The Rough Cut: 2025 Wrap-Up
What our biggest deep dives and the year’s biggest news revealed about where video is heading.
We’ve published a lot of stories this year. Long-form deep dives, character studies, workflow autopsies, and through Render Time, a weekly pulse check on the news reshaping our industry in real time.
Some pieces hit harder than others. Some stirred debate. A few became reference material.
But which ones actually mattered most?
When we pulled everything together, a pattern emerged. Not a list, but a through-line: how constraint breeds innovation, how outsiders rewrite systems, and how the tools we build inevitably reshape the stories we tell.
These are the five posts and the five stories that defined us this year.
#1: Scott Ross vs George Lucas and James Cameron
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Part 2
Scott Ross was a Bronx kid turned rock ‘n’ roll roadie who talked his way into Industrial Light & Magic and dragged them into the digital age. He won five consecutive Oscars.
Then George Lucas looked at him in a Mexican restaurant and said, “And you are?”
Six years. Five Oscars. The king couldn’t remember his general.
What follows is Scott’s impossible comeback: partnering with James Cameron and Stan Winston to build Digital Domain, the studio that would rival ILM. But Cameron: genius, tyrant, artist, wanted all the control of an in-house studio with none of the responsibility.
The Titanic section alone is worth the read.
Digital Domain lost $7-9 million on the highest-grossing film of all time. Cameron called them “idiot savants” in Newsweek. Scott nearly came to blows with a man who stood 6’2” and was building the most ambitious film ever made.
The story was much more about any creative trying to build something sustainable in a volatile system as it was about the post-production world. It’s about partnership, betrayal, and the cost of building something great.
#2: Verna Fields
Before the blood in the water, there was blood on the set.
Steven Spielberg was 26, shooting on the open Atlantic, and his mechanical shark “Bruce” kept sinking to the ocean floor. The entire film depended on a creature that barely worked but Spielberg wanted to force the shark footage into the movie anyway.
Then Verna Fields, the 56-year-old editor they called “Mother Cutter,” made a radical suggestion:
Don’t show the shark.
Instead: underwater POV shots, terrified glances, yellow barrels, and John Williams’ two-note theme. Your brain filled in the rest. What could’ve been a disaster became a masterclass in suspense.
Oh, and one of cinema’s most iconic scares, Ben Gardner’s severed head bursting through the boat hull? That wasn’t shot in the ocean. It was filmed in Verna Fields’ backyard swimming pool with milk powder to cloud the water.
A Hollywood monster, born in suburbia.
#3: Steven Soderbergh
Soderbergh sits in a strange spot in modern cinema: he’s both a Palme d’Or-winning director and the industry’s most persistent saboteur of how films “should” be made.
High Flying Bird was shot in 13 days on a ~$2M budget using iPhone 8 Plus cameras. But the real story is in its workflow.
Soderbergh would shoot all day, then edit the footage on his train ride home to TriBeca. By wrap, he had a near-finished assembly within 3 hours. No post-house. No months in the cutting room. No divorce between director and dailies.
It’s an essential story because this is the only sustainable model left.
Soderbergh proved you don’t need a village, you need a tight loop between camera and cut. . Speed allows you to fail faster, iterate more which can only aid the creative process.
Speed is creative advantage. You fail faster, iterate more, kill bad ideas before they become expensive problems.
#4: Jim Jannard
What if we told you one of the most influential camera companies of all time wasn’t created by a filmmaker, but by the founder of Oakley sunglasses?
In 2005, 16mm and 35mm film had a 95% market share in cinema. Jim Jannard, billionaire and camera nut decided to build a digital cinema camera that could rival film. Industry insiders called him insane.
Then he assembled “The O-Team”: Frederic Lumière (the connector), Graeme Nattress (the scientist), and Ted Schilowitz (the rebel) and they invented the MYSTERIUM sensor and REDCODE RAW, enabling 6K footage to fit on a disk 5cm long.
At NAB 2006, they were supposed to reveal the price. Frederic had created a fake price ($57,500) to throw off competitors. But he forgot to change it before the presentation. When he corrected it live, revealing the real price of $17,500, the floor erupted.
#5: Michael Caine
In 1987, Michael Caine flew to the Bahamas to film Jaws: The Revenge, a movie so catastrophically bad it holds a 2% on Rotten Tomatoes. He was paid $1 million for two weeks of work.
Years later, he said: “I have never seen the film, but by all accounts it was terrible. However, I have seen the house that it built, and it is terrific.”
Now, at 92, Caine just signed a deal with ElevenLabs, the $6.6 billion AI voice cloning company licensing his iconic Cockney voice to their “Iconic Voice Marketplace.”
Brands, studios, and you can now rent his voice. Forever.
ElevenLabs’ marketplace also includes Judy Garland™, Burt Reynolds™, James Dean™, even Alan Turing™. The dead can now participate in new contexts. Tell new stories they never told.
Voice cloning might define the next decade of entertainment. The Simpsons can’t go on forever with 70-year-old voice actors. High-value properties will never be allowed to die simply because their human components aged out.
