I loved reading today’s newsletter by Efosa on Cannes as it reminded me of when I first went when I was 23. Blagged my way in using my BBC employee badge. That yacht party that was headed to Italy that I had to somehow figure out how to get off of (though I sometimes wonder what if I hadn’t). The tux I had to borrow from some guy I had just met to attend a screening (I said I was 23!).

The line in the article about ‘be delulu’ is legit (I took it to mean naïve).

It’s actually a prereq for achieving most hard things in life.

Being naive is a superpower.

If you knew in advance how hard it is, how much blood and sweat it takes, how low the lows are to make a film, build a startup, make a record, or get into the NBA…would you try? If you knew in advance it would take 100 rejections before you get 1 yes — would you send each of those emails, make each of those calls?

And yet even after you succeed, you need to hold onto it in some form to do the next hard thing. And the next. And prevent cynicism from creeping in and realism from boring us to death.

Keep dreaming, keep striving toward your hard thing.

And if you’re attending Cannes, I hope you don’t (or do) end up on a boat bound for Tuscany.

—Shamir
CEO/Co-founder, Eddie AI

This week:

Cannes opens today with The White Lotus prepping to shoot season 4 on the same Croisette the day after the festival wraps, Letterboxd’s up for sale, Jack Dorsey resurrected Vine as Divine, and Timothée Chalamet leads Messi and Bad Bunny in the first fútbol ad worth watching in a decade.

Letterboxd’s looking to sell. Tiny, the Canadian holding company that bought 60% in 2023, has been talking to buyers including Versant and The Ankler. Twenty-six million users, mostly under 34, and still undermonetised. Co-founder retains veto rights over any buyer.

Jack Dorsey relaunched Vine as Divine. A human-only video platform where AI-generated content is banned. Ships with 500,000 archived original Vine clips. The man who killed Vine in 2017 is now funding its resurrection as “freedom from AI slop.”

Blender backtracks on Anthropic deal. The open-source 3D software accepted Anthropic as a Corporate Patron of its Development Fund, then reversed within weeks under community pressure. Anthropic’s money still arrives but just relabelled as a one-off donation instead of a membership.

Boris FX acquired Vegas Pro and is shipping a 2026 version with ProRes RAW support, AI transcription, and NVIDIA Blackwell GPU acceleration. The VFX plugin company now has its own NLE.

4,700 European cinema professionals signed an open letter to protect the EU’s MEDIA program. Coppola, Binoche, Skarsgård, and Östlund among them. A proposed restructuring could merge dedicated film funding into a broader cultural pot with no audiovisual guarantees. The vote lands May 12 - Cannes opening day.

Destination Cannes

Cannes’ first edition was supposed to open on September 1, 1939 but it could only screen one film and that was The Hunchback of Notre Dame. Further programming was halted when Germany invaded Poland the next morning.

The festival didn’t properly launch again until 1946, by which point the original political motivation had been replaced by something more useful - an industry marketplace.

That marketplace is the Marché du Film, and it’s the real reason most of the industry shows up.

The Palais des Festivals, which is a brutalist concrete bunker the locals call “the Bunker” - houses both the competition screenings upstairs and the market below.

The architecture tells you everything about the festival’s split personality: art on top, commerce underneath, and a red carpet connecting the two.

The hallways are narrow and overheated. Meetings happen standing up, in stairwells, or in booths the size of a phone box that costs more per square metre than Monaco real estate.

The density creates collisions that don’t happen anywhere else. A first-time filmmaker from Senegal sharing a café table with a Netflix acquisitions executive because there’s literally nowhere else to sit.

Cannes is a place where everything contradicts itself.. and so do my tips.

Follow the fun, but don’t chase it.

The best nights in Cannes find you. You wander out of a screening, end up at the Petit Majestic for one drink, get pulled onto a rooftop, then onto someone’s boat.

If you’re genuinely having fun, don’t leave for a party someone tells you is better. You’ll spend the whole night chasing a good time you already had.

The best version of yourself at Cannes is the one that’s actually present, not the one checking their WhatsApp for the next invite.

Don’t chase celeb parties. Don’t chase execs. They don’t care about you and it’s not how networking works anyway.

Stay in town.

Might be too late for this but alas. Yes, hotels and Airbnbs are triple their normal rate. Yes, Nice is only 30 minutes by train and Antibes is closer. None of this matters (unless you’re really, really trying to save money)

Stay. In. Town.

Cannes really is a 24-hours thing.

The late screening that runs to 1am, the drink that turns into a meeting, the walk back along the Croisette where you bump into someone you’ve been trying to email for six months. None of that happens if you’re catching the last TER at 11:47pm.

And if you miss that train, your option is getting a €50 Uber or waiting til 6am. Pick your poison.

Cannes is the best and worst place in the world to watch films.

You can be sat with 2,300 other cinephiles inside the Grand Théâtre Lumière, watching the first ever showing of a masterpiece in front of its director, with a ten-minute standing ovation that the cast visibly doesn’t know how to absorb.

But at its worst…Cannes gives you films, meetings, and a social scene with roughly enough hours in the day to do one of them well.

The badge hierarchy means you can queue 90 minutes and still not get in. Black tie is enforced for evening galas.

You’re sprinting between venues with no time to eat. By day five you’re running on espresso and a stale croissant you found in your tote bag, watching a four-hour Filipino drama at 8:30am and realising that croissant you just ate, was actually that business card you meant to throw away.

Don’t shoot for the execs.

Everyone arrives wanting a meeting with the head of acquisitions at A24, a handshake with a Netflix VP. You probably won’t get it. The top-tier executives are booked months in advance and move through the festival in a bubble of handlers and pre-scheduled dinners.

Shoot for the mid-level buyers, the junior sales agents, the development producers, the festival programmers who’ll actually sit with you for twenty minutes and remember your pitch.

The 25-year-old acquisitions coordinator in front of you in the coffee queue is more useful to your career than anyone on the fourth floor of the Palais, and unlike them, she’s reachable.

Be delulu, but also get real.

Delusion is the fuel. So send those cold emails. Walk into the Martinez bar like you belong there (you do - no one checks). Believe your short will sell, your script will get read, your idol will say yes to coffee.

Without that, you wouldn’t have flown out.

But Cannes is also not where careers are made. It’s where relationships might start that pay off in two years or five.

CANNES ROLLCALL

• The White Lotus is shooting season 4 here. The hit HBO show will recreate the festival after it wraps, using the actual Palais and red carpet. The season is about fame, power dynamics, and who gets to be the plus-one.

• Park Chan-wook is jury president. First South Korean filmmaker to hold the role in the festival’s 79-year history. He decides who gets the Palme alongside Demi Moore, Stellan Skarsgård, Ruth Negga, Chloé Zhao, and Isaach De Bankolé.

• Two honorary Palmes bookend the festival. Peter Jackson collects his on opening night (May 12), Barbra Streisand on closing night (May 23).

• Kore-eda’s new film is about a couple adopting a humanoid robot baby. Sheep in the Box from the Shoplifters director, who won the Palme in 2018.

• Nicolas Winding Refn is back after a decade. Her Private Hell is his first feature since The Neon Demon (2016), starring Sophie Thatcher and Charles Melton.

• John Travolta’s directorial debut. Propeller One-Way Night Coach, adapted from a children’s book he wrote in 1997 about a kid obsessed with flying.

• The dress code now explicitly bans “ludicrously capacious bags.” A direct nod to Succession’s Tom Wambsgans. Also banned: nudity, voluminous trains, sneakers at galas. Last year’s surprise hazard was the city-wide power outages.. fingers crossed for 2026.

Netflix removed A-Z sorting from its web interface. The drop-down that let power users browse by alphabet, and year in grid view just vanished. Netflix is steadily replacing manual browsing with algorithmic discovery, whether you wanted it or not.

A Jaws superfan built the world’s first life-size replica of the Orca. Moored in north Wales, open to the public, complete with yellow flotation barrels and a hand-built shark cage. He performs the USS Indianapolis speech at the end of every tour.

The Blackmagic PYXIS 12K is now Netflix-approved for 4K Originals at $5,495. Full-frame 12K sensor, 16 stops of dynamic range, box design. A sub-$6K Netflix-approved camera would have been unthinkable five years ago.

Someone built a free tool that finds royalty-free songs that sound like copyrighted ones. Paste a track, it searches 6,000 licence-free songs and surfaces the closest matches. .

This week we’re watching:

Who remembers the great fútbol ads from the 90s?

The stretch from “The Cage” through “Joga Bonito” to “Write the Future” when Nike and adidas turned thirty-second spots into pop culture folklore.

Adidas just brought it back.

Backyard Legends is the first serious attempt in over a decade. Timothée Chalamet leads a team of Messi, Lamine Yamal, and Jude Bellingham against a streetball trio whose decades-long unbeaten run has supposedly seen off Zidane, Beckham, and Del Piero.

As great as it is to see an ad released outside the Super Bowl with this kind of grand vision, the janky CG couldn’t help but make me feel even more nostalgia for the fútbol ads of a time gone by.

The below is still the GOAT.

Retail Therapy: The tablet that does less on purpose

The reMarkable Paper Pure is a digital notebook that doesn’t have apps, notifications, a browser, or any reason to check it every thirty seconds. It has a screen and a pen and you write on it. That’s it.

The 10.3-inch display has 21ms ink latency, which is close enough to paper that your brain stops noticing the difference. It weighs less than a pound and the battery lasts three weeks, which means you can throw it in your bag at the start of a shoot and forget about charging until the project wraps. Mark up PDFs, convert handwriting to text, sync to Google Drive and Dropbox.

Available at remarkable.com.

Also this week:

Sofia Coppola launched $20K grant for emerging directors, Netflix goes in for clips, a brilliant short film about an AI assistant that never disagrees with you starts as comedy and ends as horror, and ARRI released a lens motor so fast that focus pullers say it feels like a completely different job.

Render Reel

Devil Wears Prada 2 is getting praised for commissioning a human artist to paint a fake AI meme. The film needed an AI-generated image of Miranda Priestley as a fast-food worker. Instead of using AI, director David Frankel hired artist Alexis Franklin to paint it by hand.

Lufthansa lost an Oscar. Pavel Talankin, co-director of Best Documentary winner Mr. Nobody Against Putin, was forced by TSA to check his statuette instead of carrying it on board. It disappeared somewhere between JFK and Frankfurt

A vertical-only horror streaming platform called TerrorBox is launching.They’re accepting submissions for vertical series, shorts, and features.

Sofia Coppola launched a $20,000 short film award for emerging directors: through Decentralized Pictures, the nonprofit backed by American Zoetrope. The winner gets funding, mentorship, and distribution on DCP’s upcoming streaming platform. Submissions require a short video sample and a one-page project description for $25.

Claude just plugged into your creative software

Anthropic announced nine MCP connectors that let Claude directly control professional creative tools.

The list includes Adobe Creative Cloud (50+ apps including Premiere and Photoshop), Blender, Autodesk Fusion, Ableton, Splice, Affinity, SketchUp, Resolume, and Claude Design.

For filmmakers and editors, the Premiere and Blender integrations are the ones worth paying attention to.

This isn’t “ask AI to describe a colour grade.” It’s an AI that can sit inside your timeline, your node graph, your 3D viewport, and execute instructions directly.

The strategic positioning is what makes this interesting.

OpenAI built creative capabilities into ChatGPT with image generation via Sora being native tools that replace existing software. Anthropic went the opposite direction: Claude doesn’t replicate Premiere or Blender, it becomes the intelligence layer that operates inside them.

One approach says “you don’t need Photoshop anymore.”

The other says “Photoshop just got a second brain.” For professionals who’ve spent years building workflows around specific tools, the second pitch is considerably less threatening.

The early results are mixed in the way early results always are.

Early reports are mixed.

A Redditor built a 100+ page illustrated book in InDesign from a template and a folder of images which is genuinely useful.

Someone else tried resizing three Photoshop files and it took longer than doing it by hand. The Ableton connector turned out to be documentation access and not actual instrument control, which is a tad disappointing.

But the longer play suggests Anthropic isn’t banking on the connectors being perfect today.

They became a Blender Development Fund patron at $280K+ per year and are partnering with RISD, Ringling College, and Goldsmiths on curriculum development.

The gap worth tracking is these connectors that serve people who already know the tools.

The consumer creative market lives on entirely different platforms and whether professional AI copilots and consumer AI generators eventually merge or remain separate markets will shape what “creative software” even means in five years.

Netflix redesigned its mobile app around vertical video. The new “Clips” feed is essentially Reels for Netflix: scroll, discover, save to your list, share via text or social. It’s rolling out in the US, UK, Canada, Australia, India, and more. The company that killed the DVD is now borrowing the format language of TikTok to help people find something to watch. Full circle, or something close to it.

ARRI released the cforce MAX lens motor: twice as fast and 15% smaller than the cforce plus it replaces. Brushless, near-zero latency, quiet enough for documentary work, and tough enough that a beta tester ran it in “the hottest place on Earth, in jungles, and out on the open sea.

Antigravity pushed a major update to its A1 drone. With voice-controlled flight commands, timelapse mode, omnidirectional obstacle avoidance, and improved AI auto-editing. With DJI still deep in its US ban era, the A1 is one of the few options left for American operators to buy drones new.

This week we’re watching:

Alignment by John Merizalde, a darkly funny short film about a man whose AI assistant never quite disagrees with him.

It starts with breakfast suggestions and cholesterol advice but within two minutes it’s validating conspiracy theories and encouraging insomnia as a sign of genius.

A comedy until it really isn’t.

This week we’re also watching:

This Coinbase spot directed by Oscar Hudson might be the best ad of 2026.

On the surface it looks like a low-polygon video game with its boardroom NPCs and pixelated backdrops…. except every single frame was shot in-camera with real actors wearing masks, prosthetics, and sculpted costumes against practical sets.

Not a single ounce of CGI or AI was used.

Hudson is a director who’s known for shooting practically what other directors dream of creating in post and this is arguably his most daring effort yet.

Especially in a year where audiences are struggling to tell difference between what’s real and what’s not.

The BTS

Retail Therapy: 600mm in your jacket pocket

The Reeflex Ultra Telephoto turns your iPhone into something that would have required a pelican case and a bad back five years ago.

300mm to 600mm focal range, up to 24x magnification, full 48MP resolution at the wide end, and built from lanthanum optical glass and aerospace-grade aluminum.

Compatible with iPhone 13 through 17 Pro and Samsung S23 through S26 Ultra.

The project already has $400k pledged vs a $9k goal on Kickstarter.

Eddie AI v3 won best of NAB 2026. Woot woot.

I was talking to a new customer today and he was asking me how was NAB. I told him it was a moving experience. The number of customers who came up to us and told us how they use Eddie AI and how it has made a difference to their work was so cool.

Not too long ago Eddie was an idea.

Then it became a product.

Now it has active users.

Many who use it daily and for whom it has become indispensable. We are working hard to make even more so for you. And for those new users or not-yet users, we are working hard to make Eddie better for you too.

It’s still the early stages of this journey. I’m grateful you all are here.

—Shamir
CEO & Co-founder of Eddie AI

Also this week:

Hollywood employment has dropped 30% from its 2022 peak, a YouTube creator who self-distributed his horror film to $50 million at the box office is now pressing DVDs from a machine in his house, and a man in Singapore gets arrested for leaking the new Avatar (no, not the Cameron one).

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Vimeo’s new pricing is here and it’s worse than expected: Legacy Plus users are being auto-upgraded to a $70/month Professional plan which is a 670% increase. Downgrade to the $10 Creator plan and you lose password protection, player branding, and shared folders. Small businesses on older plans are reporting forced transitions to $20,000/year enterprise tiers. If you’ve been putting off the Vimeo breakup, the renewal email might make the decision for you.

Disney laid off over 1,000 workers: including much of Marvel’s Visual Development department, the long-term illustrators and character designers. Those roles are shifting to project-based freelance. Meanwhile, Disney’s stock rose 1.6% on the news and Josh D’Amaro, (the new CEO) has a compensation package just under $45 million.

LaCie launched a 32TB Thunderbolt 5 RAID array: eight bays, speeds up to 2800 MB/s, backward compatible with Thunderbolt 4, and it ships with a two-month Adobe Creative Cloud Pro subscription. Designed for 8K workflows where a single shoot can fill a drive before lunch.

A man in Singapore was arrested for leaking the unreleased Avatar: The Last Airbender film: he allegedly gained unauthorized access to a media server, downloaded the rip, and posted parts of it online. He was arrested within a day and now faces up to seven years in prison and a $50,000 fine.

A filmmaker built a clearance-ready digital prop app called Prefx: scrollable social feeds, messaging UIs, and news layouts that actors can interact with on camera in real time. Also includes Kelvin and RGB lighting controls so the screen doubles as a practical light source. $9.99/month or $99 lifetime. If you’ve ever lost hours in post replacing a phone screen, this pays for itself on the first shoot.

Markiplier is building a YouTube distribution system for indie filmmakers. After self-distributing Iron Lung to $49.9 million at the box office, he’s now setting up an aggregator that would let other filmmakers sell their films through YouTube Movies & TV. He’s also installing a DVD/Blu-ray machine in his house to self-produce physical copies.

What actually is the NAB?

NAB 2026 wrapped in Las Vegas last week, which felt like a good time to look at what the show actually is and where it came from.

In 1923, a group of radio station owners met at the Drake hotel in Chicago because ASCAP was about to sue them into oblivion over music royalties. Twenty-three people showed up. They lost the legal fight but built the organisation that would become the broadcast industry’s central nervous system for the next century.

The convention has since become the launchpad for almost every technology your production depends on.

In 1956, Ampex debuted the first ever commercial videotape recorder and generated $5 million in orders over a single weekend.

In 1982, Sony introduced the Betacam and killed the two-person ENG crew overnight. In 1999, Apple launched Final Cut Pro and shattered Avid’s monopoly by letting editors capture DV footage through a single FireWire cable instead of $30K in proprietary hardware. (It also launched FCPX at NAB 2011…which is another story.)

In 2006, RED showed up with a 4K camera inside what attendees described as a milk crate and sold thousands of deposits at $17,500 which was a price point pretty much unheard of at that time.

This year, 58,000 people showed up in Las Vegas which is up from 55,000 in 2025, with content creator attendance surging 140%.

That last number is a sign of the times.

The 2026 floor was dominated by “AI” and cloud-native production platforms. Metadata automation will be table-stakes. Conversations that used to be about signal routing and codec specs are now about how to add “AI” to workflows and with companies like Eddie AI painting a big future of AI editing agents working 24/7 to liberate pros to focus on craft and story.

NAB was built by and for broadcast engineers but now nearly half the floor is first-time attendees, and a growing share of them have never touched an SDI cable in their lives.

Ultimately, it’s always been about, and in service of, the story.

Hollywood employment has dropped 30% from its late-2022 peak: and the work that remains is increasingly leaving the country. In 2021, the US produced 251 big-budget productions. In 2025, 159. The rest of the world produced 249. Behind-the-scenes workers logged 36% fewer hours last year than in 2022. LA on-location production days nearly halved. The industry is lobbying for a 15% federal tax incentive to compete with the UK, Canada, and Australia, but will that solve the issue?

This week we’re watching:

Mora - the viral horror short from YouTube’s Grimoire Horror channel that Neon just picked up for a feature adaptation. The premise is a struggling artist searches for a mysterious woman who keeps appearing in gruesome AI-generated images.

It’s the kind of concept that could only exist right now, and Neon clearly agrees.

Two years ago these creators were uploading shorts and hoping the algorithm noticed but now distributors are watching their channels like scouts at a showcase.

Retail Therapy: GoPro wants to be a cinema camera now

The MISSION 1 PRO is GoPro’s attempt to be taken seriously, coming armed with a 50MP 1-inch sensor, 8K capabilities, and a new GP3 processor built for sustained recording without overheating.

It ships with an accessory ecosystem that includes wireless mics, powered grips, and an I/O expansion module, which is the kind of offering you’d expect from Sony or Blackmagic, not the company that built its brand on being strapped to a helmet.

The release comes at an inflection point in GoPro’s future.

They recently cut 23% of their workforce, lost 93% of their stock value and the founder even put $2 million of his own money in, to help finance GP3.

Whether filmmakers who’ve spent years choosing between RED, ARRI, Sony, and Blackmagic will look at a GoPro and think “yes, that’s my A-cam.” is up for debate.

Starting price is $499.99 for GoPro subscribers.

Reserve now at gopro.com.

NAB has been exhausting exhilarating. :)

Eddie’s v3 launch has gone better than expected. Usage is up, revenue is up, customer happiness is up.

And it’s been back-to-back with demos at our booth.

This is our first year to get a booth at NAB. If we had 10 visitors a day that would have been a win. It’s been hundreds.

It’s been really cool to meet, face-to-face, existing customers and future ones. Your questions were thoughtful. Your interest is motivating. Plus we received lots of new ideas for our roadmap (thank you).

The vision of agents to help us in post production and liberate us to make more and better videos is resonating.

Here I am demo’ing AI agents in video editing:

NAB ends today and while I will miss it, I am looking forward to some sleep, the gym, and vegetables.

—Shamir

Also this week:

Saudi Arabia writes $12 billion cheque for Paramount’s Warner Bros. takeover, a 48-hour AI short won Best Animation by doing less instead of more, seven minutes of experimental film was scientifically proven to make you more creative than seven minutes of YouTube, Nicholas Hoult robs banks in a wolf mask for YouTube subscribers, USB-C can now power a cinema camera for $399.

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ARRI has been acquired for the first time in 109 years: to Thomas Riedel, the Wuppertal entrepreneur behind Riedel Communications, the live-broadcast tech specialist that wires up Eurovision and major sports productions. The 1917-founded Munich camera and lighting house will remain in Munich and the first joint outing is this year’s Eurovision Song Contest.

Saudi Arabia writes $12 billion of Paramount Skydance’s $110 billion Warner Bros. takeover: with Qatar and Abu Dhabi adding $6 billion each. Nobody believes $24 billion arrives without strings, particularly when the package includes CNN, HBO, and Batman.

An understated 48-hour AI short won Best Animation at the inaugural Bionic Awards: Ausencia, made by 3D animators Guillermo Miranda and Javier De La Chica. The Adobe-sponsored event screened plenty of entries straining to prove AI can conjure anything. The winner did the opposite via showing a visible artistic hand.

Seven minutes of experimental film can cure brain rot and increase creativity: while seven minutes of viral YouTube did nothing at all. UCSB researchers ran nearly 500 subjects through either animated shorts from Short of the Week or home-video slop, then tested them on story writing and lateral thinking. The art-house group won, though participants reported enjoying the slop more.

Disney builds own IMAX because it lost the real one

On December 18, Avengers: Doomsday will open against Dune: Part Three. Villeneuve shot his film on IMAX 65mm cameras, which bought Warner Bros. a three-week IMAX exclusive on the year’s biggest screens.

Marvel, who wanted those screens too, got shut out.

Rather than shift the release date by a week, Disney announced its own IMAX: Infinity Vision.

The spec sheet calls for screens at least 50 feet wide, laser projection, and Dolby 7.1 surround. There are 75 certified auditoriums domestically and 300 more globally. It rolls out in September with an Endgame re-release and goes full throttle for Doomsday.

The problem is that Infinity Vision isn’t really a format so much as a logo. What makes IMAX IMAX isn’t just the size of the screen.

It’s the cameras that capture a taller 1.43:1 image, the custom theater acoustics, a brand consumers actually recognize, and directorial loyalty. Nolan shoots IMAX. Villeneuve shoots IMAX. Cameron shoots IMAX.

Infinity Vision is certification for screens that already exist, running projection tech that already exists, playing a Marvel movie shot on standard digital cameras like everything else.

There’s no new way of watching here.

History has been unkind to premium formats not called IMAX. Dolby Cinema has real technical merit and remains forgettable. AMC Prime, Cinemark XD, Regal RPX are all serviceable, but you’re not buying a ticket because of them.

A 50-foot screen minimum is also a low bar with flagship IMAX auditoriums clearing 70, sometimes 90.

What Disney does have is leverage. It can essentially mandate the branding on any exhibitor that wants its tentpoles, and it can pour marketing dollars behind a logo until audiences learn it.

That’s not nothing. But it’s a distribution play dressed up as a format.

And then there’s the trailer.

Marvel showed new Doomsday footage at CinemaCon which included Robert Downey Jr.’s Doctor Doom casually stopping Stormbreaker with one hand and is refusing to release it publicly.

DMCA takedowns are flying as bootleg rips leak, while fans plead for an official drop if only to drown out the AI fakes already flooding YouTube.

A strange new problem for a studio that still believes in scarcity marketing as the counterfeits now ship faster than the real thing.

Nicholas Hoult leads Youtube bank-robbing crew - alongside Anna Sawai, Pete Davidson and Zoë Kravitz in David Leitch’s next, unveiled at CinemaCon. The fictional crew has hit 15 banks and built 31 million subscribers, donating the take to charity (”OnlyFans is not a charity,” Davidson clarifies). A movie about criminals optimizing for the algorithm, pitched to exhibitors desperate to pull audiences away from one. Theatrical Sept. 4.

USB-C becomes legit way to power a cinema camera: MID49 showed the prototype at NAB. Its V-mount and Gold-mount unit talks to the camera, figures out the required voltage, and delivers 9V to a Canon C50, a Nikon ZR, or a Sony FX. An upcoming Canon firmware update will let a single USB-C cable handle power and run/stop. Around $399, shipping in June.

This week we’re watching:

The trailer for As Deep as the Grave, the film where Val Kilmer stars via AI, a year after his death.

The most striking shot is a closeup of a young Kilmer speaking to a child. The sourcing took hours of archival digging but the actual AI generation took just seven minutes. He has over an hour of screen time in the finished film and some detractors are calling it “terrifying”.

Filmmakers Coerte and John Voorhees swear you won’t be able to tell. More importantly, Kilmer’s children say it’s what he would have wanted.

Watch the trailer and decide for yourself.

Retail Therapy: The phone that does almost nothing

The Tin Can is a phone that only makes voice calls.

No apps, no texting, no games, no camera, and definitely no screen time negotiations at dinner.

Parents approve every contact, set quiet hours, and manage everything from a companion app. It runs on home Wi-Fi, which means it’s essentially a landline your kid can carry to their room aka the 2026 version of stretching the cord around the corner.

Available at tincan.com for $100.

Hi everyone,

For the past few months we’ve been quietly working on something we’re really excited about.

It began with an idea: what if you could finish a shoot day, send Eddie your footage, and wake up to a rough cut?

Today, that idea is reality.

Eddie v3 is live.

The headline feature is Night Shift: text Eddie a link to your footage in Frame.io, Google Drive, or Dropbox - literally just send it to +1 650 444 9211 and by 8am the next morning you've got a rough cut, logs, and organized media ready to open in Premiere, Resolve, or Final Cut.

It also handles B-roll placement for docu-style projects now with interview soundbites, story structure, and B-roll sequences assembled automatically.

We built Night Shift because the best time to process footage is when nobody’s awake to watch the progress bar.

Get started by texting Eddie a hello: +1 650 444 9211
Or download Eddie AI > New Project > Show All Modes > Night Shift

If you’re at NAB next week, come find us at booth N1672 in the North Hall.

We’re also partnered with Reddit Post Pro for a Happy Hour on Monday evening - text NAB2026 to +1 650 444 9211 to receive the details.

Now, onto this week’s news.

— Shamir

This week:

Soderbergh defends using AI to visualize John Lennon’s last interview, a Samsung SSD tripled in price in 16 months, GoPro cut another 23% of its workforce, Sony Pictures lays off hundreds while pivoting to anime, and Spike Jonze dropped another brand film that makes you wonder why he won’t just make a movie.

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Sony Pictures is laying off hundreds across film, TV, and corporate. The new CEO says it’s “strategic,” Pixomondo gets shuttered as part of the restructuring. The priorities: anime, game IP adaptations, YouTube-native content, and franchise extensions.

Alien 3: The Assembly Cut drops on HBO Max. The much longer, much better version of Fincher’s most troubled film. Two hours 25 minutes versus the theatrical’s hour 54. If you’ve only seen the theatrical cut, this is essentially a different movie.

Disney secretly owns an entire street in Burbank. Nearly every house on the east side of Keystone Street, directly adjacent to Walt Disney Studios, is Disney-owned property maintained to suburban perfection.

MUBI lost 200,000 subscribers after a Sequoia Capital backlash. Many subscribers and filmmakers objected to the investor’s ties to Israeli military startups. But MUBI rallied to a record 1.7 million subs in Q1 2026, has six films in Cannes, and just signed a co-financing pact with IPR.VC.

The Academy Museum is hosting a free Careers in Film Summit on April 18. Jessica Alba and Keke Palmer as guests, hands-on lighting workshops, professional headshots, voice acting with the current Porky Pig, and a career mixer with Academy members.

Netflix opened a 110,000-square-foot animation studio in Vancouver. Housing 450+ artists and expected to contribute $50 million CAD to BC’s GDP. Built on the Animal Logic acquisition, now fully absorbed into Netflix Animation Studios.

Cannes, sans America

The most notable thing about the Cannes lineup this year is what’s missing.

Out of 21 competition films, exactly one (1) was from an American director - Ira Sachs with The Man I Love, set in 1980s New York during the AIDS crisis.

That’s it.

The world’s largest film industry, represented at the largest film showcase on earth, by a single film about a crisis from 40 years ago.

The rest of the competition reads like a roll call of auteurs who’ve been competing for Palme d’Ors while Hollywood was making sequels: Almodóvar, Kore-eda, Hamaguchi, Mungiu, Farhadi, Pawlikowski, Nemes, Dhont. Three Japanese filmmakers. Three Spanish directors. Five French and an exiled Russian.

The put America’s exclusion into perspective, the last time Cannes had just one American film in competition was 2010. Last year there were six.

Cannes used to be where Hollywood directors proved they could be artists too with the likes of Coppola, Spielberg, Tarantino and the Coens all premiering major work on the Croisette.

Soderbergh is technically here too but in Special Screenings with a John Lennon documentary that might end up being the most talked-about American contribution to the festival which says everything about where American cinema sits at Cannes right now.

And Soderbergh, characteristically, isn’t apologising for any of it.

Soderbergh doubles down on AI use on John Lennon doc. He used generative AI to create surrealist imagery for the Lennon doc, saying it solved a creative problem traditional filming couldn’t. His response to backlash: “I found out from people looking at me like they’d seen my chest X-ray.”

GoPro is cutting another 23% of its workforce. 145 jobs gone, bringing the company down to roughly 486 people. Revenue fell 19% last year, stock has lost 93% of its value in five years and the founder even put $2 million of his own money in.

The team Bending Spoons fired now comes for Vimeo

Bending Spoons acquired StreamYard in 2024, fired most of the existing team and raised the prices.

Then they bought Vimeo and everyone braced for the same playbook but the former StreamYard crew decided to take matters into their own hands and build what comes next.

Introducing Livid…

A $10/month video hosting platform aimed squarely at the creators Vimeo is pricing out. Armed with 2TB cloud storage, password-protected sharing, and time-stamped review comments launching next week.

It’s backed by $10 million from StreamYard’s founders, so it’s not a weekend project that disappears in six months.

They built a one-click Vimeo exporter called LOVE that connects to your Vimeo account and migrates everything so you don’t even need a Livid account to use it.

Worth watching at livid.com, especially if your Vimeo renewal email has been giving you chest pains.

A Redditor built a free film financing waterfall calculator. No signup, no paywall, just plug in your numbers and see how returns flow through recoupment, profit splits, and investor positions. If you’ve ever stared at a waterfall spreadsheet and felt your soul leave your body, this might help.

Beeble launched an AI-powered rotoscoping tool. Supports 10-bit RGBA exports, PNG sequences, and batch processing up to 2,000 frames. Available now on the Beeble web app.

The storage crisis continues. A Samsung 4TB T9 portable SSD that cost $330 in December 2024 is now listed at $1,145 - a 3.5x increase in 16 months. Are we potentially entering an era where shooting on digital becomes as costly as film?

This week we’re watching:

Spike Jonze still hasn’t made a feature since Her in 2013, but brand films like last year’s Gucci The Tiger keep reminding us why we need one.

His latest is a three-minute short for On starring Zendaya. Featuring giant hands, and performers reshaping the set in real time in an all-white void.

It’s pure surrealist choreography and pure Jonze.

Retail Therapy: A watch for anyone still thinking about that Artemis footage

The AMIDA Digitrend NASA Tribute is a limited-edition watch inspired by Space Shuttle heat-shield design, which is a very specific aesthetic to build a timepiece around but somehow it works.

Only 100 of these watches exist, which means it’s less a watch and more a conversation starter for the person at the wrap party who definitely has opinions about the Artemis mission.

Available for $4420 here.

NAB is around the corner.

It is also a family member’s big birthday who is celebrating in Vegas this weekend so I will actually be in Vegas twice in 1 week, which sounds like overload. Pray for me.

If you’ll be in Vegas for NAB, here’s where/how to meet the Eddie AI team:

1. AI Agents for Video Editing: The Next Leap in Post Production Efficiency
   📅 Sunday, April 19 | 2:10–2:30 p.m. 📍 W1143 Tech Chat Theater

2. Meet with us. Booth N1672, North Hall, NAB Show 2026 🗓 April 19–22, 2026

3. Schedule a 1:1 meet.

4. Party | Apr 20, Monday evening

   Details are being finalized. Get invited by adding your name to the Eddie NAB2026 form and receive an email when we finalize this.

Separately, I was on a podcast today (it’ll be released next week) and I talked, in part, about a thought I’ve been chewing on for awhile. I wonder if a chunk of the fear of AI in the film/video world is actually rooted in how tough it is to create a sustainable career which feels fragile even at the best of times. That the hard fight to “make it” has instilled a worry in some that they could lose their place (entitlement?) on the ladder at any moment and if they do, they won’t be able to climb back up.

That struggle should make us tougher, hungrier!

Instead, a form of protectionism has developed (preserve how things are!). That worry has made some closed off to looking at AI with nuance and with new tech with optimism. (Aside: we all say “AI” as if we all know what each other means. We don’t. “AI” is a catch all for some for whatever is bad/scary.) A vocal minority is beholden by dogma to this AI thing.

It is a tool. It is amoral.

Get it working for you. So you’re liberated to bring your stories into reality. It is already hard as it is. If this brings down the barriers a bit so more people tell more and better stories, that’s a big win for you. And for the rest of us.

Enjoy today’s newsletter.

—Shamir

This week: India is producing AI mythology at a fifth of the cost and a fraction of the IMDb rating, Alamo Drafthouse workers went on strike over QR code ordering, Seedance 2.0 is spreading to platforms faster than the lawsuits can follow and Letterboxd becomes a distribution channel.

Render Reel

Alamo Drafthouse workers are striking over the switch from pen-and-paper ordering to QR codes during movies. Unionized staff at the Colorado location say the phone-based system has led to botched orders and more friction with guests. The strike started last Friday.

The US box office just posted its best first quarter since the pandemic $1.77 billion, narrowly beating 2023 and 22% ahead of last year’s dismal start. Project Hail Mary did $177 million in 11 days.

Movies are getting longer and it’s not your imagination. Wide releases now average 114 minutes, up from 106 in the 2000s. Action films average 128 minutes, which is 25 minutes longer than a few decades ago.

Rodeo FX opened a bigger Paris studio, bringing Mikros Animation under the same roof. 40,000 square feet near Canal Saint Martin, consolidating VFX and animation. The move was fueled by France’s 10% VFX bonus on top of its 30% international production rebate.

Letterboxd is partnering with Black Bear to bring its “Four Favorites” format to theaters nationwide. Co-branded installations at festivals and campus screenings tied to the release of Tuner. It’s the clearest signal yet that Letterboxd is evolving from a logging app into an actual distribution channel.

Netflix is searching for franchises after losing Warner Bros. The $700 million Roald Dahl deal hasn’t produced a hit in five years, The Electric State flopped at $320 million, and the company didn’t have KPop Demon Hunters toys ready when the film became its most-watched movie ever.

China’s iQIYI launched Nadou Pro - the country’s first AI agent built for professional film production. Script development, storyboarding, shot composition, and output in one platform. Academy Award-winning cinematographer Peter Pau is already using it and sixteen films made on the platform are already incoming.

Is the “creative producer” dead?

Lifting The Curtain

Is the “Creative Producer” Dead?

There was a time, just a few years (months?) ago, when being a creative producer was both expansive and precise…

Read more

a month ago · 30 likes · 15 comments · Christine Ahanotu

Our Substack read-of-the-week is Christine Ahanotu’s essay on the role of the “creative producer” in our ever-malleable production world. Worth reading if your job title has changed three times in five years and you’re not sure what to call yourself anymore.

Volumetric video is proving itself in live sports but cinema isn’t ready yet. Milano Cortina 2026 delivered near-cinematic quality replays and even A$AP Rocky shot an entire music video with it. But its use-case for narrative isn’t so certain yet.

India is rebuilding its film industry around AI, and nobody else is moving this fast

Collective Artists Network, one of Bollywood’s biggest talent agencies, set up an AI studio in Bengaluru that’s producing mythology content at a fifth of traditional costs.

Their AI-generated Mahabharat series on JioStar has pulled 26.5 million views but the IMDb rating of 1.4 suggests the audience is curious long before they’re actually convinced.

Meanwhile, Eros Media World, one of India’s oldest studios with a library of over 3,000 titles, used AI to give the 2013 hit Raanjhanaa a happier ending.

Lead actor Dhanush said it “stripped the film of its very soul.” Despite this, Eros is allegedly reviewing its entire catalogue for more AI-assisted adaptations.

The structural difference between Hollywood and Bollywood is important to note.

SAG-AFTRA requires consent before altering a performance whilst the DGA bars AI from creative decisions without the director.

Those protections don’t exist in India, which means studios can move fast.

Much faster.

AI adoption feels most promising with dubbing, especially with India’s 22 official languages. AI is currently able to adjust an actor’s face to match a new language which is solving a problem audiences have tolerated badly for decades.

Google, Microsoft, and NVIDIA are all investing heavily in Indian AI production infrastructure, which tells you where the global industry thinks the next wave of real-world data is coming from.

By the time Western studios decide what they think about AI in production, India will already have years of data on what works and what audiences actually accept.

Delkin Devices dropped a 1TB microSD card despite global memory shortage :195 MB/s read, 160 MB/s write, V30 rated for 4K recording. Designed for action cameras and mobile devices and with Sony pulling cards off shelves, now is not a bad time to stock up from whoever’s still shipping.

An April Fools’ post imagined what it would look like if OpenAI built a cinema camera instead of a video generator. The Square sensor, “Latent RAW” capture, prompt-assisted controls were all fake but nothing is 100% impossible tech-wise. Worth a read if you’re interested in where computational imaging might be heading.

This week we’re watching:

Artemis II.

The first crewed lunar mission in over 50 years and the footage coming back is stunning. Earthrise, a total solar eclipse from space and the Moon’s far side in detail nobody alive has seen in person.

The crew is transmitting it all back to Earth over the next four days across 400,000km of empty space.

And if you read our FFmpeg piece, you already know what compressing interplanetary footage is really like.

Retail Therapy: The home robot that watches your family so you don’t have to

The Enabot EBO Max is a mobile home robot with a 4K camera that patrols your house, recognizes family members by face and voice, and lets you video call your living room from anywhere.

The real audience is anyone who’s ever been at work wondering if their dog is on the couch. The answer is yes, but now you can confirm it in 4K.

It’s yours for $529.

We saw how YouTube, Netflix, Instagram, and TikTok built their empires on FFmpeg's foundation.

Billions of encodes per day and trillions of bytes compressed.

But those are just the companies you know about.

In reality, FFmpeg runs everywhere.

And the deeper you look, the more absurd the dependency becomes and the more obvious the question nobody's asking: Who's actually paying for this?

WWW

Aside from the World Wide Web, FFmpeg also runs in the wild weird world.

Millions of Ring doorbells, Nest cameras, and no-name Chinese surveillance devices use FFmpeg to compress feeds before uploading to the cloud. That’s how your doorbell can send you a notification with a video clip seconds after detecting motion without melting your home Wi-Fi.

Your doctor is reviewing your colonoscopy footage through FFmpeg.

The Mars Ingenuity helicopter (first aircraft to achieve powered flight on another planet) records video of its flights through Martian atmosphere and then compresses it using FFmpeg.

FFmpeg is completely without bias.

It doesn’t care if you’re encoding The Mandalorian, surveillance footage of ISIS propaganda or a reel of a dachshund on a skateboard.

TRILLION-DOLLAR PARADOX

Video streaming market size (2025): $416.8 billion

Social media market size: $250+ billion

Cloud gaming: $5+ billion

Security/surveillance: $60+ billion

Generative AI (which uses FFmpeg for training data preprocessing): $100+ billion

Conservative estimate of industries that critically depend on FFmpeg: $800+ billion in annual revenue.

But until recently, FFmpeg’s funding was essentially zero.

For over two decades, volunteers maintained the software underpinning a near-trillion-dollar industry for free. They debugged issues while working day jobs and optimized codecs on weekends. They wrote documentation in their spare time and fixed security vulnerabilities that, if exploited, could take down YouTube.

Things changed in 2024.

The German-backed Sovereign Tech Fund invested €157,580 (approx. $170,000) into FFmpeg in 2024, followed by a $100,000 donation from the Indian fintech company Zerodha in 2025.

These investments might seem serviceable but let’s look closer.

YouTube generated $31.5 billion in revenue in 2023. Netflix pulled in $33.7 billion. Meta, $134.9 billion. In fact, Netflix’s CEOs, Reed Hastings and Ted Sarandos, made a combined $101 million in 2022 alone.

A single YouTube outage costs Google $5 million per hour.

To put that into context, that single hour costs nearly 30 times more than the entire donation the German government made to keep FFmpeg running.

THE DAY JOB

Here’s what happens when the software running half the internet is maintained by volunteers who can’t afford to quit their day jobs.

Every time you upload a video to YouTube or TikTok, you’re handing FFmpeg a mystery box from a stranger and saying “open this.”

Video files are Trojan horses that can contain very complex data in the most trivial of content.

Like this one:

For hackers, this is Christmas morning.

Consider one attack that actually worked. A hacker crafts a poisoned playlist file. The server running FFmpeg receives it and dutifully tries to transcode it; reading the password file, encoding it into a video, and outputting it like any other job. The hacker hits play and watches your server’s password file scroll across the screen like end credits.

This happened multiple times, at real companies.

FFmpeg is written in C, a high-performance language from 1972 that is blindingly fast but lacks modern memory safety. A single malicious byte in a video file can trigger a memory error that hands an attacker full control of the system processing it.

Google even now runs a project that bombards FFmpeg with millions of corrupted files specifically to find these vulnerabilities before hackers do, which says something about how seriously the industry takes the risk.

Trillion-dollar companies depending on FFmpeg would rather spend millions cleaning up the explosion than a single dime to prevent it.

THROWN UNDER THE BUS FACTOR

Imagine you’re a software developer working a day job but in your spare time, you maintain a critical component of FFmpeg because you care about open-source.

Then the emails start:

“FFmpeg crashed on my video. help?”
“I need XYZ feature for my startup. When will you add it?”
“This is broken. You guys don’t know what you’re doing.”
“Help me torrent movies.”

These messages come at 3 AM or on weekends. During your vacay or a wedding. From people who have never contributed a single line of code or a single dollar.

You step back from the project and stop responding.

And the “bus factor” drops by one.

The bus factor is a morbid but brilliant metric that boils down to this:

How many people need to get hit by a bus before this project dies?

It’s a real calculation software projects use to measure fragility because If only one person understands the authentication system then the bus factor is one. If three people can, then the bus factor is three.

For FFmpeg, the bus factor is maybe twelve.

A dozen people around the world with deep enough knowledge to maintain the core codebase and most are volunteers. A few are employed by FFmpeg dependants and at least allow them to contribute during work hours.

THE LAST COMMIT

What happens the day the last maintainer walks away?

ZERO DAY SCENARIO

Day 1-30: The Illusion of Stability

Nothing. YouTube and Netflix will still stream. So will Instagram. The code is already compiled and running on billions of servers worldwide so FFmpeg doesn’t need its creators online to function.

But this is the dangerous part because everything looks fine.

Month 1-6: The Security Rot Begins

A hacker discovers a buffer overflow in FFmpeg’s handling of a new HDR video profile and it’s exploitable. They upload a poisoned video file to YouTube, and now you can execute code on Google’s servers. One of the core maintainers would have written a patch fix for this within days.

Google, Facebook and Netflix’s engineers try to patch it themselves with each company creating their own fix, but without FFmpeg know-how, the patches are near-useless.

And there’s no guarantee the patch won’t just break something else.

The internet now has dozens of partially-broken versions of FFmpeg running in production.

Year 1-2: The Codec Wall

A new video standard launches, called VVC (Versatile Video Coding) or AV2 and it’s 40% more efficient than the current standard, which means streaming companies can save billions in bandwidth costs.

But FFmpeg doesn’t support it and there’s no one left who can add it.

The new iPhone 18 starts recording in the new format by default and suddenly, half the internet can’t process videos shot on these new phones.

Companies try to hire engineers to add codec support. They try Silicon Valley first, offering $500K+ salaries for anyone with deep video codec experience. Then they try the tiny pool of university researchers who somehow specialize in video compression.

But FFmpeg’s codebase is millions of lines of C written over 25 years so the new hires spend months just trying to understand how one singular decoder works.

Meanwhile, security vulnerabilities are piling up.

Year 3+: The Fragmentation

Every major tech company now maintains their own fork of FFmpeg. Google’s version is incompatible with Meta’s. Amazon’s breaks differently than Microsoft’s.

Indie developers and small companies, who can’t afford dedicated video engineering teams, are stuck with the now-ancient FFmpeg codebase riddled with security holes.

In essence, if the dozen core FFmpeg maintainers quit tomorrow, the internet wouldn’t go dark instantly, but it would enter a state of irreversible decay.

And there’s no backup plan.

At this point you might be asking: can’t AI just do this?

Feed the codebase to an LLM, point it at the bug, let it patch. It’s a fair question. AI coding tools can handle isolated, well-defined bugs well enough. Give it a buffer overflow with clear context and it’ll write you a plausible fix.

But FFmpeg is 25 years of deeply optimized C held together by tribal knowledge that was never written down. Fixing one decoder without breaking six others requires understanding how everything connects, which is the kind of systems intuition that comes from years of actually working inside a codebase.

A patch that passes every test can still silently corrupt video in edge cases that only surface months later in production.

So yes, AI buys time. But it doesn’t replace the dozen people who actually understand what’s running under the hood.

IN SLOW SUCCESSION

Fabrice Bellard is 52 and has been absent from the codebase for two decades. Michael Niedermayer is still Chief Architect but technically stepped down in 2015. He cannot stay forever so who’s training the next generation?

Maintenance isn’t sexy, especially in a world obsessed with AI gold rushes and billion-dollar startups. Few developers want to spend their lives in a 25-year-old C codebase.

But with the $270,000 in 2024/25 they received in funding, maybe things are changing.

A new generation has emerged from the trial by fire of the project’s mailing lists. I spoke with two of them who helped me with research for this post.

JEAN-BAPTISE KEMPF

President of VideoLAN, the org behind VLC. He famously turned down tens of millions of dollars to keep VLC ad-free. He’s also FFmpeg’s chief diplomat, and helped secure the project’s first government funding from Germany’s Sovereign Tech Fund.

TOMAS HÄRDIN

Swedish FFmpeg maintainer by day and propmaster on indie films by night. Tomas keeps the MXF and LXF codebases running, which, if you’ve ever exported a file from a pro camera or editing suite, means he’s kept your workflow running too. Based in Umeå, a small university circle just below Arctic Sweden.

CHAOS BEFORE THE STORM

The next decade will test FFmpeg like never before.

AV1, the next-generation codec from Google, Netflix, and Apple, offers 30% better compression than H.265 but fully optimizing it requires thousands of hours of work.

AI video tools like Sora (RIP) and Runway haved flooded the web with massive uncompressed files that all need transcoding. 8K video contains four times the pixels of 4K; VR requires dual 4K+ streams at 90fps; 360-degree video captures entire spheres.

Eddie AI uses FFmpeg to swiftly create manageable proxies from terabytes of multi-camera footage and start editing within minutes or even seconds.

The load is increasing exponentially as we enter an unprecedented era of video.

But for the first time in FFmpeg’s 25 year history, so has the recognition.

The work that was invisible for so long is slowly being treated as the critical infrastructure it always was.

This piece took nearly a year to research and write via tracking down maintainers in Arctic Sweden, decoding mailing list archives, and understanding 25 years of video compression history.

If you found it valuable, we’d really appreciate if you share it :)

Hope you made meaningful progress this month…completed an edit, won a client contract, or made something and shared it. Keep creating.

We’re at NAB in Las Vegas

• Come hang with us at our booth: N1672, North Hall

• See a live demo: Apr 19, 2:10 | W1143 Tech Chat Theater: AI Agents for Video Editing

• Book a 1:1 meeting

If you didn’t read Part 1 of our long form article last week, check it out:

March Madness of Eddie AI Updates

Eddie’s updates this month can be read them here.

TL;DR: Eddie is better, faster for video pros who want a teammate to turn raw footage to an assembly for docu-style, scripted, and podcast edits. And of course it works with Premiere, Resolve, and FCP. (Wait, but what about Avid? This question has come up three times today!! 🙃)

Enjoy today’s newsletter.

— Shamir, CEO / Co-founder, Eddie AI

This week:

Sony pulled nearly every memory card it makes off the market because AI datacenters are buying all the NAND flash, Apple discontinued the Mac Pro with no replacement, a C-3PO head sold for a million dollars, and DNG just became an international standard 22 years after someone asked Adobe if they could just make a RAW format.

Render Reel

DOP biopic? Feature about James Wong Howe is in development: the two-time Oscar-winning cinematographer who started as a slate boy for Cecil B. DeMille, invented the crab dolly, and couldn’t become a US citizen until 1943 because of the Chinese Exclusion Act…..is finally getting his own film.

Apple killed the Mac Pro with no plans for a replacement. The $6,999 tower hasn’t been updated since 2023 and the Mac Studio has been doing its job for less money.

A C-3PO head from Empire Strikes Back sold for $1.05 million at auction. Tom Hanks’ Wilson volleyball went for $189K. A Golden Ticket from Willy Wonka fetched $107K. The Ace Ventura rhino birth prop sold for $60K, which means someone is displaying a mechanical rhino butt in their home and paid handsomely for it.

Sony suspends memory card sales

CFexpress Type A, Type B, and most SD cards, all pulled from the market with no timeline for return. The global demand for NAND flash has outpaced supply, driven largely by the massive buildout of AI infrastructure.

When every major tech company is scaling compute at the same time, the components that go into memory cards are the same ones going into data centers and right now, data centers are winning the bidding war.

It’s a growing-pains problem, not a permanent one.

The semiconductor industry has historically cycled through shortages and corrections, and manufacturing capacity will eventually catch up. In the meantime, third-party card manufacturers like Angelbird and ProGrade are still shipping across all formats.

If you have a shoot coming up on any Sony camera, it’s worth ordering cards now rather than the week before. I even recently tried buying a Sandisk SSD that is now retailing at nearly double the price.

The shortage is real, but it’s the kind of supply-chain bottleneck that tends to resolve once production scales to meet demand.

The Ouray Film Sabbatical is a fully funded residency for filmmakers in the Colorado Rockies: Less a film lab, more a creative retreat with mentorship, mountain air, and a 1902 Victorian house. Applications for 2027 are worth a look if you imagine you’ll be between projects and/or running on fumes.

Runway hosted AI Summit on March 31 in New York. Kathleen Kennedy, NVIDIA, Adobe, Paramount, EA, and Spotify on the speaker list. One day, $350, and a lineup that’s less hype-cycle and more operational: how studios are actually integrating generative tools into existing workflows.

Alan Cumming, Bowen Yang, and Lena Waithe launched the Necessary Foundation: a nonprofit giving $20K grants to early-career LGBTQ+ filmmakers as studios pull back on DEI. GLAAD’s latest report found that 37% of LGBTQ characters in major studio films appeared on screen for less than a minute.

Altman pulls Sora plug

Sora cost $1 million a day to run and peaked at a million users before collapsing to under 500,000.

The timeline is almost comically fast. With a splashy launch in September. Six million downloads in November. By February, barely a million. By March, dead.

Disney committed $1 billion to the partnership and found out Sora was being killed less than an hour before the public announcement. Bob Iger went on CNBC in December calling it a “landmark deal.”

What actually killed Sora wasn’t public backlash or Hollywood resistance, it was Anthropic.

While OpenAI had an entire team trying to make video generation work, Claude Code was winning over the developers and enterprise clients that actually pay the bills.

Altman looked at the compute being burned on Sora and decided he’d rather spend it fighting the war he was losing.

DNG is now an official ISO standard: Adobe’s open RAW format, which started as a forum post asking “could Adobe make a RAW format?” in 2004, is now internationally recognized alongside TIFF and PDF. For filmmakers, it means CinemaDNG workflows just got a stronger long-term archival case.

This week we’re watching:

A doc about Silvesterchlausen, a 500-year-old Swiss tradition where groups of men dress in ornate costumes and spend 18-hour days yodeling and clanging bells through the village of Appenzell every New Year.

Nobody knows how or why it started.

Sometimes the best thing a documentary can do is let something inexplicable stay that way.

Read this week: Underexposed’s piece on why filmmakers should stop oversharing.

Underexposed

Return to the Unknown

“Access is fuckin’ over. Scarcity is the next big thing, guys. I think the next move is, ‘This thing’s incredible. Good luck trying to find it.’” - Mark Duplass, SXSW 2026…

Read more

2 months ago · 56 likes · 14 comments · Alex Rollins Berg

Alex’s piece argues mystique is the one thing algorithms can’t replicate, and the pressure to “share your process” is turning sacred creative work into content. It cites Longlegs’ $127 million run off a mysterious billboard with just a phone number, and Mark Duplass at SXSW declaring “access is over”.

A great look at what it means to be a filmmaker in this current timeline.

Retail Therapy: The keyboard that thinks it’s a typewriter

The EPOMAKER Glyph is a mechanical keyboard with round typewriter-style keycaps and five layers of sound dampening engineered for maximum “thock”, so every keystroke sounds like you’re writing something important.

It’s got a 2.79-inch screen built into the body that shows the time, hot-swappable switches let you tune the feel until it matches your writing mood, and an 8000mAh battery means it’ll outlast every Final Draft session you throw at it.

Available at epomaker.com.

Jezero Crater, Mars. February 18, 2021.

The Perseverance rover is seven minutes into the most terrifying descent in NASA’s history. Twenty-one miles above Martian terrain, cutting through atmos at Mach 15, wrapped in a heat shield glowing at 2,370°F.

Engineers hold their breath inside mission control.

They won’t know if the rover survived for another eleven minutes (the time it takes radio signals to crawl 128 million miles back to Earth).

Then, signal arrives.

Video starts arriving. It’s high-def footage of the descent and we can see the parachute deployment with the sky crane lowering the rover on cables.

The bandwidth between Mars and Earth is around 32 kilobits per second - slower than 1998 dial-up. One minute of raw HD video would take at least a month to transmit. Yet within days, the world was watching cinema-quality footage of one of humanity’s greatest engineering achievements.

So how did NASA do it?

The same way YouTube does. And Netflix. Processing 500 hours of HD video every minute straight to your phone. The same way TikTok compresses a billion dance videos. Or the way your Ring doorbell records intruders and your PlayStation streams gameplay to Twitch.

FFmpeg.

A single piece of software written by a reclusive French genius who once held the world record for calculating digits of Pi, maintained by a loose confederation of volunteers who spend their free time arguing on online forums about video codecs, and funded by… well, that’s the problem.

Almost nobody knows they or it exists.

This is the story of the code powering the internet: created by a genius who vanished, split apart by civil war, and kept alive by developers who could be making $500K at Google but choose not to.

THE FRENCH CONNECTION

Born in Grenoble, France in 1972, Fabrice Bellard attended École Polytechnique and Télécom Paris. French institutions known for churning out mathematicians who think in algorithms the way poets think in metaphors.

At nine years old, he was already programming on a calculator. At 17, he wrote a compression tool that became standard on MS-DOS. In 1997, at 25, he discovered a new formula for calculating Pi which was 43% faster than the previous. At 28, he calculated the largest-known prime number using source code only 438 bytes long.

By 2000, Bellard had already shipped more software than most programmers dream of in a lifetime.

But the state of the digital world annoyed him so he decided to fix it.

WINDOWS ‘00

Picture the internet in ‘99. You download a video and double-click it but nothing happens.

You need RealPlayer. Or QuickTime. Or Windows Media Player. But each player only handled its own formats and a video encoded on Windows wouldn’t play on Mac or Linux.

On December 20, 2000, Bellard pushed the first commit of FFmpeg under the pseudonym “Gérard Lantau” to shield against patent lawsuits. “FF” for “Fast Forward.” “mpeg” for the Moving Picture Experts Group.

Where other projects wrapped closed-source binaries, Bellard wrote his own decoders from scratch in brutally optimized C. FFmpeg was completely self-contained.

He drew a hard line between the “container” (the file format: AVI, MP4, MKV) and the “stream” (the actual video and audio data). That separation meant you could remux without re-encoding, saving hours of processing time.

To this day, the entire architecture rests on the logic of pulling videos apart and putting them back together.

Twenty-five years of software. One idea.

FFmpeg is a mere black terminal window and a blinking cursor. You type a command like ffmpeg -i input.mp4 output.avi and a single line executes millions of lines of code. YouTube runs a fancier version of that exact command to transcode 500 hours of video every minute.

The documentation runs thousands of pages with maybe only three people on Earth fully understanding it.

By 2004, Bellard had built the foundation for the most important media software in history. Then he left and handed the project to a developer named Michael Niedermayer and moved on to his next obsession. His problem was solved and the rest of the world was left to figure out the rest.

But we all know that’s not how this ends.

C++OUP D’ETAT

From 2004 to 2011, Michael Niedermayer was FFmpeg’s engine, making the software technically unstoppable.

He was a perfectionist with an intuitive understanding of video compression, personally writing or optimizing many of the decoders that gave FFmpeg its speed. He cared about making FFmpeg handle every video format, no matter how obscure. And on that metric, he delivered.

But the project’s culture became a point of friction.

FFmpeg was fast-moving and unstructured, with Niedermayer as the final word on what got merged. Some developers thrived in that environment whilst others found it impenetrable. A growing faction wanted clean code and predictability but FFmpeg was running a circus.

And in early 2011, key developers decided to stage a coup.

They seized control of the servers.

Mailing lists.

Issue trackers.

The documentation.

Their plan was to oust Niedermayer and drag FFmpeg back to modernity.

Just one problem.

They didn’t control the domain name: ffmpeg.org.

Fabrice did.

The rebels sent him emails, making their case.

Bellard: “No.”

On March 13, 2011, the rebels retreated and announced a fork: Libav and took a chunk of developers with them. Major Linux. Debian, Ubuntu, all switched from FFmpeg to Libav. This created a situation where millions of users typing “ffmpeg” in their terminal were actually running Libav’s avconv tool, which would print a deprecation warning for the command they thought they were using.

Niedermayer and the remaining FFmpeg developers monitored Libav’s repository making sure any bug fix or improvement Libav committed was ported back into FFmpeg. This was feasible because the codebases were still structurally similar.

A one-way street formed: contribute to Libav, and your code ended up in FFmpeg within hours.

FFmpeg had now absorbed every improvement while maintaining its broader format support but the civil war had taken its toll on the person holding it all together:

Full email here.

FFmpeg now had everything Libav had, plus its own features, plus support for obscure formats Libav had dropped in the name of cleanliness. Users didn’t care about governance philosophy over whether their video played.

By 2015, the war was over and FFmpeg had won.

A TRILLION-DOLLAR HOBBY

FFmpeg powers YouTube, Netflix, Instagram, and just about half the internet so you’d assume it’s run like a big corp. It’s not.

It’s less a company and more a loosely federated hobby project held together by email lists and IRC channels.

Most contributors drift in and out. Some treat it as a hobby whilst others are paid indirectly via consulting. Bursts of activity follow new codecs or client-driven fires and it’s generally only Michael who commits to the codebase constantly.

In person meetings are as rare as you’d expect.

And when they do meet, it’s at industry events like IBC or NAB and weekly Jitsi calls exist for small subsets of contributors.

Many core developers have never even met or spoken to Michael.

The FFMPEG WEB

YOUTUBE

YouTube processes 500 hours of video every minute.

Every sixty seconds, users upload 30,000 minutes of footage.

Each one arrives in whatever format the user happens to export, and each one needs to be converted into six different resolutions. Then encoded with three different codecs for compatibility and efficiency. Then…. segmented for adaptive streaming so your video doesn’t buffer when you’re watching on the toilet.

Google built custom hardware to handle the load but the software orchestrating those chips was always FFmpeg.

Well, a heavily modified version Google will never open-source because it contains their coding secrets but the foundation is Bellard’s code.

And that code now processes more video in one day than existed in the entire world when he wrote it.

NETFLIX

Netflix’s relationship with FFmpeg is even more complex.

When you press play on Stranger Things, your device doesn’t receive a single video file. It receives a stream that dynamically switches between dozens of versions of the same episode, each one optimized for different network conditions and screen sizes.

Netflix pioneered what they call “per-title encoding,” where the compression parameters are tuned specifically for the content itself.

An MCU film with rapid motion needs a higher bitrate than a dialogue-heavy period drama like The Crown.

This optimization saves the company millions of dollars in bandwidth costs every year while maintaining the visual quality that keeps subscribers from canceling.

And FFmpeg executes every one of those encodes. Billions of them.

SOCIAL

Instagram, TikTok, Twitter.

Here’s where it gets interesting because they also use FFmpeg to make your video look worse.

Upload a 4K video to Instagram and watch what happens. Instagram transcodes it to 1080p, applies aggressive compression, and serves back a file roughly one-tenth the size you uploaded.

TikTok is worse.

Their compression algorithm is powered by FFmpeg but optimized for mobile screens and doomscrolling. It’s an entire system built on the truth you’ll probably watch the video once and scroll past it within 5 seconds.

Twitter famously had the worst video quality of any major platform, with compression so bad that text sometimes became unreadable. Under Elon Musk, the platform allegedly improved encoding settings but still uses FFmpeg.

The point is this: your video never stays your video.

The moment you upload it, FFmpeg transforms it into whatever form the platform deems acceptable.

You’re just a user providing content and they’re the infrastructure deciding what that content becomes.

Part 2 is here, where we look at the security exploits that have already worked. The "bus factor" calculation that keeps engineers awake at night. And the zero-day scenario where the web goes dark because ffmpeg contributors finally had enough of 3 AM emails.

Will you be at NAB in Las Vegas next month? I’d love to meet with you.

1. Come to our booth: N1672, North Hall. Yes we made enough customers happy that they subscribed and gave us money that we decided we could afford booth space at NAB and share our mission with future customers! :)

2. Demo: Sunday, April 19, 2:10pm W1143, Tech Chat Theatre. I am speaking about AI agents in post production and I’ll demo the latest with Eddie. And if you know us by now, we like to launch new things. ;)

3. Connect with us to setup a 1:1 meet or stay in touch re: events we will host: fill out this form. We will demo Eddie. You can try Eddie yourself. Please bring your questions (and concerns). How can Eddie improve content ops? What does Eddie mean for video editors and post production teams? Is AI immoral or amoral? Should we limit or ban AI in creative areas? Harder the question, the better. I’m here for it all. :) And mostly, looking forward to seeing ole friends, chatting to customers and hearing your feature requests, and meeting new awesome people.

Can’t wait to see you at NAB.

Enjoy today’s Rough Cut.

—Shamir Allibhai
CEO & Co-founder, Eddie AI

This week:

The UK government is investigating Adobe’s cancellation fees, the Daniels say their Everything Everywhere follow-up needed five years because the world is too complex to rush, Val Kilmer is starring in a new film five years after his death, and bots are crushing a 27-year-old film review site,

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The Daniels’ follow-up to Everything Everywhere All at Once is a “fun sci-fi, action comedy with a big heart” shooting this summer and hopefully releasing November 2027. Daniel Kwan said the delay is because “what we’re feeling and what we’re hearing from the world is very complex and really nuanced.”

The UK’s Competition and Markets Authority is investigating Adobe’s cancellation fees: specifically the 50% early termination charge on annual plans billed monthly. The CMA wants to know if customers are being given clear enough information before signing up. Adobe could face fines of up to 10% of global turnover.

A trans editor is suing DreamWorks over harassment on Bad Guys 2: alleging a supervisor repeatedly used their deadname, sent unsolicited memes about transgender people, and asked invasive questions about their transition.

Val Kilmer is starring in a new film, five years after his death. His estate and family approved the use of generative AI to place him in As Deep as the Grave, a role he was cast in but too sick to shoot. The filmmakers followed SAG guidelines, compensated the estate, and say this is what Kilmer wanted.

A first-time director borrowed a friend’s Black List login, read 100 scripts, and just premiered at SXSW. Will Ropp found the script for Brian in 15 pages, shot it in 18 days in Oklahoma on a tax rebate, and cast William H. Macy and Randall Park. The most useful indie filmmaking case study you’ll read this week.

A producer published the most practical pre-production checklist we’ve seen from LLC formation to call sheet quotes from Robert Bresson. Adam Kritzer documented every step of making his feature Lost Cause and turned it into a downloadable PDF. Check it out below:

AMAUTEUR

Making "Lost Cause" || Chapter 4

While making my new movie, Lost Cause, I documented the process and wrote a series of essays that examine and reflect on every facet of making, marketing and distributing an independent film in America at this critical and challenging moment…

Read more

2 months ago · 13 likes · 2 comments · Adam Kritzer

Kids-in-mind.com, the site that’s been analyzing films for child-appropriateness since 1998 is being crushed by bot traffic. Servers crashing, site going down for hours, forced to add intrusive verification screens. They’re asking for donations to hire developers and move to more secure hosting. No bot can watch a movie and review it the way a human has been doing every week for 27 years.

The UK produced 1,164 films in 2025, more than France, Germany, Spain, and Italy. Norway, which made 77, won six European Film Awards for Sentimental Value. Volume and quality remain on different tracks.

How a Fisherman’s Wharf jeans shop funded the worst film ever made

SFGATE published a fantastic deep dive into how Tommy Wiseau funded “The Room” and it’s too good not to summarize here.

Mid-80’s. Before Tommy Wiseau was the man behind “The Room”( the $6 million disaster that became cinema’s most beloved cult film) he was a guy selling Levi’s to tourists out of a “Street Fashions” at San Francisco’s Fisherman’s Wharf.

Wiseau, who claimed to be from Louisiana but spoke with an unplaceable European accent, had arrived in the US with nothing and worked his way into retail by selling yo-yos and trinkets.

But his real play was denim. This was before Levi’s had its own retail locations, which meant tourists who wanted to buy the quintessential American jean had to go through middlemen and Wiseau was one of them.

He put a massive pair of inflatable jeans on the front of the building and an American flag so large that nearby residents complained it was blocking their view.

According to former employee, close friend and now a San Fran circus director, Gregangelo Herrera, the operation was extremely lucrative.

Herrera handled the cash directly for a decade through the ‘80s and ‘90s, and says Wiseau “earned every f—king dime” that eventually went into financing his film.

Street Fashions expanded to multiple locations including building on Sutter Street. One night Wiseau called Herrera at 2am for help but when Herrera arrived, Wiseau was standing alone, drenched in sweat, having demolished half the second floor with a sledgehammer.

Herrera:

I don’t know how it was even humanly possible.

The business had its problems and European seasonal employees were reportedly sneaking jeans out of upper-floor windows and tossing them to accomplices on the street below.

Around the same time, federal agents were investigating a multinational Levi’s theft ring that was moving 5,000 stolen pairs a week to Eastern European markets at $200 a pop.

Eventually Levi’s opened its own flagship in downtown SF and the middleman model collapsed. Herrera eloped to run his circus full-time and when Wiseau held a private screening of “The Room” for friends, Herrera said he “wanted to crawl into a dark cave.”

Most staff would go on to leave Street Fashion but not Wiseau. He took The Room’s catastrophic reception and rebranded it as an intentional comedy, screening it at midnight showings where audiences threw plastic spoons at the screen and shouted along with the dialogue.

The film became such a phenomenon that even James Franco made a film about it in 2017 called The Disaster Artist. The original still screens regularly, two decades later.

Wiseau still owns the Fisherman’s Wharf building, leasing it to a spy shop that sells surveillance cameras, stink bombs, and ISIS action figures (yes). The Street Fashions sign is still on the side of the building, advertising a sale that ended well over 20 years ago.

Next door, a pizza place has a crumpled photo of Wiseau at an awards ceremony taped to the wall.

The whole story is the most American origin myth you could imagine.

An immigrant sells jeans to tourists, buys real estate, demolishes his own building with a sledgehammer, makes worst film ever produced, and then turns it into a career.

Sony dropped a major FX6 firmware update: new home screen, improved autofocus, Blackmagic RAW support via HDMI, and Monitor & Control upgrades. If you shoot on the FX6, this one’s worth the 8-minute install.

Sony is winding down Pixomondo (the Oscar-winning VFX house behind Hugo, Game of Thrones, and House of the Dragon) just three years after buying it. Around 500 people were affected with VFX work now consolidated into Imageworks. It provides a stark reminder that winning an Academy Award doesn’t make you acquisition-proof.

Singapore-based Video Rebirth raised $80 million for its AI video model Bach: Backed by AMD Ventures and Hyundai, targeting professional-grade 30fps output for advertising and film. They’re positioning against consumer tools like Veo and Pika by focusing on temporal consistency and controllable automation. Yet another entrant in the AI video space, except this one actually says the word “consistency” out loud.

This week we’re watching:

For the compositors out there, this video is an absolute goldmine.

It’s a highly technical speed-compositing breakdown demonstrating how to take a raw blue-screen plate and turn it into a final, Marvel-level cinematic shot using Foundry’s Nuke.

