What we’re NOT gonna do is talk shit about Mike Flanagan. The man who gave us what I consider to be one of the best shows ever written, directed, filmed, acted, scored. And that’s Midnight Mass.

How about let's stop building more personal assistants to manage our emails and more AI startups to manage and cure diseases

Many critiques of AI filmmaking compare it to an ideal scenario with top-tier talent most of us will never get to work with. They talk about losing the collaboration with other artists that elevates your work. For most directors, the reality of traditional filmmaking is working within the limits of whoever you can afford and whoever is available. The actor who shows up without their lines memorized. The DP who’s still learning and can’t quite give you the Roger Deakins look you’re after. AI has its own limitations. But for those of us working without big budgets, it’s often a better tool for getting what’s in our heads onto the screen.

we’re cooked I’m afraid

Call me crazy (cuckoo cuckoo)… but I will keep repeating this Claude + instagram is going to make more millionaires in 2026 than crypto ever did in 2015

If you want to know who survives AI, look at what happened to Hollywood in the 1970s. Movie Studios used to enforce tight “shooting ratios”; usually 5:1, maybe 10:1 TOPS. As in, for every 5 feet of film shot, at least 1 foot had to end up in the final cut (35mm was expensive!) In the 70s, there was a rapid elimination of production constraints. