Hi everyone —
Eddie is now friends with ChatGPT and Claude. Has a slick iPhone app. And the biz model is now primarily pay-as-you-go so it is way more flexible plus the price was reduced a lot.
Prompt from within ChatGPT and Claude and tag the Eddie plugin/connector/MCP to create video edits.
ChatGPT and Claude already have your video project’s knowledge. You may have used them to develop the story and prep for the interviews. So you can use them to prompt Eddie. Assuming you brought in your media into Eddie, Eddie will then do that edit for you per the requested prompt.
In the case of ChatGPT you can actually see the edits within ChatGPT.
Here’s how to setup Eddie for ChatGPT/Claude.
Have a great weekend.
—Shamir
Also this week:
The Aussie company that invented the fluid tripod head way back in ‘46 is about to shut down. China’s bizarro YouTube picked the same week YouTube made getting paid harder to fling its doors open to the West. Also, New York’s City Hall made a Wes Anderson-style doc about a tenant union and nobody seems sure why.
Render Reel
Bilibili goes global. China’s YouTube alternative drops ID checks and relaunches its international app. They’ve hired community managers in LA and London but what’s most interesting is the Studio tool, which auto-translates your uploads into Chinese and puts you in front of a few hundred million people YouTube will never reach as long as it’s blocked on the mainland.
Yahoo now distributes docs. They teamed with The Nonfiction Hotlist to pick 20 shorts out of nearly a thousand submissions and stream them to its 700 million monthly visitors. They also did a festival screening at the American Dream mall in New Jersey last weekend.
Filmmakers accuse Letterboxd and TMDB of deleting their films for no reason. Dan Hentschel says his films keep getting pulled from both platforms without explanation. His film Sister vanished the day after he publicly mentioned it was listed, and Joel Haver says his self-distributed work was removed while other YouTube-distributed films stay up.
The people who sell screen time won’t buy it for their kids
Everyone reading this newsletter makes or uses screen time for a living. Whatever you call the work - films, docs, branded content, verticals, literally whatever. It ends up on somebody’s screen, distributed through infrastructure owned by a fairly small group of companies.
Now, about the people running them.
The NY Times pulled together a decade’s worth of their own statements this week, and the finding is hard to miss.
The executives who built the attention economy ration it at home. Zuckerberg limits his children’s passive screen time. Peter Thiel reportedly caps his kids at 90 minutes a week. Even Bill Gates held phones back until his kids were 14.
Evan Spiegel’s toddler gets no screens at all.
Let’s go back to Zuckerberg a second.
“I don’t generally want my kids to be sitting in front of a TV or computer for a long period of time,” he has said. Interacting with people is good, he argued, but passively consuming content “just going from video to video” doesn’t carry the same benefits.
“From video to video”.
Zucker isn’t really describing tech as he’s really describing a feed. The Feed. Coming from the man who arguably invented it. What he’s ruling out for his own kids is the delivery system, the version of watching where nobody chose anything and nothing was ever meant to end.
That’s the double position.
At work, these companies sell abundance. At home, their executives behave as if their children’s attention is the scarcest resource in the house.
That distinction matters for filmmakers because we’ve spent years being told that shorter, faster, more frequent and more frictionless is simply what the audience wants. The engagement data appears to reward endless consumption.
Maybe it does but apparently the dinner table doesn’t.
American repertory cinema rewrites the Asian film canon. Distributors like Big World Pictures and Arbelos are putting filmmakers like Tsai Ming-liang and Toshio Matsumoto into US theaters. In some cases for the first time ever. Only running at 15 to 30 screens.
Mayor Mamdani’s video team made a 13-minute documentary about New York tenants. It follows Brooklyn renters organizing against a landlord with more than 5,000 hazardous violations, Wes Anderson-style sunflower-yellow title cards and a pizzicato score.
The most interesting thing is that it’s 13 minutes long and basically just… a doc with no campaign attached to it.
Dana Harris-Bridson leaves IndieWire after 16 years as editor-in-chief. In that time it went from a Silver Lake apartment to PMC ownership, Emmy-nominated video and a Netflix series. She says she’s off to build something new.
The company that invented the fluid-action tripod head is closing after 72 years. Australia’s Miller Camera Support Equipment pioneered the design that still underpins basically every fluid head used today. Owners Mark and Diane Clementson are retiring, with final trading on September 25.
This week we’re watching:
Directed by Dave Meyers and Cam Erickson.
A kaleidoscopic descent into an opulent house party where the guests have no faces and the whole thing slowly turns into a nightmare.
The credits originally listed three “AI artists” which was later changed to “VFX artists” alongside studios that openly use generative AI.
So far nobody knows exactly where AI was used - can you spot it?
Retail Therapy: Cooling vest for hottest summer on record
England had its hottest ever June, Spain a joint-record hottest month, and parts of France didn’t even drop below 30.6°C (85 fahrenheit) overnight.
For crews, that’s translated pretty quickly into long days, exterior locations in sauna-like conditions.
The Ergodyne Chill-Its 6210 is a phase-change cooling vest designed for exactly that. Its cooling packs hold the torso at a steady 64°F for up to two hours, without needing airflow, so it works in humid heat as well as dry.
The whole thing weighs under three pounds and can fit under PPE.
Cop for $185 here.