Retail Therapy: Glasses for editors who forgot to blink

Gunnar’s new mineral glass lenses are made from the same material as camera and telescope optics but can now sit on your face while you scrub through a timeline at 4am.

Scratch-resistant, distortion-free, with a 0.2 diopter focusing power designed to reduce the eye strain you’ve been pretending isn’t happening.

Two tint options included: Amber for blue-light blocking and contrast, or Clear Pro for accurate color.

Available at gunnar.com.

Will you be at NAB this year?

We will. Our booth is North Hall N1672 (add to your NAB show planner here).

Let’s meet. Submit this form and we will update you as the date gets closer.

(We’re brewing something cool. Stay tuned.)

—Shamir

This week:

The Oscars made history in more ways than one, a VFX studio you’ve never heard of has been behind every Marvel film for a decade, Adobe’s CEO announced an NVIDIA partnership and an exit in the same week and I went to my first SXSW.

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Autumn Durald Arkapaw became first woman to win Best Cinematography in 96 years of the Academy: shooting on 100-pound IMAX cameras, 65mm film stock, and Ultra Panavision lenses to make Sinners the top-grossing original film of the decade.

A Redditor built the best Oscars recap we’ve seen: a visual breakdown of every winner, speech, and record from the night, from PTA’s three-win sweep to the first woman to win Best Cinematography in 96 years. Scroll through the whole ceremony below.

Exceptional Minds is a nonprofit VFX studio staffed entirely by autistic adults and they’ve worked on every Marvel film since 2015, erased a camera crew from Gladiator II, and painted fall colors onto trees for Bridgerton.

An SMU professor has spent 30 years hunting down “four-wall” screenings: Films so obscure they rent out entire theaters for a week and nobody shows up. He was one of four people who paid to see the lowest-grossing film of all time ($30 total box office). Now that Dallas has been added as an Oscar-qualifying city, he might be living in the golden age of his own very specific obsession.

SXSW dispatch

Austin is interesting.

One day it was 90°F and I was nearly sunburnt by 2pm. The next it was 40 and I was buying a hoodie from a merch table because I packed like an idiot. Nobody warns you about this.

This was SXSW’s first year without the Austin Convention Center, which is being demolished and won’t reopen until 2029. So the festival spilled across the entire city; panels in hotels, screenings scattered across downtown, Congress Avenue shut down and turned into one long block party of activations and dirt-mound Rivian test drives.

In practice, it meant you were always 20 minutes from wherever you needed to be and whatever you wanted to see was already at capacity by the time you arrived.

But the serendipity is really real and that’s the thing nobody can replicate about this festival.

I had a conversation about distribution models with a VC at a taco stand, watched a filmmaker pitch a series to a streamer exec at a hotel bar, and ended up at a ranch party that felt more Cannes villa than Austin indie fest. The Texas version of the Riviera house party is just bigger, dustier, and has better brisket.

What makes SXSW structurally different from every other festival is that collision. At Cannes, you’re surrounded by film people. At CES, you’re surrounded by tech.

At SXSW, a fintech founder, a horror director, touring musician, and an AI startup CEO are all in the same bar at the same time, and somehow it all makes sense.

This was also the first time I attended a major festival with a project. I co-executive produced PERFECT, starring Julia Fox and directed by Millicent Hailes in her feature debut. I’ve been to festivals before on vibes alone but having something to actually talk about changes the experience completely.

….

SXSW filmmakers shot this year’s festival on everything from two ARRI ALEXA 35s to a refurbished Sony 9000 bought on eBay with tapes that haven’t been in production for two decades.

Apple acquires MotionVFX: The Warsaw-based company has been building professional-grade tools for Apple’s ecosystem and beyond for 15 years but now it’s just Apple. Likely gets folded into Creator Studio, the $13/month subscription bundle Apple launched in January.

Adobe and NVIDIA announce strategic partnership which means Firefly’s next generation of models will be built on NVIDIA’s computing stack, Premiere Pro and Frame.io get CUDA acceleration, and Adobe is launching cloud-native 3D digital twins for marketing.

Adobe’s CEO of 18 years steps down. Shantanu Narayen oversaw the company’s transformation from boxed software to cloud subscriptions to AI. He’ll stay on as board chair while they search for a successor. The timing is notable: he announced the NVIDIA partnership, then the exit, in the same week.

This week we’re watching:

New Studiobinder video essay on why the most powerful thing a camera can do is nothing at all. It breaks down how filmmakers from Ozu to Glazer use locked-off shots to make composition and editing do the work that camera movement usually handles.

Worth 11 minutes if you’ve ever defaulted to a dolly move when the scene didn’t need one.

Retail Therapy: The $35 Bluetooth Tracker

The Pebblebee Evercolor is a Bluetooth tracker that clips to your keys and screams at you with sound and light when you lose them.

Works with both Apple Find My and Google Find Hub, which means it’s the Switzerland of trackers for households where one person is iPhone and the other is Android and neither is switching.

500-foot Bluetooth range, 12-month rechargeable battery, and a “Link recovery” feature that helps strangers return your stuff. Check it out at pebblebee.com.

It’s been an intense few weeks. But the good kind.

We had a rush of new users to Eddie, the AI AE for video pros. And a meaningful inflection.

The quiet work we’ve been doing for at least 7 months (but truthfully, since day 1) has really made a difference for this latest surge. The behind-the-scenes work is not sexy; it’s table stakes like better workflows, better UI, faster tech.

And you can feel the impact in users telling us about their delightful experience. They’re getting better edits and better outcomes. They’re spending less time on tedious work, more time on creative.

Their clients are happier.

They, themselves, are happy.

Feel free to reply to me and let me know about your recent experiences with Eddie AI. What should we improve next? What’s the next feature you want us to add?

To that end — as you should expect by now if you’ve been following along ;) — we have something brewing. And it’s kinda cool. (I am totally, 100% not biased.)

I can’t wait to share more on it soon.

Kick butt this week.

—Shamir

This week:

Netflix walked away from an $83 billion deal for Warner Bros, a podcast is using generative AI to make the films Hollywood didn’t make, ARRI is putting its image science into a smartphone, Project Hail Mary has 2,018 VFX shots but 0 green screens, Blu-ray refuses to die, SXSW kicks off its most radical restructuring in decades and I’ll be there with a Julia Fox film.

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Netflix walked away from an $83 billion deal for Warner Bros., then immediately bought Ben Affleck’s AI startup.

They acquired InterPositive, Ben Affleck’s 16-person AI startup that’s been in stealth since 2022.

InterPositive is nothing like Sora or Runway as it doesn’t generate video from prompts. Instead, it trains on a production’s own dailies, then lets filmmakers relight, fix continuity, and adjust color within its existing pipeline.

Netflix spends about $20 billion a year on content so even a modest efficiency gain across post-production compounds across every title. The framing is quality, not cost with Sarandos saying the business is in making content 10% better, not 50% cheaper.

UK government is exploring a state-backed “British YouTube” a platform built into the free TV infrastructure already on millions of TV sets, ad-funded through Channel 4’s existing sales operation, with creators keeping 100% of their IP.

“Project Hail Mary” has 2,018 VFX shots and zero green screens. Co-director Christopher Miller clarified that the Ryan Gosling space film built the entire ship interior as a practical set, shot against black and color-shifting backgrounds for true interactive light. Guillermo del Toro called it “an aspiration and a commitment, especially now.” Opens March 20.

4K Blu-ray sales rose 12% in 2025 while overall physical media dropped less than 10%. Streaming still accounts for 92% of home entertainment spending, but the disc that everyone keeps eulogizing is refusing to die.

Someone mapped the exact minute every Pixar film makes you cry. 77% of the tear moments land in the final 30% of the runtime. Only two films break you in the opening minutes (Up and Finding Nemo). The most profitable cry factory in cinema, visualized.

Podcast uses AI to make Hollywood’s unmade

What would Jodorowsky’s Dune really have been like? Or Kubrick’s Napoleon?

I guess we’ll never know. But a new podcast is trying anyway.

New pod, Films Not Made, from veteran producers Avi Zev Weider and Amy Hobby, is doing something interesting with that space. Each week, they revisit projects that died then use generative AI to produce trailers, scenes, and stills to bring them to life.

It’s interesting because understanding why films don’t get made is often more instructive than understanding why they do.

It’s also a genuinely novel use case for AI: visualizing work that never existed.

The kind of the next evolution of remastering scratchy early recordings into full-fidelity audio, or colorizing black-and-white footage. Except here, the original never existed at all.

Will be interesting to see where this goes, even just as an experiment.

First episode is out now on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

ARRI is putting its image science into a smartphone partnering with HONOR on a “robot phone” arriving later this year. Unlike the Leica/Xiaomi or Hasselblad/OnePlus deals, which are mostly color profiles and lens branding, ARRI says this goes deeper.

Time Out published 100 greatest cinemas list: from a Berlin kino with a nuclear bunker to a Canadian theater with only 12 seats. A love letter to the places streaming was supposed to kill.

Filmmaker magazine just moved to Substack Its first editorial letter covers a lot of ground. The Paramount/Warner Bros. merger, Netflix's cost-plus model, the NonDé movement, the Berlinale fallout, and Sundance's move to Boulder. Worth a subscribe if you're in indie film.

Filmmaker Magazine

Filmmaker Is Officially Live on Substack

Read more

3 months ago · 74 likes · 8 comments · Mike Hogan

What actually is SXSW?

This year's edition starts this Thursday and got me thinking about what SXSW actually is.

I’ve been to most of the majors now and you get a feel for them quite quickly. Cannes seals attendees behind hierarchy on the French Riviera. Sundance traps everyone in a small mountain town and lets the industry bring its heat to the snow.

But SXSW is different.

It’s a top-10 film festival that isn't really a film festival at all.

It’s the only place in the world where filmmakers, tech bros, VCs, and touring musicians cram into the same city block, all peddling something that doesn’t really exist yet and hoping this is the week it sees the light of day.

It started in 1987 as a regional music showcase with 700 people showing up to watch 200 bands across fifteen Austin venues. Film arrived in ‘94. Tech followed soon after and by 2010, the Interactive track had officially overtaken music in attendance.

Twitter was a nothing but a niche microblog when launched at SXSW in 2007. Jack Dorsey and co. placed live tweet displays in the convention center hallways, encouraging real-time conversation among attendees.

Usage tripled almost overnight, jumping from 20,000 daily messages to 60,000.

It was the moment Silicon Valley realized SXSW was the launchpad for consumer tech and suddenly the scruffy “Keep Austin Weird” festival was now hosting six-story Doritos vending machines and TEDx-esque keynotes.

Anyway, back to film.

The term “mumblecore” was literally invented at SXSW.

Coined at a bar during the 2005 festival after premieres from the Duplass brothers, Andrew Bujalski, and Joe Swanberg. Greta Gerwig’s career also started here. Lena Dunham’s too. Even Jordan Peele’s Get Out premiered here.

The Midnighters section evolved into arguably the best horror launchpad in the world with Blair Witch, Insidious, X, Cabin in the Woods all premiering to Austin midnight crowds.

And when A24 needed to launch Oscar romp Everything Everywhere All at Once, SXSW was the only home that made sense.

This year marks the festival’s most radical restructuring in decades.

The Austin Convention Center is being demolished, forcing a decentralized “clubhouse” model across three neighborhoods. The schedule has been shortened from ten days to seven, with film, tech, and music running simultaneously for the first time under the theme “All Together Now.”

It’s either a return to the organic, street-level energy of the early years or a logistical nightmare. Probably both.

I’ll have to let you guys know as I’ll be there March 11–18 for my first SXSW as co-exec producer of PERFECT, starring Julia Fox and directed by Millicent Hailes in her feature debut.

If you’re coming to SX please let me know :)

Two fun SXSW facts:

• “South by Southwest” is a play on Hitchcock’s North by Northwest.

• The festival’s official email address in its early years was 72662.465@compuserve.com. Early panel talks included “The Web Is Dead?” and “So You Want to Make a CD-ROM?” I’ll be honest, I had to Google what CompuServe was but I was born in ‘94.

This week we’re watching:

A fly-on-the-wall look at the most expensive self-funded film ever made and proof that $120 million of your own money doesn't solve the one problem every other self-funded project has: nobody in the room who can tell you no.

Retail Therapy: The phone that starts fires

The Oukitel WP63 is a rugged Android phone with a 20,000mAh battery. It can survive a 100-foot drop, charge your MacBook, and literally light a campfire.

It’s marketed for off-grid adventurers and wilderness types, which is corporate for “preppers who still want to check their email.” The battery is so large the phone is essentially a power bank that happens to make calls.

Not yet out but you can get more info here.

Did you hear the news? Eddie AI, your agentic assistant video editor, now places (real, not generated) B-roll on the A-roll rough cut story. 🤯

Luc Forsyth has the scoop:

Eddie is known for cutting docu-style edits where you import numerous hours of multicam interviews. Eddie aligns with you on the story and then finds soundbites and weaves them together.

Eddie now turns your B-roll footage into sequences and places those B-roll sequences on the A-roll rough cut. It also organizes this B-roll, groups them in categories, and overall helps you move forward in your edit faster.

Try it. Let me know what you think. :)

—Shamir
CEO & Co-founder, Eddie AI

This week:

A lost 1897 Méliès film featuring cinema’s first robot was found in a box of rusted reels from a potato farmer’s great-grandson, Ang Lee compared editing to cooking, a MrBeast editor got caught insider trading, and A24 is becoming the studio where every musician with a Pitchfork cosign goes to get their first acting credit.

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The ACE Eddie Awards went to Sinners and One Battle After Another and Ang Lee, accepting the Golden Eddie, compared editing to cooking: “Shooting is like buying groceries, and the real cooking is on the editing table.” He dedicated the award to his editor of 35 years, Tim Squyres, who missed Brokeback Mountain because Lee told him he was retiring.

Le Monde is calling Paris “Frollywood” because Angelina Jolie, George Clooney, Matt Dillon, and Kristen Stewart are all shooting in France now. Part Trump-era exile, part Hollywood model collapse, and part the fact that Le Bristol has really good suites.

UCLA survey finds teens are over superheroes and want to see men being good dads on screen “connected masculinity” beat “stoic lone warrior” by a 5-to-1 margin. Somewhere, a Marvel executive is reading this and greenlighting a film where Thor does school pickup.

A MrBeast editor got caught insider trading on Kalshi placing bets on MrBeast’s own videos using information he had access to as an employee. He had “near-perfect trading success” on low-odds markets, which is either very stupid or very confident. He was fined $20K and banned for two years.

Tropfest return was a hit. Scorsese sent a video message, James Cameron judged, Margot Robbie walked the carpet, 35,000 showed up in person, and Lianne Mackessy won $50K for her short Crescendo. The Australian short film competition that helped launch a generation of filmmakers in the 2000s is trying to prove it can do it again.

The first robot in cinema almost lost to rust

Georges Méliès made more than 500 films and we still don’t know exactly what’s in all of them.

Last September, librarians at the Library of Congress opened a box of rusted nitrate reels dropped off by the great-grandson of a Pennsylvania potato farmer who moonlit as a traveling projectionist in the 1890s (yes).

Inside was “Gugusse and the Automaton” a 45-second short from around 1897, long presumed gone, featuring what may be cinema’s first ever robot. It hadn’t been seen by anyone in over a century.

You can watch here.

The short’s about a magician winding up an automaton dressed as the clown Pierrot. The machine turns on him and he grabs a sledgehammer and beats it smaller and smaller until it’s a doll.

Even in 1897, the tech anxiety trope was already there and it’s like we’ve been making the damn same movie for 130 years.

Most of Méliès’ negatives were melted down for silver during World War I so what survives usually does so because of piracy and this print is no exception as it’s at least three copies removed from the original.

The Academy announced 15 Scientific and Technical Awards including lead-free bullet squibs, Dragonframe (the stop-motion software behind basically every stop-motion film you’ve seen), and a dialogue restoration tool that reduces need for ADR.

From Staff Picks to F1: Paul Trillo and the pipeline that doesn’t exist yet

If you were on Vimeo between 2012 and 2020, you probably saw Paul Trillo’s work. He built a career on utilizing camera rigs or post-prod techniques in ways others simply weren’t.

You may have seen his Carvana Super Bowl ad but my all time favourite was his brand film for Olympus.

A 7 minute odyssey into what anxiety and paranoia really feels like told through the lens of a snorricam rig.

Anyway, I digress.

Trillo is now co-founder at AI film studio Asteria who just unveiled their Aston Martin F1 project, created with CoreWeave for the Las Vegas race.

It combines live action, remote-control miniatures, 3D, VFX, and generative rendering into a single pipeline. The brief, developed with director Mowgly Lee, was to go places where there are no roads.

The video is, here

The breakthrough was frame-specific editing with every frame art-directed individually in C4D and Photoshop, laid on the timeline and driven by a 3D animatic. Some shots used over ten keyframes. This allowed them to track every single logo on the vehicle, which would be impossible with any prompt-based pipeline.

For an F1 team where sponsor placement is contractually precise, that’s simply not optional.

Watch the breakdown, here

Baz Luhrmann’s self-funded Elvis documentary EPiC is in theaters built from footage he found in the Warner Bros. vault while making the 2022 biopic. Never-before-seen film from Presley’s 636 consecutive sold-out shows in Vegas.

A24’s first teaser for Backrooms is out, based on Kane Parsons’ viral creepypasta clips that were so good at evoking dread that A24 signed the teenage creator to be their youngest-ever feature director. The filmmaker/creator distinction keeps getting blurrier, and this might be the project that erases it entirely.

