Back to the Future (1897)
Cinema’s oldest robot resurfaces from 1897. Paul Trillo builds an AI pipeline for F1.
Hi everyone!
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.
Render Reel
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