Happy Belated Public Domain Day
The cheapest production upgrade of the year arrived on January 1
A week of unsafe sets, collapsing creator economics, and a dog driving a truck that looks more real than half the internet.
Also, Public Domain Day happened: which may be the most useful story here if you’re actually making things :)
Render Reel
Vertical drama cameraman nearly beheaded in on-set driving incident A 27-year-old camera operator was crushed under a Rolls-Royce after an unlicensed actor hit the accelerator instead of the brake. The production failed to produce insurance documentation, which feels like a glimpse into how regulated vertical drama shoots are. Spoiler: not very.
Reddit becomes UK’s fourth most visited social platform As Google increasingly surfaces forum posts and AI overviews cite Reddit directly, the platform is repositioning itself as the human footnote to synthetic answers.
Lightspeed partner predicts end to creator economy Michael Mignano publicly argues that tools like Sora will soon erase the creator economy. Perhaps a slightly odd take (or well informed?) considering he’s someone who founded two creator-facing apps.
Over half of YouTube Shorts served to new users is AI slop A Kapwing study found that 54% of Shorts recommended to first-time users qualify as low-effort AI or “brainrot.”
The Clearance Sale (Public Domain Edition)
Public Domain Day passed on January 1 which meant an avalanche of material slips out of ownership and into availability. This year it was works from 1930 and sound recordings from 1925.
What’s striking is how few filmmakers treat the public domain as an active resource rather than trivia. Everyone’s tracking new cameras and codecs but almost no one tracks new characters, or artworks becoming usable without permission and that’s a blind spot.
In a production environment defined by rights friction and shrinking budgets, the public domain is one of the last places where creative freedom actually increases over time.
If you’re making any kind of video content right now and you’re not keeping a running list of newly public-domain material you can use — visually, musically, narratively — you’re leaving free production value on the table. Go look at the list. Now.
Here’s what you can do:
Take a film from 1930 and actually use it. The whole film. You can literally lift the entire dialogue and characters. You can pull a Marx Brothers gag and drop it into a TikTok.
Or you could build entire projects around Betty Boop as she existed in her earliest form. You can also go as far as remaking All Quiet on the Western Front shot-for-shot if you wanted to.
And you can monetise all of it.
What you cannot do:
You can’t use a character as they evolved later. For example, Betty Boop is public domain only in her 1930 form.
You can’t assume international freedom. This applies to US law so a film that’s legal stateside, may still be copyrighted in Europe.
Highlights from the list:
Films
– All Quiet on the Western Front — Lewis Milestone
– Animal Crackers — Marx Brothers
– The Blue Angel — Marlene Dietrich
– Morocco — Marlene Dietrich
– L’Âge d’Or — Luis Buñuel
Characters & animation
– Betty Boop (original) — Max Fleischer
– Early Mickey Mouse shorts & comics (1930) — Walt Disney
Music (compositions)
– I Got Rhythm — George Gershwin
– Georgia on My Mind — Hoagy Carmichael
– Dream a Little Dream of Me — Fabian Andre
– Body and Soul — Johnny Green
Sound recordings
– The St. Louis Blues (1925) — Bessie Smith & Louis Armstrong
– Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen (1925) — Marian Anderson
Books
– The Maltese Falcon — Dashiell Hammett
Stranger Things finale out-earns Avatar in popcorn sales Netflix’s theatrical finale generated more than $25M in concessions over New Year’s, beating Avatar: Fire and Ash’s holiday concession take without selling a single ticket.
California suburb loses its last movie theater to condos The Regency Calabasas Commons, the final cinema serving a broad stretch from Thousand Oaks to Santa Monica, closed permanently on December 28. It will be replaced by mixed-use condos: in a neighborhood where many homes already contain theaters better equipped than the one that just shut down.
ScriptMatch analyses 10,900 script buyer data Just 5% of deal pathways run through agents or reps, while 24% flow through producers holding first-look or output deals.
A single 10-hour fireplace video has earned over $1.2M Since 2016, one looping fireplace upload has out-earned most narrative creators on the platform.
Got a film for Sundance?
My friend Ed Rigg, who’s been on the film fest circuit for awhile now and runs RecDek (film and TV recommendation app) is accepting short films to screen at the RecDek House during Sundance this year.
Only criteria: it must be a short film, and you must already be going to Sundance.
That’s it.
So somewhere between freezing in Park City, bouncing between screenings and bad coffee, and processing your official Sundance rejection, you could still end up watching your short play in a swanky chalet screening room.
RecDek hosts houses, parties, and screenings at all the major festivals. I’ve personally been to their events at BFI London, Cannes, Berlinale, and can say this is an opportunity worth submitting to.
It’s also free, so you’ve nothing to lose :) Deadline is Jan 16th.
Cut of the Week: The dog driving video that refuses to be AI
This video keeps resurfacing on my feed. A Labrador in the driver’s seat, another dog buckled into a child seat, scrolling by at golden hour.
The creator, Kanchanasopawong (aka Artwood on IG), a Thailand-based photographer, has the demeanor of someone who has opted out of urgency entirely as he drives through the Thai countryside - even letting his dogs take the wheel.
“Is this AI?” is becoming a common question on any video that beggars belief and I asked myself the same question but then clocked the original upload date: January 31, 2024.
We’re probably heading toward a world where videos will need to get tagged “PS” aka pre-Sora.
I’ve watched it 10 times now and I’m still not sure what the trick is.
Truck being towed? Or his truck idling in neutral? Curious to hear your thoughts.
Retail Therapy
Rokid AI Glasses: “Look Busy Without Looking at Your Phone” Accessory ~$599
These look like normal glasses, which is the point. Rokid’s AI Glasses bundle an assistant, camera, and audio into a lightweight frame you can actually wear all day. You can ask questions or capture quick POV clips without pulling your phone out every five minutes, which is increasingly the new luxury.
Clicks are “bringing buttons back” - Bluetooth Wireless keyboard ~$79
Clicks is a slide-out Bluetooth keyboard that turns your phone into a pocket workstation. Pull it out when you need to actually write emails or messages that require more than a sentence.
The wireless built-in battery that tops up your phone is a great addition and the keys are very tactile. It also pairs across devices so one keyboard follows you from phone to tablet to TV.
If you’re reading in the app, tap the little ❤️ so we know you’re out there.