This week we’re watching:

Gorillaz released a hand-painted 2D animated short that took 18 months to make, directed by Jamie Hewlett with London studio The Line, paying homage to The Jungle Book and classic Disney features. It hit 860,000 views in nine hours.

Turns out the internet still moves fast on something made very, very slowly.

Retail Therapy: Nosh, the autonomous cooking robot

An autonomous cooking robot that loads your ingredients, heats them with a 2000W induction system, and adds spices from an 8-box tray. All controlled from an app on your phone.

Marketed as a solution for people who are “busy or tired and still want fresh food,” so in other words: everyone.

Pre-order for $1499 here

This week:

A Google creative director’s field notes on fighting “pixar drift”, Scorsese voices four-armed alien shopkeeper in the new Mandalorian, Google Cloud launched “enterprise-grade AI filmmaking pipelines” next to a 12th-century Delhi monument.

Render Reel

Framerate is the new Vimeo, or at least it’s trying to be. Still in beta, it’s positioning itself as the hosting platform for people who actually make things.

The Nonfiction Hotlist partnered with Yahoo to champion 23 unproduced nonfiction projects. Like the Blacklist but for docs already shot. Worth a look for next year’s edition if you have a doc sitting on your drive.

Gemini can now make you a 30-second AI song, the company unveiled Lyria 3 and clarified the goal isn’t to create a masterpiece, which is doing a lot of work as a disclaimer. Lyria 3 is rolling out through Gemini right now.

A Google creative director wrote the most honest breakdown of what directing an AI ad actually looks like

For most of advertising’s history, a director’s value was inseparable from what they could actually do.

You were a live-action director or animation. You shot on film or you shot digital. You worked in stop-motion or you didn’t.

The industry ran on specialization, and the pipeline from concept to storyboard to shoot to post was sequential and slow.

And of course, expensive by design.

A two-week turnaround for a polished stop-motion-style spot with a four-person team was completely delusional.

But that started cracking in the early 2000s when After Effects and Cinema 4D collapsed the line between motion design and traditional post-production. Suddenly a single designer with the right software could output work that previously required a team of twelve.

But even then, there was a core pipeline. You still concepted, then you storyboarded, then you built assets, then you animated and then you composited.

Erica Gorochow’s breakdown of directing a Google holiday ad using entirely generative AI tools is the clearest account yet of what happens when that pipeline finally collapses.

Gorochow is a motion designer and director whose work has been recognized by Vimeo, Fast Company, and AdWeek.

She led a team of four through a two-week sprint using Google’s own models which generated over a thousand takes.

They composited in After Effects and then hired real voice actors because AI dialogue didn’t hit the mark.

They fought constant “Pixar drift” which is the model’s gravitational pull toward a generic 3D aesthetic that flattens everything into the same cuteness.

On day one, they were already producing near-final frames to pitch with.

Gorochow describes a rhythm of rapid exploration in ImageFX, refinement in Flora using NanoBanana, then reconstruction in Photoshop and After Effects for final polish.

It’s not really post-prod. And it’s not really pre-prod either.

It’s all production, all the time.

After generating a sprawling, messy board of explorations, Gorochow realized she needed to lock her final characters, sets, and props before moving into video generation.

Without that discipline, the AI would hallucinate details differently in every shot.

In other words, she had to impose the structure of a traditional production pipeline onto a tool that has no native concept of continuity.

But it isn’t all song and dance.

She notes that her “bread and butter” is neither stop-motion nor high-end 3D and under the old system, she’d never have been hired to direct something in this style. AI gave her access to an aesthetic vocab that would previously have required a specialist.

She went onto say:

The ability to pitch anything is what energizes me.

That said, I don’t have a purely rosy view of AI. I still worry about what this means for craft, for specialists, and for the people who built the techniques we’re now abstracting away. But this project also reminded me how essential directing instincts still are: communication, framing, pacing, performance, and a practical understanding of how to glue the pieces together, were all key – and I hope, timeless.

When I think of AI as a new, expansive tool, more like the early days of the Adobe suite, there’s a lot here to be genuinely excited about.

Her entire piece is worth reading because it’s a rare AI production write-up that’s both enthusiastic and eye-opening and doesn’t pretend those two things cancel each other out.

Scorsese lends voice to a four-armed alien shopkeeper in the new Mandalorian and Grogu trailer, the character gets maybe thirty seconds of screen time before slamming the door on Pedro Pascal. Star Wars officially responded on X by calling the cameo “absolute cinema,” Possibly a dig at Scorsese’s 2019 comments that Marvel films weren’t?

Invideo partnered with Google Cloud to launch “enterprise-grade AI filmmaking pipelines” unveiled at the India AI Film Festival next to the Qutub Minar (an 800 year old monument), which is a sentence that would have read as satire only two years ago.

This week we watched: Matthew McConaughey on AI in Hollywood

He said:

It’s here, the moral plea won’t stop it, there’s too much money behind it, and the only move is to own your likeness before someone else uses it without asking.

He also floated the idea that “Best AI Film” could become its own awards category which sounds absurd until you remember that “Best Animated Feature” didn’t exist at the Oscars until 2001.

Retail Therapy: AI dash cam

The DDPAI Z90 Master is a triple-channel dash cam that records 4K front, 4K rear, and 3K interior simultaneously, which means it captures more footage of your commute. For better or for worse.

It’s got Sony STARVIS 2 sensors for night driving, an AI interior camera that brightens faces for “ride-share records and incident proof,” and 4G remote access so you can check on your parked car from your phone.

Like a Ring doorbell on wheels.

It’s really for Uber drivers who want receipts or people who watched one too many road rage compilations and decided they weren’t going to be the one without evidence. Fair.

This week:

Two half-trillion dollar AI companies are in a very public diss war over Super Bowl ads, AI featured in nearly 25% of all spots showing just how embedded it's become, Grok put $1 million behind an AI video competition, and an ode to post-prod tech we’ve (thankfully) lost along the way.

Render Reel

AI earned its own line item at Berlinale, researcher Stephen Follows reported from the EFM floor that one company pitched "hybrid actors" whose faces buyers can swap for local celebs using AI, producers are now actively embracing AI-generated visuals at pitch meetings, and what could make history as the first AI-generated movie to qualify for the Oscars was being shopped on the sales floor.

StephenFollows.com - Using data to explain the film industry

Risk mitigation and casual nihilism were the main themes at the 2026 European Film Market

As another year’s European Film Market winds down, I have completed my annual round-up of what I saw, heard, and read…

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3 months ago · 10 likes · Stephen Follows

Doug Liman’s Bitcoin biopic casting call says AI may be used to “adjust” performances, which is a very polite way to say your acting might get notes from a machine.

Film Screener Studio replaces the Vimeo-link-plus-Google-Form combo every indie filmmaker has cobbled together at least once. Upload your film, invite private reviewers, collect structured feedback. Built by a filmmaker, currently free, and probably an upgrade on whatever you’re doing now.

Ode to the tech that broke us

Out of Sync

Top 10 Technologies I'm Happy to See the Back Of

For all the grumbling one might do about modern technology, for all the multiple file formats and aspect ratios, file delivery formats and specs that exist and melt my brain on a regular basis, there are a few technological states from my past that I do not wish to return to. In no particular order, here are my top 10…

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3 months ago · 5 likes · 2 comments · Shane Woods

Shane Woods over at Out of Sync has written a piece that functions both nostalgia and accidental history lesson. A top 10 of the tech he’s glad we’ve left behind, and reading it is a genuinely useful reminder of just how much invisible friction has been engineered out of the craft over the last two decades.

For anyone who came up in post-production recently, or works adjacent to it now, some of what Woods describes will read almost like fiction.

Waiting an entire day for the editor to leave before you could get access to Avid. Getting down on your hands and knees behind a machine to daisy-chain massive specialist hard drives together with fat inflexible SCSI cables, cursed with bent pins, just to unlock an extra 500MB of storage.

Competing with the entire facility for one of the two HD decks, watching the clock, knowing that two minutes of idleness meant losing your place in the queue.

The sound effects CD section is particularly vivid.

The image of an assistant editor moving computer to computer through a building, ejecting CD-ROMs one by one searching for a single car door slam, is the kind of detail that makes you genuinely grateful for a world where you can find almost any sound literally thirty seconds from now.

What ties all of it together is a point Woods doesn’t quite make explicitly.

So much of what assistant editors once spent their days doing was essentially managing scarcity. Scarcity of machines. Of storage. Decks, access, information. The job carried a huge administrative and logistical tax that had nothing to do with the actual craft of editing.

The person who got the cut finished wasn’t necessarily the most talented, but often the one who was best at navigating the infrastructure around them.

That friction is largely gone now.

Grok held a Super Bowl ad contest with a $1 million grand prize and got 4,000 submissions in 48 hours. The winner reimagines Galileo's inquisition as a modern query to Grok. Second place ($500K) follows a boy dreaming of space. Third ($250K) takes a journey through the cosmos. Entries were judged on creativity and timeline impressions, so virality was baked into the scoring.

The results are here.

Belgium’s oldest film distributor just went under. Belga Films, founded in 1937, has been liquidated after cinema attendance in Brussels dropped 40% over the past decade. The company’s CEO blamed a city traffic scheme that made their cinema harder to reach.

From Flat Tires to LLMs

The first Super Bowl ads in 1967 cost $37,500 for 30 seconds and sold you exactly what they sound like.

Goodyear ran a spot about a woman getting a flat tire that opened with “this flat tire needs a man” and when no man showed up, the tire saved her instead.

McDonald’s pitched itself as “the closest thing to home” then reminded you there were 900 locations now. Yawn.

Everything changed in ‘84 when Ridley Scott directed Apple’s Macintosh ad. A dystopian, Orwellian 60-second film that never once showed the product’s specs. It’s now considered one of the greatest commercials ever made, but at the time Apple tried to kill it because it copy-tested at a 5 against a norm of 29.

It only aired because the agency couldn’t sell back the slot in time but it ended up driving $155 million in Mac sales in three months.

It was the moment Super Bowl ads stopped being commercials and started being events.

The Super Bowl has been where tech goes to announce it’s mainstream ever since. And historically, that announcement comes right before the correction.

In 2000, fourteen dot-com companies bought 20% of the ad inventory. Pets.com, Epidemic.com, OurBeginning.com: most were dead within a year. In 2022, FTX, Coinbase, and Crypto.com spent $54 million on spots while Bitcoin sat at $42K. Within months, the market crashed, FTX collapsed into fraud, and the industry entered a winter it still hasn’t fully left.

By 2026, crypto was down to a single, cautious Coinbase ad.

By the time a category can afford an $8 million Super Bowl spot, the trust problem has already replaced the adoption problem.

This year, AI took that stage.

Fifteen out of 66 ads featured AI in some form. OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Amazon, Meta, even Svedka’s resurrected 2005 fembot.

The strangest result belonged to Anthropic. Their Super Bowl debut featured darkly comic scenarios of chatbots steering users toward cougar dating sites and height-boosting insoles.

Four years and billions deep, the AI industry’s Super Bowl message boiled down to “trust us, this matters”.

Only Anthropic had the nerve to say what it wouldn’t do and that turned out to be the thing people actually wanted to hear.

But there’s an uncomfortable follow-up: how do you expect this to scale without ads?

Google is free because of ads. YouTube is free because of ads. Gmail, Instagram, and the entire modern internet are free because of…..you get the point.

The most important tech of the last two decades reached everyone on earth precisely because nobody had to pay for it.

If the choice is between a $250/month subscription and an ad before your chatbot answers, most people aren’t choosing the subscription.

Nothing sustainable is completely without cost.

South Australia’s Film Lab: New Voices is back for round four, offering $600K to make a feature and their track record (a Teddy winner, an AACTA sweep, a horror already generating buzz) is making a strong case that the best film pipeline in the country runs through Adelaide.

Tarantino turns his theater back into a porn cinema for February because nothing says Valentine’s Day like a midnight screening of “The Opening of Misty Beethoven.”

Fred Grinstein of Machine Cinema released a new report tracking every notable use of genAI in documentaries. From the first AI-driven recreations at Sundance to the first broadcast series using AI on Sky History. Outputs are getting better and the legal questions are moving toward actual precedent.

Machine Cinema

AI in Documentary... So Far

This is my second annual installment exploring how authentic storytelling collides ( or vibes?) with synthetic content. We aren’t seeing the firehose effect that seems to be taking over use cases like advertising and animation, but we are seeing meaningful adoption and experimentation in documentary and unscripted, which is what I focus on…

Read more

3 months ago · 9 likes · 2 comments · Fred Grinstein

The full report is worth a read if you’re in nonfiction.

This week we watched:

A scrawny dude asks how to get a six-pack and the chatbot pivots to short king solutions.

The tone is exactly right. That slightly too-eager, slightly too-helpful cadence that anyone who’s used an LLM immediately recognizes.

It’s a genuinely funny ad, which is rarer than it should be, but as we mentioned earlier, the ad-free utopia it’s selling will likely remain exactly that.

Sam Altman called it “clearly dishonest” but not before admitting it made him laugh, which tells you everything.

Claude shot from No. 41 to No. 7 on the App Store, its highest rank ever, with downloads jumping 32% in the days after.

Retail Therapy

The 30W speaker you can wear around your neck like a boombox

The JLab Blue XL is a 30W speaker you wear around your neck like a boombox that gave up on being carried. Dual drivers, 20 hours of battery, and it doubles as a tabletop speaker.

It’s marketed for “watch parties and team moments,” which is corporate for playing your phone too loud in a group setting but making it a lifestyle choice. USB-C fast charging gets it back to full in three hours.

The real question is whether the world needed a wearable speaker or whether someone in a product meeting just really wanted to walk around Target with their own theme music.

Either way, it exists now.

This week:

Berlinale starts in four days with private equity workshops upstairs and 200 filmmakers learning to embrace chaos downstairs, Amazon launches AI Studio promising to keep humans involved, Video Store.Age tries selling indie films on $30 encrypted USB drives to an audience that already owns Blu-ray, and Spielberg finally won a Grammy.

Also coming up later this week, we’re releasing a juicy longform on one the greatest open source tools you’ve probably never heard of :)

Render Reel

First Cut Lab goes international: Tatino’s Paris editing lab selected four features from Europe and Latin America for its inaugural 2026 lineup. Sales agents, distributors, and festival programmers attended the session at the end of January.

Alamo Drafthouse mobile ordering update: The theater chain’s mandatory in-auditorium mobile ordering is now live at multiple locations. The reviews are, predictably, brutal.

Spielberg won a Grammy: He produced the John Williams documentary which won “Best Music Film” at the Grammy’s, meaning he’s finally completed his EGOT (Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, Tony). Spielberg joins a list including Whoopi Goldberg, Audrey Hepburn, Mel Brooks and 19 special others.

Kristen Stewart keeps cinema alive: The Actor / Director restores historic 1925 Highland Theatre as a community space for LA’s next gen of filmmakers.

Video Store.Age

Ash Cook and Aidan Dick’s Video Store.Age could be a potential window into the future of distribution.

The model is modest by design. They’re touching twenty titles in year one, working hands-on with each team and selling drives in theater lobbies like punk merch. It’s either wildly idealistic or the only distribution strategy that actually works at the margins.

Streaming broke indie distribution by eliminating transparency; by burying films in opaque data and offering MGs that don’t reflect viewership value. So Cook and Dick decided to build their own collector economy.

First collectibles include Sam Feder’s Heightened Scrutiny, a VHS-exclusive of The People’s Joker, and Caveh Zahedi’s Higher Education. Launch is February 27 at LifeWorld Brooklyn.

I do wonder if tight curation means very few filmmakers will actually benefit.

The target audience are clearly cinephiles who probably already own physical media like Blu-ray and VHS, so would they really adopt encrypted USB tech?

The drives also use a proprietary embedded player, meaning you can’t just drag files off or play them anywhere else. And if the company folds, that $30 drive you just bought becomes a paperweight.

But also, why the hell not?

Distribution is already broken and their 50/50 filmmaker split is real money. If this dies in two years, then it dies, but at least it’s an actual experiment instead of another “we fixed indie film with blockchain” announcement.

Read Max Cea’s interview with the founders for more:

Nothing Bogus

Video Store.Age Is Trying to Help Fix Indie Distribution

As a programmer at Sundance, Ash Cook has spent the past eight years advocating for films like We’re All Going to the World’s Fair and Kokomo City — films with small budgets and bold visions, made by people working in the margins. Over that same period, Cook watched as the system of indie distribution increasingly failed films that were challenging and didn’t have ample resources. “There’s been a consensus for years now — between sales agents, distributors, and filmmakers — that distribution is broken,” Cook says. “I felt like…

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3 months ago · 19 likes · 1 comment · Max Cea

Sean Baker’s secret short: “Sandiwara” starring Michelle Yeoh will premiere at Berlinale. The short was shot on an iPhone with fashion brand Self-Portrait and Yeoh plays five characters. Match made in heaven.

Adobe’s Firefly moved to unlimited generations: The feature updates across both Adobe’s “commercially safe” models and bundled third-party options.

Destination Berlinale

Berlinale starts February 13th, which gives us just four days to remember that Berlin isn’t Cannes with better coats.

It’s the festival born as Cold War propaganda: opening in 1951 with Hitchcock’s Rebecca aimed straight at the Soviet sphere. Then it became the political, transgressive talent incubator everyone now pretends was always the point.

The transition was never gradual.

It took a rupture in 1970 when Berlinale’s jury tried banning Michael Verhoeven’s anti-war film O.K., calling it “anti-American,”. The decision sparked mass walkouts, and the festival completely imploded. The entire jury resigned, 1970 Berlinale edition cancelled, but the festival’s experimental section “the Forum” was born.

Competition and star worship were explicitly rejected making Berlin the “political” festival. Berlin’s whole brand is about being the festival that cares about formal experimentation and geopolitical stakes and not just red carpets.