Honorable Mentions
Eleanor Coppola
Eleanor Coppola documented her husband’s genius in the Philippine jungle with a 16mm camera and a diary. Hearts of Darkness became the definitive chronicle of Apocalypse Now‘s chaos. Now, 45 years later, Megadoc shows Francis at 82, chasing Megalopolis with the same ambition but none of the support.
Movie Trailers
A 150-second symphony designed to hijack your calendar. We break down the three-act structure, the sonic manipulation, and why The Social Network‘s trailer is still the gold standard. In a world of infinite content, the ability to distill your story into a perfect first impression is survival.
The Simpsons
The Simpsons Movie 2 is happening, but the cast is aging out. Julie Kavner (Marge) will be 77 in 2027, and her voice is noticeably raspier. AI can preserve voices but who owns the sound once the actors are gone? Springfield is just the most visible example of a problem every long-running franchise might face.
5 News Stories We Covered
Sora: The Cash Burner
Bill Peebles, Sora’s lead, admitted the economics are “completely unsustainable.” Video inference costs 5x-15x more than text. OpenAI is literally paying billions so the internet can make meme videos with impeccable motion blur.
This is the first time AI stopped being a “tool” and became a wholesale replacement threat. OpenAI isn’t trying to be profitable now, they’re betting costs will crash 5x-15x over two years while they lock in users. Burn cash, capture users, monetize later. Except the compute bill has never been this astronomical.
MrBeast’s Viral Factory
Business Insider published an exposé on MrBeast’s operation. We explained what their findings actually mean: “By every measure that matters, this is a Hollywood.” Not an aspiring one, a present-tense studio that out-competes legacy entertainment.
BI’s reporting revealed the machine: 350 people, hundreds of concepts weekly (most killed before production), parallel teams juggling productions with hundreds of cameras, editing teams of eight tracking retention by the second. Six-figure projects killed mid-stream if numbers don’t hold.
We asked: “Are we entering a future where one-person YouTube empires can compete head-to-head with Hollywood studios?” Then answered: “Or are we already there?”
Hollywood’s Missing 42,000 Jobs
The LA Times reported the numbers: 142,000 to 100,000 workers in two years. Nearly 30% fewer productions over $40M. South California unemployment at 5.7%. Production at lowest levels since mid-1990s.
We explained why “Survive till ‘25” became bitterly ironic. Streaming’s “growth at all costs” era ended when profitability became the only metric. Mid-budget storytelling collapsed, rippling through every layer: catering, props, costumes, post facilities. “The middle tier that made Hollywood function is being hollowed out.”
We provided the historical context: In 1980, LA County held 63% of U.S. film jobs. By 2023: 27%. “Hollywood is acting like an aging movie star: still famous, still photogenic, but struggling to accept that it’s no longer the lead.”
What looks like loss in one ZIP code is growth everywhere else. The means of production have gone global. “The next Hollywood won’t be in Hollywood, it’ll be wherever embraces the tools shaping the future fastest.”
Geography no longer guarantees survival. Adapt to the new geography of work or become obsolete.
Tilly Norwood: Hollywood’s First AI Actress
At a Zurich Film Festival Summit, Dutch creator Eline Van der Velden unveiled Tilly Norwood, a hyper-real AI actress. They announced she was in talks with major Hollywood agencies for representation.
SAG-AFTRA’s response was immediate: “’Tilly Norwood’ is not an actor. It’s a character generated by a computer program trained on the work of countless professional performers without permission or compensation.”
We framed this as the symbolic battle it is. Van der Velden calls Tilly “a new tool.” SAG-AFTRA calls her an existential threat. Both are right.
The controversy revealed how fragile the post-2023 strike peace remains. Digital likeness protections were the hill everyone was willing to die on. Now an AI “actress” wants to sign with CAA.
We explained the real stakes: if agencies sign AI talent, representation becomes optional. If voice and motion can be cloned, the middlemen of fame become legacy infrastructure.
Apple’s Iphone 17 Carol Critter Ad
While Coca-Cola leaned into generative AI with weightless physics and stitched-together vibe, Apple doubled down on touch: puppets stitched, carved, painted into existence. Nine creatures built one joint at a time, animated by puppeteers in blue suits erased in post.
Shot entirely on iPhone 17 Pro, the premise is simple: a hiker drops their phone, the woodland cast picks it up and makes a music video to Flight of the Conchords’ “Friends.”
Yes, there’s a million-dollar army of crew and weeks of prep behind the “shot on iPhone” tag. But the core techniques are replicable. Puppetry, practical effects, iPhone cinematography and blue-screen compositing are all accessible.
In a year dominated by AI-generated content, we positioned Apple’s ad as a reminder: the tools can be cheap.
What’s really expensive is the idea and the hours spent executing it with care.
2025 isn’t over yet. We’ve still got a few more stories queued before the year closes, including deeper dives on the tools and revolutions that didn’t make headlines but changed how we work.
Stay tuned.