weinstein’s cut of Gangs of New York as the only version. The most heartbreaking is that Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in America was intended as two three-hour films.

Warner Bros released a 139-minute chronological cut but the original five-hour version is likely lost forever.

Jamie Oliver is making a vertical microdrama. The Jamie Oliver Group is developing a scripted short-form series with Baby Teeth as part of a push into IP and formats. A chef’s media company producing vertical drama sounds like a sentence generated by an algorithm, but here we are.

DJI and Insta360 are in a patent war. DJI is suing over the Insta360 Luna Ultra, alleging it copies Osmo Pocket design and tracking tech. Insta360 counter-sued, targeting DJI’s Ronin and Osmo lines. This lands as DJI faces looming US restrictions, which means the creator camera market could get squeezed by patent law and geopolitics at the same time.

UK distributor Elysian Film Group Distribution is being liquidated. Danny Perkins’ distribution arm, launched in 2020 with CAA backing, is now in formal insolvency with outstanding debts. Elysian distributed Studio Ghibli’s The Boy and the Heron in the UK but couldn’t survive the economics of independent distribution.. a story becoming all too familiar.

Shanghai built an AI backlot and invited filmmakers to use it. The fest launched AI BACKLOT with Hailuo AI and not as a screening category but as a live production lab where filmmakers work with the tools in public. While Cannes and Tribeca debate whether to programme AI films, Shanghai skipped the argument and built the infrastructure.

Sony makes 65mm modular. Sony unveiled RIALTO 65, a 65mm-format sensor block for the VENICE 2, with a release planned for the first half of 2027. The interesting part is not just the bigger sensor or the 9.6K open gate capture. It is the way large-format prestige is being turned into an upgrade layer on an existing ecosystem instead of a sealed-off rental-house religion.

Remote dailies become acquisition territory. MTI Film acquired Mango NewEdit, a Burbank company specialising in remote dailies and Avid editorial services. Not sexy, but very relevant. Consolidation is moving into the invisible infrastructure of production, where post houses buy workflow capacity rather than just colour rooms and finishing talent.

The Social Reckoning trailer had one job and it might not have done it

The original Social Network trailer is regularly called one of the best of the century.

Scala’s cover of “Creep,” and the snappy edit all convinced everyone that a film about the guy who made Facebook would be worth our time.

That was its only job and it nailed it.

Sixteen years later, the Social Reckoning trailer has to convince you there’s a film here you haven’t already watched play out on cable news and in congressional hearings.

The Sorkin dialogue is sharp as ever. Jeremy Strong as Zuckerberg calling himself a “professional defendant” and the line about being “post-government” are standouts.

But sharp writing isn’t the same thing as a reason to exist.

The other thing the Social Network trailer nails is establishing what the “social network” actually is. Not Facebook, but Mark and his circle of friends and associates, and the slow spiral of reducing that circle to one.

The question the Reckoning trailer never really answers is.. what reckoning?

Haugen (the whistleblower) leaked the documents and Congress held hearings. The Wall Street Journal published everything and then Zuckerberg renamed Facebook to Meta, got into MMA, and came out richer than before.

Is that a reckoning?

Out October 9. We’ll see.

Retail Therapy: Your tripod has a belt clip now

The Joby HandyPod Clip Extend is a tiny tripod, selfie stick and handheld grip that folds down to under 6.5 inches and weighs 106g. Can support a phone, action cam and compact cameras under 1kg.

Also has a carabiner leg so you can clip it to your bag and “mantis mode” for clinging to fences or railings, which is either very useful or a warning sign that every public object is now content infrastructure.

Available from Joby for around $35.

We’re back from Cine Gear LA. It was a blast.

It was two packed days at Universal Studios talking about what we’re really building…between you and I, we’re not building another NLE. We’re building your AI teammate. One that syncs multicams, logs and assembles so you’re liberated to focus on the creative.

We also demoed what’s new in Eddie AI, including Logging v2, Feedback v2, Night Shift, and our Premiere Pro, DaVinci Resolve, and Final Cut Pro workflows.