Less starry than Venice, colder than Cannes (in weather and taste) and more institutional than Sundance.

However, it’s the market, EFM (European Film Market), which is Berlinale’s unsung draw as it’s the real reason industry flies in, especially Americans, though the public has no idea.

EFM’s predominantly housed in the Gropius Bau and with its high ceilings and natural light, you can actually hear yourself think. An alien luxury at any film market.

Last year, we covered what attending Cannes actually feels like.

And if the Cannes’ ‘Marché,’ feels like a fish market, then EFM feels like a WeWork in a museum.

Everyone moves slower. Meetings happen in corners with actual seating instead of standing in hallways clutching tote bags. You’ll know your way around the building in half a day.

It’s less chaos than Cannes. Which is part of the problem.

The Cannes’ market badge gets you panels upon panels, screenings and pavilions on a beach, which is real access for real money. Berlin’s EFM badge costs just as much (€450) but buys you significantly less.

People increasingly skip it entirely, taking meetings at the Marriott or the Ritz Carlton for the price of a €10 espresso instead.

Geography is the second EFM problem.

Cannes is a small coastal town of maybe 7 square miles (realistically 0.5 during the festival). There aren’t that many options for meeting much further than the Palais where the Marché is and everyone passes through the building eventually anyway.

So paying €450 for proximity makes sense.

Even if EFM surrounds Potsdamer Platz, Berlin is still a sprawl in comparison.

Just as many people congregate at the Marriott, Ritz, and Soho House as they do Gropius Bau. The badge becomes optional when the action isn’t centralized.

EFM’s program this year is interesting though.

Masterclasses on linking institutional capital with creative producers. Winston Baker panels on PE strategies. IPR.VC workshops on treating content as a diversified asset class. An AI Decision-Making workshop. A Film-to-Game Accelerator. A Cross-IP Accelerator with Annecy. Something called “EFM Beyond” positioning producers as “IP architects in a liquid content ecosystem.”

A lot of word salad to essentially just to say “keep up”.

Amazon launches AI Studio as production accelerator: MGM Studio launches AI Studio in March; a closed beta for industry partners to test tools that speed up pre- and post-production. Albert Cheng leads the team, promising humans stay involved at every step, pointing to House of David battle scenes as proof of concept.

Once upon a time in Baltimore: A historic look at Baltimore’s production golden age: when the city was “Hollywood East” and how capped state incentives killed the boom while uncapped rivals kept building.

CNN asked astronauts to pick favorite space movies: Artemis II crew favorites include Apollo 13, The Martian, Interstellar, The Right Stuff, and of course, 2001.

This week we’re watching:

YouTuber ThisGuyEdits asked 116 editors to answer a survey about their current editing situation. Some of the answers are surprising, some not.

The recap doesn’t look great.

• 74% are not working sustainably

• 5% have a reel that actually brings in work

• 78% lack regular clients

• 84% do not have a clear plan

Worth a watch, if you’re an editor.

Retail Therapy

The $349 Typewriter That Syncs to Dropbox

The Freewrite Alpha Raven Black is a distraction-free writing device with a 2-4 line LCD screen, mechanical keyboard, 100-hour battery, and cloud sync.

You won’t find any browser tabs or notifications. Just a minimal display and autosave to Dropbox with sync via Wi-Fi or USB-C.

The question is whether you’re buying a tool or the fantasy that the only thing between you and finishing your screenplay is the existence of the internet.

It’s the Moleskine notebook theory, but Bluetooth-enabled.

Hope you enjoy today’s newsletter.

Making peace with AI was always going to be the way.

AI is just another tool in the storyteller’s toolkit. It’s amoral. Use whatever tool you need to tell your story.

Real footage and AI generated clips and stock music and archive will all co-exist in the same video. Our focus with Eddie AI is on weaving these assets into a story — the only things the consumer actually cares about.

There’s been lots of updates with Eddie AI, like support for multi-track audio and dirty multicam timelines. Try it if you haven’t recently and let me know what you think.

Enjoy today’s newsletter!

Shamir
CEO & Co-founder, Eddie AI

This week: Sundance normalizes AI for indies while Darren Aronofsky’s AI Revolutionary War series makes the case against itself, a YouTuber self-distributes a $17M box office hit that beat every Sundance film combined, YouTube kills background playback for non-Premium users ( 😓), and an Oscar-nominated cinematographer defends shooting Melania doc.

US Box office took a 12% hit from blizzard. 250 theaters across 30 states closed, pushing domestic grosses down to $59M. Theatrical is now brittle enough that even a bit of climate disruption alone can meaningfully dent national revenue.

Netflix commits €240,000/year to Blender’s Development Fund. The first major studio to back the open-source 3D tool at this scale.

SAG-AFTRA floats “Tilly tax” on AI actors. The union considers a royalty levy on studios using digital performers, with payments going into pension and health funds.

Film professors say their students can’t sit through films anymore. The Atlantic surveyed 20 professors who reported students failing basic film comprehension. At UW Madison, half a class picked wrong answers about Jules and Jim‘s ending. Some classes are now assigning film portions instead of full features. Dark times.

Netflix’s KPop Demon Hunters was the most streamed film of 2025. logging 20.5 billion viewing minutes in the U.S., equivalent to 207 million full watches, with an Oscar-nominated song that topped Billboard for eight weeks. Streaming hits now brute-force cultural relevance without ever touching a theater.

Steph Curry won Sundance’s Short Film Grand Jury Prize. Curry co-directed with two-time Oscar winner Ben Proudfoot. This is his second collaboration with Proudfoot after the Oscar-winning The Queen of Basketball.

Indie studios scramble as LA productions continue to lag. LA soundstage occupancy dropped to 63%, down from 90% during peak TV. Hackman Capital defaulted on its $1.1B Radford Studio Center mortgage and Goldman Sachs is taking control. Broker Carl Muhlstein warns “this could be the first of several foreclosures.”

YouTuber Markiplier just beat Sundance’s entire 2025 slate at the box office; his self-distributed video game adaptation Iron Lung earned over $17M this weekend across 3,000+ theaters, surpassing the combined US box office of every single Sundance feature film last year. Markiplier wrote, directed, and starred in the film without studio backing or traditional distribution.

Oscar-nominated cinematographer Dante Spinotti and David Fincher’s DP Jeff Cronenweth both shot the Melania documentary with Brett Ratner The $40M Amazon-financed doc about the First Lady was screened at the White House and grossed $7M opening weekend despite terrible reviews. Spinotti (Heat, L.A. Confidential) gave The New Yorker an interview where he compared lighting Melania’s face to being a “reporter.” No word from Cronenweth, but it’s fascinating watching cinematographers of this caliber sign onto what’s essentially a lavish vanity project. The money must have been good.

The vibe shift comes for Park City

We’re at an inflection point.

The prominence of AI at Sundance’s Story Forum, combined with Sundance Institute announcing an AI Literacy Initiative in partnership with Gotham, Film Independent, and Daniel Kwan’s Creators Coalition on AI, signals American indie filmmaking is ready to normalize AI.

At the festival, Adobe hosted a “Showtime! Park City: Gen AI Showcase” where filmmakers Taryn O’Neill and Momo Wang presented Adobe Firefly-generated shorts. O’Neill’s MythOS was completed in one month. Wang’s Wink took 28 days to produce five minutes of 3D animation , compared to two years for 10 minutes of traditional 2D animation on her 2023 Oscar-qualifying film PengLai.

As discovery platforms, film fests have always gained credibility by covering leading trends, especially new media. Why wouldn’t they? We’ve seen 360 at Cannes and VR at Venice.

But AI feels different.

These festivals can’t afford to ignore it anymore. Venice has a sidebar AI film festival. Runway already announced its 4th festival and a debut summit in March, headlined by former Lucasfilm president Kathleen Kennedy. Tech has more money than God and is spending like crazy. Google bankrolled the AI Literacy project and offered a $1M prize for an AI short film at the 1 Billion Follower Summit, receiving 3,500 entries globally.

Then there’s Darren Aronofsky’s Primordial Soup, which premiered On This Day... 1776, a short-form series recreating the American Revolution on TIME’s YouTube channel.

It does not look good.

The series uses gen-AI- with SAG-AFTRA voice actors. Pitched as a “hybrid approach” between humans and models. Yeah, no. Aronofsky’s involvement gave the project legitimacy it wouldn’t otherwise have, and Primordial Soup positions itself as an “ethical” AI studio but it just doesn’t work.

There was a lot of snark in the comments but one stood out for me.

Aronofsky’s efforts look no better than the AI slop flooding everyone’s feeds. If you’re going to use AI, at least do something different with it. We talked about Spike Jonze’s use in his Gucci film a few months ago. His AI worked because he used it to create the uncanny, something AI is inherently better at than realism.

Aronofsky shot for realism when he could do so much more.

Final Cut Pro 12 is here. They’ve added AI-powered search features and beat detection. Transcript Search finds spoken words in footage, Visual Search locates objects and actions, and Beat Detection syncs edits to music rhythm. It’s the second major version in a year after Apple maintained FCP X for over a decade. Eddie AI still integrates seamlessly, letting you drag FCP clips into Eddie to generate rough cuts via prompts, then export back with automatic relinking for polish.

You can no longer have YouTube running in the background. For years you couldn’t officially do this as a non-premium member anyway but many users have been using third-party browsers like Edge and Brave as workarounds.

A YouTube spokesperson said in a statement to GSMArena:

Background playback is a feature intended to be exclusive for YouTube Premium members. While some non-Premium users may have previously been able to access this through mobile web browsers in certain scenarios, we have updated the experience to ensure consistency across all our platforms.

In other words “We’ve seen your workarounds and we’re killing it.”

ACE Eddie Awards nominate Weapons, Wicked: For Good, and One Battle After Another for best editing. The American Cinema Editors announced nominees across 14 categories ahead of the February 27 ceremony. Drama contenders include Sinners and Hamnet, while comedy nominees feature Marty Supreme and Wake Up Dead Man. Filmmaker Ang Lee gets the ACE Golden Eddie Filmmaker of the Year Award.

Want to intern for A24? They’re hiring a post-prod intern in NYC for $18/hour. You’ll need Premiere Pro skills and prior experience, which feels cheeky, but at $18/hour it’s not offensive compared to the flood of film internships that go completely unpaid. Also, it’s A24.

This week we’re watching: Aronofsky’s AI YouTube series

Curious to hear people’s thoughts on this.

Retail Therapy

Alveos One is a chest-worn breathing wearable that monitors your breath in real-time tracking rhythm and variability to read your nervous system state, with haptic cues nudging you toward calm when stress spikes. Sounds useful on a film set, right?

This week’s letter includes: Vimeo laying off its entire video team because private equity thinks a video platform doesn’t need people who understand video, Ryan Coogler’s vampire horror breaking a 75-year Oscar record, Christopher Nolan casting Travis Scott in The Odyssey, and a camera company worth $1.2 billion that might get bought by investors who want faster returns from a brand built on moving slowly.

Render Reel

TikTok announced a new joint venture last week that acquires its U.S. assets and technically ends the ban saga that’s been dragging on for years. The immediate legal drama is over, but we now see a blueprint for how the government plans to handle other Chinese apps that get too popular too fast.

Runway released Gen-4.5 with big claims and familiar caveats: The company says it’s the “world’s top-rated video model“ with better physics and temporal consistency. But the same limitations seem to remain.

“Generalist” is becoming shorthand for taste: Michelle Higa Fox argued on It’s Nice That that the future belongs to creative generalists, but not the “Swiss Army knife” kind who collect skills. She means people with strong fundamentals and discernment: the ability to know why something should or shouldn’t be made. Her point is that AI gives you infinite options at infinite speed, which makes execution cheap but shifts all the value to judgment. If your career depends on mastering specific software, you’re vulnerable.

Warner Bros Discovery shareholders told Paramount to try again: They rejected what the company called an “inferior scheme” of a hostile takeover bid. The consolidation drama continues, just with more paperwork and worse vibes.

Vimeo’s Death by Private Equity Is Right on Schedule

It’s going from bad to worse for Vimeo, which is almost impressive given how quickly “worse” arrived. The video hosting platform just laid off what former employees are calling “most” of the company, including, allegedly, the entire video team.

Yes, the video team at the video company.

If you’re wondering who’s left, your answer is as good as mine.

This is happening just months after Italian tech holding company Bending Spoons bought Vimeo for $1.38 billion in what’s looking less like an acquisition and more like an assisted exit. The layoffs came on January 20, barely enough time for new employees to figure out where the good bathroom is, let alone what their jobs were supposed to be.

Vimeo had already cut 10% of its workforce last September, so this is the second round of “we’re committed to growing Vimeo” that somehow involves dramatically fewer people employed by Vimeo.

Bending Spoons has previous with this: buy a tech company past its peak, slash headcount, run it lean, and extract whatever margin is left. They did it with Evernote in 2022, Meetup and WeTransfer in 2024, and AOL and Eventbrite in 2025.

WeTransfer is the most instructive case study here with 75% of their staff gone within months of acquisition.

What makes the Vimeo situation particularly bleak is that the company’s whole value proposition was supposed to be the opposite of this.

Founded in 2004, one year before YouTube, Vimeo positioned itself as the premium alternative for creators who cared about quality over virality.

CEO Philip Moyer literally said “our goal is to cut through the noise, to be the platform of trust” when talking about their AI features last year.

But trust requires humans.

Curation requires taste. And taste requires the kind of institutional knowledge that lives in, say, a video team that understands what makes good video good.

The irony is that Vimeo’s stock nearly doubled late last year after announcing tools to fight AI slop. The market liked that! People wanted a platform that would filter out garbage and elevate quality.

But you can’t build that with skeleton crew headcount and private equity austerity. You need editors, moderators, people who understand context and culture and what makes something worth watching.

Christopher Nolan cast Travis Scott in The Odyssey and somehow this tracks: The rapper appears in the new Odyssey trailer which is the kind of stunt casting that makes you go “what on earth is Nolan doing?” until you remember he’s done this before (Harry Styles in Dunkirk, David Bowie in The Prestige). Scott previously collaborated with Nolan on the Tenet soundtrack, so this is less random than it appears.

Sinners Rewrote Oscar History, and the Academy Didn’t See It Coming

Ryan Coogler’s Sinners shattered a ceiling that had stood for 75 years. The vampire horror film set during Jim Crow secured 16 Oscar nominations, breaking the record of 14 held by All About Eve (1950), Titanic (1997), and La La Land (2016).

Sinners blew through it because of a structural change: the Academy finally introduced a Best Casting category in 2024, the first new competitive award since Best Animated Feature in 2001. That extra nomination slot pushed Sinners from a hypothetical 15 to the actual 16. Without it, the film still would have set a new record, but the Casting award made it mathematically impossible for any previous film to have matched.

Horror has spent a century in the Academy’s tech ghetto.

Good for makeup and sound design, rarely a best Picture. Only six horror films have ever been nominated for Best Picture. One won (The Silence of the Lambs in 1991). Sinners is the first vampire film ever nominated for Picture, Director, and Actor simultaneously.

The Warner Bros. context adds another layer of absurdity. The studio achieved its best nomination morning ever with 33 total nods, including both Sinners (16) and Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another (13), while actively being sold to Netflix for $72 billion. It’s a power move and a funeral at the same time.

Meanwhile, PTA remains the most nominated filmmaker in history without a competitive win.

One Battle brought him three more personal nods (Picture, Director, Screenplay), continuing a streak that now rivals Stanley Kubrick’s. He’s 0-for-many and staring down the Sinners juggernaut. At the opposite end, Timothée Chalamet became the youngest actor ever to receive three Best Actor nominations at age 30 (matching Marlon Brando).

The non-English film surge continued with Joachim Trier’s Sentimental Value landing four acting nominations, breaking the previous record of three.

Whether Sinners converts its 16 nominations into wins on March 15 remains to be seen. Titanic won 11 of its 14. La La Land famously lost Best Picture despite leading the pack. But the number 16 is now the benchmark, a moment when a genre film with a majority-Black cast and a story rooted in specific American trauma achieved the kind of saturation-level Academy support previously reserved for musicals about Hollywood or boats that sink.

The Best Film Editing race has one winner in my eyes, and it’s Andy Jurgensen for One Battle After Another. Film editing is a strange category because unlike cinematography or costume design, the best work often doesn’t announce itself. It’s about disappearing into the service of the film, extracting the absolute best of a director’s vision, a story’s momentum, and actors’ performances.

Jurgensen did exactly that with One Battle’s near-three-hour runtime. In a year where Sinners is dominating the conversation with 16 nominations, Jurgensen’s work stands out as the kind of invisible excellence that makes a film great rather than just impressive. If the Academy understands what editing actually is, this one’s not even close.

Leica explores $1.2 billion sale: Up from under $100 million in 2004, an absurd return for a niche brand that survived the smartphone era by leaning into heritage and luxury. Leica’s whole thing is being a slow-moving prestige brand with mystique, but new investors in 2026 want fast growth and faster returns, which typically means diluting what made the brand special in the first place.

Adobe commits $10 million to creators via its Film & TV Fund: The program supports emerging and mid-career filmmakers with grants, product access, and training, announced at Sundance with application details coming “later this year.” For now, interested filmmakers can email createchange@adobe.com to get updates.

This week we’re watching:

YouTube updated its advertiser-friendly guidelines to allow full ad revenue on content about abortion, self-harm, suicide, and domestic/sexual abuse. As long as it’s not explicitly graphic or descriptive.

Previously, these topics got slapped with the yellow dollar icon (limited monetization) no matter how you handled them, which meant serious narrative work got penalized the same way slop did.

Now creators can actually earn money for handling sensitive themes with restraint, instead of sanding their scripts into brand-safe mush. Topics like child abuse and eating disorders are still off-limits.

YouTube’s framing this as “listening to creator feedback,” which really means they finally figured out their algorithm couldn’t tell the difference between art and exploitation, and advertisers are fine with it as long as it’s not too graphic.

Retail Therapy

Ruko’s sprinting to fill DJI drone gap

Ruko just launched the U11MINI 4K, a pocket aerial drone with 4K/30fps video, 8K stills, a 48MP sensor, 3-axis gimbal, and an integrated touchscreen controller so you don’t need to tether to your phone.

It weighs under 249g (FAA-exempt), claims 64 minutes of flight time and 20k ft of range, and costs $389.99. The specs look decent on paper, but calling it “your first pocket aerial drone” is doing a lot of heavy lifting.

This is a company most people haven’t heard of trying to replace DJI, which dominated the consumer drone market for a reason.

Whether Ruko (or any of the other inevitable challengers) can actually match DJI’s build quality, software, and camera performance remains to be seen, but at least there’s something available while the FCC ban keeps new DJI units out of the US.

I’ve been thinking about that “holding space for Defying Gravity” moment from the Wicked press tour. The one where journalist Tracy E. Gilchrist told Cynthia Erivo she’d seen people “holding space for the lyrics of Defying Gravity” cueing Ariana Grande to hold Erivo’s finger whilst getting emotional.

It became an instant meme, detached completely from its context, reduced to internet shorthand for being performatively earnest about nothing.

The clip has tens of millions of views. But most people couldn’t tell you a single thing the cast actually said about the film in a normal interview.

That moment revealed what press tours are actually for in this era.

Studios aren’t paying hundreds of thousands to rent out the Four Seasons so actors can explain their character motivations fifty times. They’re creating conditions for chaos, for memes, for the kind of authentic weirdness that cuts through the algorithmic noise.

But there’s a growing segment of film enthusiasts actively avoiding press junkets and trailers altogether.

I’m one of them.

We’re the people optimizing for the one thing the press junket explicitly destroys: mystery. The possibility of genuine surprise. Junket interviews don’t enhance films. When was the last time a junket interview actually enhanced your experience of watching a film?

But that’s not what junkets are for. They’re not designed for film enthusiasts or cinephiles. They’re designed for the general public. The objective is pure conversion: interrupt someone doomscrolling Instagram long enough to convince them to part with $15 to come see our movie.

So how did we actually get here?

What press junkets actually were

The modern press junket was born from a logistics problem: How do you get Tom Cruise to appear on local news in Chicago, London, Tokyo, and Sydney in the same week to promote our film?

Well, you didn’t.

You parked him at the Ritz Carlton and sent journalists to him.

By the ‘90s, this had solidified into rigid format. Rent a floor of a hotel, cycle 200 journalists through in four-to-six-minute intervals and extract soundbites.

But to understand how we got here, you have to go back to when Hollywood’s entire infrastructure collapsed.

The collapse creates the machine

When the 1948 Paramount consent decrees blew up the studio system, something catastrophic happened to PR. Studios had to sell off their theater chains meaning their massive publicity departments evaporated too.

By 1957, indie producers were making half of all American films. Stars needed outside representation. And they needed it fast.

This is where Warren Cowan enters the story.

He co-founded Rogers & Cowan in 1950, in the midst of the Hollywood PR collapse and he understood that if you’re an indie publicist, you need a scalable system.

His system was the press teleconference.

It was as boring as it sounds, but essentially it was: Place star in room. Bring journalists to star, and suddenly you have your machine.

Worked like clockwork.

The Jaws junket

Universal released Jaws with a $1.8 million marketing campaign; the largest in the studio’s history. Seven months of buildup. Producers on talk shows promoting the novel. The same iconic shark logo on both paperback and film ads. Advance copies to “opinion holders”. Restaurant waiters , cab drivers, execs. Influencers before influencers became a thing.

Then came the $700,000 television blitz: two dozen 30-second spots across all three major networks the three nights before opening. They reached 43% of American households in three days.

Co-writer Carl Gottlieb:

That notion of selling a picture as an event, as a phenomenon, as a destination, was born with that release.

Jaws rewired how studios thought about promotion. You could manufacture demand. Turn a movie into an event people felt they had to experience, and this is what press junkets would service: not films, but phenomena.

Inside the machine

By the ’90s, the machine had crystallized into a monster. In both its efficiency and dehumanizing treatment of actors and press alike.

Celebs sat in separate hotel rooms. Typically at the Four Seasons; flanked by publicists, giving interviews from morning til eve. Sometimes for days. Round-tables grouped 6-10 journalists sharing 15-30 minutes. One-on-ones were shorter: Entertainment Tonight got 10 minutes, “Good Morning, Des Moines” got 4.

In one weekend, journalists at a single hotel could speak with stars from Dumb and Dumberer, Hollywood Homicide, Alex and Emma, and The Hulk. For Dumb and Dumberer, actors worked “8 a.m. to 6 p.m. straight,” returned the next morning, then flew to New York to do it all again.

Jennifer Aniston even declared “This is new, this is new, this is new” as a mantra before interviews; trying to trick her brain into thinking the 47th person asking about her character was different from the 46th.

Studios covered everything. Hotels, flights, spending allowances. Which created the ethical problem.

The Junket Whore and The Fake Critic

The term “junket whore” described journalists who attended all-expenses-paid events and provided predictably favorable coverage.

The ultimate scandal came in 2001, when Newsweek discovered Sony had invented a fictional critic named “David Manning” who created six bogus pull quotes for Columbia Pictures films. Sony had to pay $1.8 million in settlements.

Veteran LA times journalist John Horn said: “No one would ever dare to invent a fake critic again. But if you read reviews from junket journalists today, these ‘real’ reviewers still will give enthusiastic quotes for the world’s worst movies.”

Satellites changed everything

Around the mid-’80s, satellite transformed everything. The Satellite Media Tour let filmmakers conduct back-to-back remote interviews with stations nationwide from a single broadcast environment. Securing 30 or more earned TV interviews in a single day was very common.

No need to fly journalists to the hotel anymore. You could beam the star into their newsroom. By the late 90s, Electronic Press Kits (EPKs) provided B-roll footage and clips without requiring physical presence.

The hotel-room circuit became just one option among many. But it persisted because of what it delivered: the illusion of access, and the soundbite factory churning at maximum.

For decades, this worked. A $500,000 junket investment generated millions in equivalent ad value.

Then 2020 happened.

COVID crucible

The global COVID-19 lockdown fundamentally altered how audiences relate to celebrities. We all stayed home. And we all started listening to podcasts like we were being personally mentored by strangers.

The podcast boom wasn’t new, but the pandemic supercharged it in a specific way.

Suddenly, we were forming parasocial relationships with hosts who became our substitute for actual friends. You’d wake up, make coffee, and spend an hour “hanging out” with Dax Shepard or the Smartless guys.

They didn’t know you existed, but you felt like you knew them.

This is the environment that explains why Andrew Garfield and Harris Dickinson can sit down on an A24 podcast and spend an hour talking about skating injuries like two guys who just ran into each other at the skatepark and we'll listen to every minute of it.

Podcasts and the parasocial

Matt Damon and Ben Affleck recently appeared on the Joe Rogan Experience podcast to promote their new Netflix thriller The Rip. One Battle After Another stars Leonardo DiCaprio and Benicio Del Toro showed up on Travis Kelce’s New Heights podcast. Timothée Chalamet sat down with Theo Von for A Complete Unknown.

A single Joe Rogan episode can sometimes draw more viewers than a month of Jimmy Kimmel. The old link between podcasts and talk shows; where podcasts were seen as supplementary to “real” media, has completely dissolved.

Now late-night shows are legacy infrastructure for older demographics who still watch linear TV. For everyone else, they’re just a place to harvest 90-second clips, and you can now get better clips elsewhere.

Podcasts are the new junket circuit.

A-listers cycle through the likes of Rogan, Hot Ones, and Smartless the same way they once cycled through hotel rooms at the Four Seasons. It’s the same machine, just a different platform.

Except the machine can now also run in reverse.

When the junket makes the actress

In the old model, you became famous or you had a film to promote, then you did junkets. The junket existed to serve the already-established star or film.

But now, the junket or its modern equivalent, can also create the star.

Podcaster, actress and professional provocateur Dasha Nekrasova is perhaps the most fascinating case study of this. She co-hosts Red Scare, a controversial, politically unclassifiable podcast that gained a devoted following in the late 2010s. The show made her notorious in a specific online subculture. The kind of notoriety that traditional Hollywood gatekeepers would have dismissed as irrelevant.

Except it wasn’t irrelevant.

The podcast platform with its terminally online audience, its cultural cachet and notoriety, gave Nekrasova the legitimacy to make The Scary of Sixty-First, her directorial debut. A cult hit and winner of best first feature at Berlinale 2021. That led to an acting role in Succession. Which led to a role in Bertrand Bonello’s The Beast opposite Léa Seydoux.

There’s no world where Dasha manages to have a film career without the podcast. Not even a Bizarro world.

The podcast was her junket.

But instead of using it to promote films she’d already made, she used it to build the audience that would let her make films in the first place.

This would have been impossible in Warren Cowan’s era. The traditional path was: get discovered, become an actor, then get sent on the promotional circuit. The new path is: build an audience anywhere, convert that attention into opportunities, then leverage those opportunities into legitimacy.

The gatekeepers still exist, but there are now multiple gates.

YouTube essayists become documentarians. TikTok creators get cast in studio films. Podcast hosts direct features.

The fractured media landscape is changing who gets to make films just as much as how we promote them.

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This week’s letter includes: Sundance’s final year in Park City after 43 years and $13 million in losses, Netflix asking filmmakers to repeat the plot “three or four times” because they know you’re on your phone, an AI anxiety documentary premiering at a festival having its own identity crisis, and a $9,000 handbag that requires charging.

Render Reel

Over half of Indian moviegoers now routinely skip theatres: With theatrical windows shrinking to 4–8 weeks, over half of Indian moviegoers now routinely skip theatres and wait for streaming, hollowing out an ₹18,000 crore industry already struggling with screen shortages and falling per-screen revenue.

Kathleen Kennedy leaves Lucasfilm after 14 years: She hands over day-to-day control to Dave Filoni and Lynwen Brennan while returning to producing, framing AI as the next Jurassic Park–scale inflection point rather than an existential threat.

Apple Creator Studio rolls Final Cut Pro, Logic, Pixelmator, Motion, and Compressor into a $12.99/month subscription, signaling Apple’s intent to own the end-to-end creator workflow rather than just the hardware.

Anthropic targets Hollywood’s invisible workforce: As reported by The Ankler, Claude doesn’t need to replace writers or stars to upend the industry; by automating development analysis, and internal decision-making, it hollow-outs the assistant and junior executive layer that studios actually run on.

TikTok launches PineDrama as a standalone app: The company is betting that cliffhanger-driven, one-minute microdramas can succeed where Quibi failed, pushing short-form serialized storytelling toward a projected $26B market by 2030.

Netflix asks filmmakers to make movies for people who aren’t watching movies.

Matt Damon appeared on the “Joe Rogan Experience” podcast revealing Netflix executives are asking filmmakers to restate the plot “three or four times in the dialogue” because they know viewers are on their phones.

Damon explains: traditional filmmaking builds to a big set piece in act three. But now Netflix wants the big action scene in the first five minutes “to make people stay.” And they want characters to repeat the plot constantly because they assume people are scrolling Instagram.

Which, we probably are.

But playing devil’s advocate here: if you create lazy, formulaic storytelling that treats viewers like idiots, aren’t you giving them a reason to check their phones?

Just a thought.

The HPA awards normalize AI in the pipeline: The 2026 Innovation & Technology nominees read less like a future forecast and more like a workflow diagram, with AI fully embedded across pre-production, post, and distribution rather than isolated as a novelty or side bet.

Dreame enters the action-cam race with an 8K modular camera: The Leaptic Cube pushes headline specs and long-range wireless monitoring, but the real play is ecosystem control. Rings, and control surfaces point toward ambient capture rather than incremental GoPro upgrades.

​​Final Park City Sundance

Sundance officially begins on Thursday and it used to be where scrappy filmmakers with maxed-out credit cards premiered movies shot on borrowed cameras. Now it’s Burning Man for people whose Amazon Studios deals fell through.

So here we are. The last dance.

The festival is relocating to Boulder, Colorado for 2027, which means this is Park City’s final hurrah. Forty-three years in Park City ending, and everyone’s showing up to either mourn the loss or celebrate the escape; depending on whether you’re a nostalgic cinephile or a local sick of fighting tourists for a table every January.

Park City’s isolation was supposed to be the point. Like Burning Man, the difficulty of getting there created exclusivity and community. And like Burning Man, it outgrew its humble origins the moment someone realized it could scale.

Despite this, Sundance has lost over $13 million in the last five years.

Sundance Institute CEO Amanda Kelso recently said:

hosting a film festival in a mountain town is extremely expensive.

Which, yeah it is when your festival location requires attendees to:

• Book cabins up to a year in advance

• Or don’t book a year in advance but stay 1 hour away from the actual festival

• Pay Park City prices (read: tech bro ski weekend prices)

• Navigate a town built for 8,000 people suddenly hosting 80,000

• Rent cars to get anywhere

I’m part of a few WhatsApp group chats where you can find a sofa in a cabin at Sundance being offered for $150 a night. No joke.

It’s not a surprise that a change needed to be made.

Before Robert Redford died in September 2025, he’d already started advocating for the move to Boulder. Which feels significant, considering Redford was Sundance for most people.

But what many don’t realize is that before Sundance, there was something else.

The Utah/US Film Festival started in 1978, founded by John Earl (the Utah film commissioner), Sterling Van Wagenen, and Cirina Hampton Catania as a scrappy celebration of American indie cinema.

Redford took it over in 1984, moved it to Park City (his Sundance Resort was nearby), and completely transformed it; rebranding it as the Sundance Film Festival and building the infrastructure that made it legendary. The Sundance Institute, the labs, the grants, the year-round support system, that was all Redford’s vision.

So while he didn’t create the original festival, he created Sundance as we know it.

So why Boulder?

As a city it has a few things going for it that Park City doesn’t.

• Bigger than Park City but still has the “artsy mountain town” vibe

• More infrastructure (hotels, venues, actual space for tens of thousands of people)

• Direct flights to a major airport

• More affordable for emerging filmmakers

• Colorado’s creative scene is booming

Basically, it’s Park City without the problems that made Park City untenable.

This AI Doc

One of the most buzzed-about films this year is a documentary about AI anxiety.

The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist comes from Daniel Roher (Oscar winner for Navalny). The setup: Roher’s about to become a father and is spiraling about AI. Will his child grow up in a world where humans are obsolete or will AI solve all our problems?

What’s interesting is the title: “Apocaloptimist.” I felt that. That exhausting state of being simultaneously terrified and hopeful about the future.

We’re all apocaloptimists now, doom-scrolling while also believing things might work out.

The timing is perfect. Sundance’s final year in Park City; a festival struggling with its own identity crisis about what “indie” even means, is premiering a film about a guy having an existential crisis about whether humans will remain relevant.

CryptoMondays

Nothing says “indie film festival’s final year” quite like a CryptoMondays event discussing Film3 and “on-chain systems.”

CryptoMondays, heralded as “the largest in-real-life Web3 community in the world” is hosting an event about how blockchain and AI are “reshaping the future of creative industries.” The organizer, Alizah Whitney Johnson, pitches it as: “Many of the challenges we’re experiencing around trust, ownership, and value creation are directly related to how our systems are structured.”

But is the solution blockchain?

Viltrox brings AI autofocus to PL cinema lenses: The NexusFocus F1 uses Sony bodies to add autofocus, and zoom control to manual cinema glass, narrowing the gap between solo operators and traditional focus-pulling setups without altering optical character.

ARRI dominates the 2026 Golden Globes: Winning films overwhelmingly leaned on the Alexa 35 and Mini LF, reinforcing that despite constant camera churn, high-end narrative production remains conservative where it matters most.

Ricoh launches a black-and-white-only GR camera: The GR IV Monochrome rejects color entirely, betting that creative constraint itself is the feature and positioning single-purpose image making as a deliberate counterpoint to all-in-one hybrid cameras.

Insta360 upgrades its webcam into a utility camera: The Link 2 Pro won’t replace cinema rigs, but its 1/1.3” sensor, and gimbal tracking show how “webcams” are absorbing features once reserved for mirrorless cameras.

Cut of the Week: 17 Months of Editing Frankenstein

Evan Schiff (editor of Frankenstein) posted a time-lapse showing every timeline iteration from March 2024 through final delivery in August 2025.

Seventeen months compressed into 90 seconds.

The timeline slowly accumulates into layers: production footage from Toronto, London miniatures, Scottish location shoots. 51 audio stems. Then 51 music tracks. Orange VFX temps stacking on top. Alexander Desplat’s score demos getting replaced by Abbey Road final mixes.

Mesmerizing and exhausting in equal measure.

Retail Therapy

TDM Neo headphones twist into a Bluetooth speaker with one motion

A new audio brand called TDM is selling $249 headphones that physically twist into a Bluetooth speaker with a flick of your wrist; engineering a modular design that eliminates the need to own both headphones and a portable speaker. You can now turn personal listening into a group jam session by literally transforming the device in your hands.

French brand PEUTY launches $9,000 handbag with built-in OLED display

French brand PEUTY is selling a $9,000 handbag with an OLED screen embedded in the leather. A luxury purse that turns into a glowing, phone-controlled display, transforming a simple accessory into a Bluetooth-enabled fashion statement that requires charging.

Who’s going to Sundance this year? Let us know in the comments