We continue to be inspired by all of you indomitable filmmakers. Keep making, keep creating, keep fighting to put forth your ideas into the world for how it should be better.

—Shamir

CEO & Co-Founder, Eddie AI

Also this week:

Spielberg refused to release ET on VHS for six years, Brazil launched government streaming service with 555 titles dating back to 1910, TikTok and Sundance launched free micro-series scriptwriting programme.

The 27 year old assistant that found A24 record-breaker Backrooms. The film opened to $118 million worldwide on a $10 million budget yet the film was discovered by a 27-year-old assistant at Shawn Levy’s company who messaged Kane Parsons on YouTube when the first video had barely any views..

Brazil launched a free government streaming service with 555 titles. Tela Brasil offers 139 features, 85 TV movies, 267 shorts, and 64 series spanning 1910 to 2025. All Brazilian productions, available to anyone with a government digital account. The catalogue includes Glauber Rocha, Hector Babenco, and two Oscar nominees.

Spielberg refused to release ET on VHS for six years. The film played in cinemas for 363 consecutive days and when he finally relented in 1988, it sold 15 million copies. MCA spent over $1 million colouring the tape guards green and adding holographic stickers to combat piracy.

The 83-year-old filmmaker signed on as a partner and adviser to Black Forest Labs, the German company behind the FLUX image generation models.

His use case is specifically only for storyboarding.

Scorsese isn’t necessarily endorsing AI filmmaking outright as he’s using AI the way he used 3D on Hugo and de-aging on The Irishman.

He’s using it as a pre-production tool that keeps human judgment at the center but the symbolic weight is hard to overstate.

TikTok and Sundance launched free micro-series scriptwriting programme. A four-week online course through Sundance Collab focused on serialized short-form storytelling for digital audiences. They want creators to treat micro-series as its own craft, not a lesser version of film or TV. Applications open globally through July 1.

Obsession art director made $6,741 on a film projected to gross $250 million

Sally Choi posted her rate $300/day with no mileage or backend and the internet did what the internet does.

But the discourse that followed mostly missed the point.

The calls for every crew member to receive backend on low-budget shoots sound righteous until you look at the actual numbers and producer Mynette Louie broke down what those potential numbers might be.

After exhibitors take 50%, the distributor takes their 30% fee, marketing costs, the minimum guarantee, agent fees, investor recoupment, and deferrals are paid out, the producer’s net receipts on $126M in US box office land at roughly $12.8 million.

Now you have to split across producers, the writer/director, cast, and some department heads.

Giving backend to every crew member on a low-budget shoot is like giving equity to every contractor who touched the product at a startup.

What is fair and what the industry should normalise is backend for heads of department on low-budget indies. If you’re the art director, the DP, the editor, and the budget is under a million, points should be part of the conversation.

In my experience these conversations were always being had on indies.

The question is why didn’t Choi push for backend upfront and the answer is obvious as you realize it was her first major gig.

She had no representation, and was also living paycheck to paycheck so taking this gig was a no brainer.

But it’s also a case of inexperience meeting an industry that doesn’t volunteer information about what you should be asking for.

The viral post with 1.2 million views from actor Luke Barnett landed the practical advice cleanly.

Use the credit, get a BTL agent and leverage the three hardest weeks of your career into the next ten years of it. Most importantly, don’t torch the relationships that got you there.

He’s right.

But the fact that a crew member can art direct a $250 million hit and walk away with less than seven grand is still worth sitting with.

Would love to hear everyone’s thoughts on this in the comments.

This week we’re watching:

Nike's six-minute World Cup film Rip the Script, directed by Dan Streit via Somesuch for Wieden+Kennedy.

Ronaldo, Mbappé, Haaland, Vini Jr., LeBron, Kim Kardashian, Travis Scott and Channing Tatum all appear because apparently the brief was "everyone".

The scale is undeniable as the spot opens on a commercial set and detonates into a genre-hopping sprint through action films, arthouse, talk shows, and pyrotechnics.

There are historically few bigger ads on the calendar than a Nike World Cup spot and this one made sure you knew it.

But for all the craft on display, it left me a little cold.

Six minutes of everything somehow adds up to not quite enough of anything. Like the cinematic equivalent of a restaurant menu with 100 items.

What exactly are we supposed to be looking at here?

Six minutes of everything somehow adds up to not quite enough of anything. Worth watching for the production alone and if you’re interested the BTS, read this deep dive with the director.

Retail Therapy: Your new doubles partner doesn’t complain about the heat

The Aceii One is a tennis robot that moves around the court, tracks your position with dual cameras, and fires balls at up to 80 mph with a half-second feed interval.

It folds into a carry-on suitcase with room for 120 balls, your racket, and whatever’s left of your dignity after losing a rally to something on wheels.

Works on hard, grass, and clay courts, and also does pickleball and padel if you’re going through a phase.

Available at aceii.com for $1500.

I’m packing up and heading to Cine Gear LA this week — caffeine, demos, and questionable booth snacks included.

If you’re going to be there, or if you’ll be in LA, I’d love to meet up and show you what we’ve been building with Eddie AI.

Book a time to meet with us.

• Cine Gear LA, June 5–6, 2026

• Eddie AI’s Booth: S1611, Stage 16

• Location: Universal Studios Lot, Universal City, CA

—Shamir

Also this week:

Higgsfield screened an AI feature at “Cannes”, the Alamo Drafthouse phone petition hit 10,000 signatures, Hollywood’s top 18 executives made $746 million while 17,000 jobs were cut, and Ron Howard put real actors in real fire in 1991 and nobody’s tried it since.

Higgsfield screens 95-minute AI feature at Cannes but not at Cannes. Hell Grind was made by 15 people in 14 days for under $500K, generating 16,181 shots to land 253 final ones. Filmmakers received backlash for not making it clear it wasn’t actually part of the official festival

Amazon greenlit three AI-generated kids’ shows and one creator already dropped out. Jorge Gutierrez withdrew his series Punky Duck 48 hours after announcing it, following backlash over his previous anti-AI stance. BuzzFeed’s entry also drew fire from the original character creator.

The Alamo Drafthouse phone petition hit 10,000 signatures. The chain now requires mobile ordering during movies but the Austin audience booed the new policy in unison.

A self-funded audio creator went from indie projects to showrunning DC’s Batman podcast in four years. Hit #1 on Apple Podcasts. Worth reading if you’ve never considered audio as a final destination for cinematic storytelling.

IndieWire gathered five experts on short film strategy at Cannes. The biggest takeaway: apply to festivals when submissions open, not at the deadline. Apply late and you’re slotting into someone else’s programme. A 30-minute short takes the slot of two films. And if you’re building an audience in the US, start with a mailing list, not a social following. Instagram doesn’t convert but email does.

Cate Blanchett announced the second round of the Displacement Film Fund at Cannes five filmmakers receive €100,000 each for shorts about displacement, with premieres at IFFR 2027. The first round’s films got sold-out screenings and are heading to Film Forum for Oscar qualifying runs.

The YouTube Auteurs

Three horror films are dominating the US box office right now, and none of them came through the traditional pipeline.

Curry Barker’s Obsession, made for under $1 million, Markiplier’s Iron Lung, self-distributed on a $4 million budget with practically zero marketing spend, crossed $50 million worldwide.

And Kane Parsons’ Backrooms, directed by a 20-year-old for A24, is tracking $40–50 million in its opening weekend breaking the previous record of $25 million for Civil War.

YouTube is the thread that connects all of them.

These filmmakers didn’t bother with film schools, proof-of-concept shorts at Sundance, or development deals. Their audiences were built on YouTube and let the algorithm do what festival programmers used to do which is surface talent.

Parsons uploaded his first Backrooms video as a high schooler testing Blender animations and it hit 20 million views in two weeks.

Barker has reportedly been offered eight figures sight unseen for his next pitch. Markiplier just announced Iron Lung‘s digital release will be a YouTube exclusive because, as he put it at Cannes, “YouTube is my home.”

Horror has always been the genre where unknown directors break through cheaply. Think of Sam Raimi, James Wan, Robert Eggers, Ari Aster all started with shorts.

But the difference now is where the audience relationship forms.

Hollywood is scrambling to catch up.

Dylan Clark has been tapped to adapt his YouTube hit Portrait of God for Universal and offered the Blair Witch reboot. Neon signed Sam Evenson to adapt his viral short Mora. The pipeline from YouTube upload to studio deal is now shorter than the pipeline from film school to first feature.

None of this means YouTube replaces the festival circuit as Sundance, Cannes, and TIFF still do something an algorithm can’t. They curate and confer legitimacy in ways that matter for a filmmaker’s long-term career.

But for directors who never considered YouTube as part of their path, this moment is worth paying attention to. It’s not the only route. But pretending it isn’t one at all means ignoring the three films currently dominating the box office.

Also Markiplier is building a YouTube distribution system so other filmmakers can sell their films the same way.

If you wanted a single image to capture where independent film distribution is heading, it’s a YouTuber with 37 million subscribers hand-packaging Blu-rays in his living room while Hollywood executives try to figure out what just happened.

Ron Howard put real actors in real fire for Backdraft in 1991 and nobody’s done it since. The crew built a steel tank called “Big Bertha” that ejected flame at 1,200 square feet. ILM handled what was too dangerous to shoot live. Thirty-five years later, it’s still the benchmark for practical fire effects on screen.

Hollywood’s top 18 execs made $746 million in 2025 while 17,000 jobs were cut across the industry. Zaslav topped the list at $165 million with a pay ratio of 1,378 to 1. AMC Theatres’ CEO made $15 million while the median employee made $12,756. A Los Angeles nonprofit is pushing an “Overpaid CEO Tax” for the November ballot.

DJI released an independent security audit showing no backdoors or data leaving the US. The firm tested two drone models over five months and found zero critical vulnerabilities. DJI is using the findings to appeal its FCC ban. Whether a clean pen test shifts a decision rooted in geopolitics is another question.

HOVERAir launched a waterproof self-flying drone that takes off and lands on water. The AQUA is 249g, shoots 4K at 100fps, tracks subjects via millimeter-wave radar, and floats if it tips over. Built for surfers and water sports, not adapted from a land drone. Starts at $1,299.

This week we’re watching:

A documentary about the computer graphics lab that built the backbone of modern animation and the feature film it never finished.

In 1974, eccentric millionaire Alexander Schure founded a CG lab at the New York Institute of Technology in a mansion on Long Island’s Gold Coast, hired Ed Catmull to run it, and told his animators he wouldn’t need them once the computers worked.

The team invented the alpha channel, the first RGB digital paint system, and reflection mapping. They tried to make the world’s first all-CG feature, The Works, but one engineer calculated it would take a whole seven years to render.

Then George Lucas called, Catmull and Alvie Ray Smith left for Lucasfilm, and the lab that seeded Pixar, RenderMan, and modern VFX slowly wound down.

A must watch for anyone interested in the origins story of modern animation.

Retail Therapy: The camera that watches your life so you don’t have to remember it

The Looki L1 is a clip-on AI camera that records short clips throughout your day and organises everything by context automatically. At the end of the day, it generates a highlight reel or, and this is genuinely unhinged, turns your footage into comic strips.

You can also ask questions about your own day, like what you ate or how long you worked, and it answers from the footage.

It’s a personal surveillance device you voluntarily wear, except they promise end-to-end encryption and no data training.

Thirteen-hour battery, IP67 waterproofing, and the existential question of whether you want an AI that knows more about your Tuesday than you do. This could be a really fun gadget for a documentary filmmaker or a YouTuber who’s been meaning to vlog for years but never does.

Available at looki.ai for $249.99

Happy Wednesday.

Will you be at Cine Gear Expo LA? We’ll be demoing Eddie AI at booth S1611 (Stage 16). Meet us and book a meeting.

Yesterday we publicly launched Logging v2 where you now provide Eddie AI with context about the edit project so it better logs and organizes your interviews and B-roll, creating the bins and stringouts of clips that you most want. We also added support for backgrounder docs, 20 hours of interview material, and B-roll logging for stills.

Enjoy today’s newsletter.

—Shamir

Also this week:

Alamo Drafthouse is now screening indie animated shorts before features nationwide, Radio Silence is directing a Choose Your Own Adventure movie, short stories posted to Reddit are getting seven-figure studio deals and Seattle’s largest IMAX screen is dropping feature films entirely.

Netflix cut its movie output to the lowest Q1 since 2018. Just 23 original films in the first quarter, down from 50 in 2022. The strategy is explicit: fewer films, bigger swings, more international. Greta Gerwig’s Narnia is the tentpole with a Tarantino sequel with Brad Pitt in development too.

Alamo Drafthouse is screening indie animated shorts before feature films. Animation Nights New York is curating the selections — no ads, no trailers, just short-form animation on the big screen. First up is Buzzkill, playing before Obsession at Alamo locations nationwide. One of the only theatrical distribution paths for independent animation outside the festival circuit.

Radio Silence is directing a Choose Your Own Adventure movie for 20th Century. The script is by Tom Bissell, who won a WGA Award for Andor and co-wrote The Disaster Artist. The interactive book series sold 250 million copies. No plot details yet, but the team behind Ready or Not adapting a branching-narrative format feels right.

Short stories are Hollywood’s hottest format. A profile of Scott Glassgold, who pivoted from repping sci-fi proof-of-concept shorts to representing self-published authors posting stories to Reddit. Several seven-figure deals later, the pipeline from Reddit post to studio acquisition is real and accelerating.

Films are more likely to star a man named Chris than a woman over 60. A UK study found six of the top 100 grossing films over three years had a male lead named Chris. Five had a female lead over 60. Emma Thompson: “So where are the stories about us?”

Seattle’s Boeing IMAX Theater is dropping feature films. The 80-foot, six-storey screen is the largest in Washington state and will only show documentaries going forward after the Space Needle purchased the venue. “The economics of operating a movie theater have become increasingly challenging.”

Netflix acquired The Black Ball for the US. The Spanish-language Cannes competition film that received a 20-minute standing ovation, the longest of the festival. Penélope Cruz and Glenn Close in supporting roles. A queer epic spanning three periods of Spanish history connected by the works of Federico García Lorca.

The clipping economy is eating everything

The NPR recently profiled a 25-year-old in Belgium who quit his Subway job to clip other people’s content full-time. Emrah Bayraktar takes long-form interviews, cuts them into short-form snippets, posts them to Instagram, and earns money through affiliate links and view-based bounties.

He went from making $12 one night to $2,500 two weeks later. Now he runs six clipping pages with over a million combined followers and teaches others how to do the same.

He’s not alone.

There are now entire marketplaces where agencies upload content and let anyone clip it for cash. Recent bounties include a dollar per thousand views for MLB game clips and $25 per thousand views for clips promoting an AI startup.

The pitch to brands is this: why spend money on Meta ads when you can flood social media with clips through a network of freelance clippers instead?

The implications for filmmakers and creators are worth sitting with.

The measure of success is no longer how many people watch your work, it’s how many people saw the clips. NYU marketing professor Scott Galloway’s podcast co-host Ed Elson discovered this firsthand when strangers started recognising him on the street.

They’d seen his clips but never watched his podcast.

This is the logical endpoint of what platforms have been optimising for. Attention measured in seconds, not minutes. A three-hour interview becomes twenty 90-second clips, each stripped of context, each competing for a scroll-stopping thumbnail.

The person who made the original content gets reach. The clipper gets paid. The viewer gets a fragment. Nobody gets the whole thing.

For anyone making long-form content; documentaries, podcasts, interviews, video essays etc the question becomes whether the clip is now the product and the original is the raw material nobody watches.

IMAX is exploring a sale. They’ve approached entertainment companies as potential buyers, according to the Wall Street Journal. The process is early and may not lead to a deal. IMAX’s domestic box office market share hit a record 5.2% last year. Weeks after Disney launched Infinity Vision to compete with it.

Panasonic’s new LUMIX L10 is already overwhelmed by preorders. The compact camera with a 20.4MP sensor and Leica-designed 24-75mm zoom lens is causing delivery delays in Japan before it’s even shipped. Panasonic says demand is “greatly exceeding expectations.” Whether the delays hit worldwide remains to be seen.

DJI is ending support for the Osmo Mobile 3 and OM 4 in August. Both gimbals stopped production in 2021 so this isn’t a surprise. Your gimbal won’t stop working but won’t get tech support either. DJI’s current range starts at $99 for the Osmo Mobile 7P if you need a replacement.

This week we’re watching:

A deep dive by Synthet into the origins of every meme sound effect you’ve heard a thousand times but never questioned.

A sad trombone that traces back to vaudeville and a plunger mute on the end of a bell. An anime “wow” from a 1990 Konami arcade game called Parodius. The Vine boom is a sledgehammer hitting an iron door, recorded in 2012 by a sound company called Blue Zone and degraded through years of MP3 compression.

Twelve minutes of sound archaeology that’ll make you hear your timeline differently.

Retail Therapy: The editing console for your other hand

The XPPen Pilot Pro is a one-handed editing controller with a joystick, dials, and enough buttons to map 100+ commands across Premiere, Resolve, or whatever your NLE of choice is. Colour wheel grading without modifier keys. Variable-speed playback with a flick of the joystick. Custom themes so you can organise your shortcuts however your brain works, which for most editors is chaotically.

What your other hand is doing while this one handles the timeline is entirely your business.

At $209, it’s cheaper than most pieces of kit that promise to speed up your workflow and actually might. Not revolutionary, but the kind of tool that quietly saves you twenty minutes a session until you can’t imagine editing without it.

Available at xp-pen.com.

I was reflecting on a chat I had with a new customer…

A lot of AI tools fail creative people for the same reason: they confuse automation with creativity.

They assume the goal is to remove the human from the process.

But anyone who has actually edited a film, cut a documentary, shaped a YouTube story, or worked through the tenth version of a brand piece knows the real work isn’t mechanical. It’s emotional. Intuitive. Iterative. Often frustrating. Occasionally magical.

Creative work isn’t a straight line from prompt to output.

It’s exploration.

And that’s where many AI products break down.

They generate polished-looking results quickly, but leave no room for discovery. No room for instinct. No room for the tiny human decisions that make something feel alive instead of merely correct.

Worse, many AI tools interrupt the very workflows creatives rely on. They ask editors to leave their timelines, upload assets into disconnected interfaces, or trust black-box outputs they can’t meaningfully control.

That might work for a demo.

It doesn’t work under deadline.

At Eddie AI, we think the future of creative AI looks different.

We don’t believe the editor disappears.

We believe the busywork disappears.

The searching. The organizing. The first-pass assembly. The repetitive mechanical steps that drain energy before the real storytelling even begins.

The goal isn’t to replace creative people. It’s to help them stay in creative flow longer.

Because the best editing decisions still come from humans:
the pause before a reaction shot,
the instinct to hold on a moment,
the feeling that a scene needs air,
the realization that the story is actually about something else entirely.

AI can accelerate the process.

But taste, emotion, and storytelling judgment still belong to people.

And honestly, that’s a good thing.

—Shamir

This week:

DJI launched a cinema-grade Pocket camera at Cannes that may never reach the US, a Harlem Renaissance documentary premiered 50 years after the footage was shot, Sony pushed a major BURANO firmware update, and someone tracked 13,000 indie buyer deals since January and published the whole dataset for free.

Render Reel

A24 paid $17 million for Cannes breakout about washed-up party promoter. Jordan Firstman’s Club Kid. His directorial debut, also starring Cara Delevingne and Diego Calva premiered Friday in Un Certain Regard and triggered an eight-figure bidding war by Saturday. A24 outbid Focus, Searchlight, Netflix and Mubi; Warner Bros.’ new indie label Clockwork tapped out early.

A Harlem Renaissance documentary premiered at Cannes 50 years after footage was shot. In 1972, filmmaker William Greaves gathered surviving figures of the movement at Duke Ellington’s townhouse and filmed them for four hours but never finished a film. After his death in 2014, his son and granddaughter restored 60,000 feet of 16mm film and completed it.

ScriptMatch tracked 4,100+ indie buyers and 13,000+ deals since January and published the data. Horror’s share of buyer mentions doubled. Boutique theatrical distributors scaling up. Vietnamese, South Asian, Filipino, and Chilean projects are getting pickups at unusual rates.

Sony BURANO gets major firmware update. Version 3.00 adds full-frame 5.8K 6:5 for anamorphic lenses, Super 35 3.8K at 120fps, X-OCN recording for S35 1.9K, and normal peaking support. If you shoot on a BURANO, this is the update you’ve been waiting for.

Soderbergh’s Full Metal AI

Steven Soderbergh used Meta’s generative AI to fill in about 10% of his new John Lennon documentary and the reception at Cannes ranges from polite confusion to outright contempt.

Time called the imagery pointless and bad but Soderbergh is unbothered.

The film is built around a two-hour radio interview Lennon and Yoko Ono gave a small KFRC crew at the Dakota on December 8, 1980 hours before Lennon was shot. The audio is the spine and for most of it, Soderbergh leans on archival photos and footage.

For the more philosophical stretches, he reached for AI.

“I worked on everything that could be solved except that for as long as I could,” he told the AP. Then he ran out of time and money and the Meta deal closed the gap.

Fair to hate the visuals. Bad AI in a doc about one of the 20th century’s most uncompromising creative weirdos is, on its face, isn’t great.

But the argument underneath is more interesting than the imagery. Soderbergh has been saying out loud that someone with creative credibility needs to “go full-metal AI” in public so the rest of the industry can actually see what crosses the line, and what doesn’t.

Soderbergh is a man who refuses to be told what tools he can or can’t reach for.

Considering this is the guy who shot Unsane on an iPhone it makes all the sense.

And Soderbergh is not alone. 2026 is truly the first Cannes where AI has moved from debate to being on the slate.

Sales agents at the Marché say the embarrassment around using the tech evaporated in twelve months. AGC’s Critterz is branded “human-led but AI-assisted.” Doug Liman’s Bitcoin is co-produced by Kavanaugh’s new venture, Acme AI & FX.

Thierry Frémaux gave a measured “we are on the side of the artists” then programmed Soderbergh anyway.

Two things can be true but whether Soderbergh’s Lennon experiment worked remains to be seen. But if you know Soderbergh that’s all he’s ever done.

Filmsupply launched Editfest 2026 a 30-day editing competition with $65K in prizes across title sequence, advertisement, and trailer categories. Download the starter kit, cut something from their cinematic library, submit by June 5.

Canal+ says it will blacklist over 600 French cinema figures who signed a petition warning that leaving French cinema in the hands of far-right billionaire Vincent Bolloré risked “a fascist takeover of the collective imagination.” The CEO’s response: “I will no longer work with the people who signed that petition.” Among the signatories: Juliette Binoche and a director with a film in Cannes competition this week.

DJI launches Osmo Pocket 4P at Cannes. First time the company has positioned a Pocket as a filmmaking tool rather than a vlogger gadget. The regulatory pressure on Chinese drone and wireless products in the US means it’s unclear if or when the 4P actually makes it stateside

This week we’re watching:

A CalArts animated short by Melody Cheng where every frame is hand-illustrated to the point where you’d hang any still on a wall.

Two characters navigate a building complex that grows on its own, a structure so uncontrollable it’s scheduled for demolition.

Four minutes with no dialogue wasted, and a visual quality that makes you forget a student made it.

Sound could use some work but everything else is already there.

Retail Therapy: The guitar that plays itself (almost)

The Melo-D is a foldable AI guitar with LED frets, a built-in touchscreen, and the ability to convert any song into playable chords the moment you paste a link. Hum a melody and it turns it into a guitar solo. Type a mood and it generates an original piece.

It also does piano, electric guitar, and guzheng sounds, because apparently one existential crisis about whether you’re actually playing music wasn’t enough.

Available here.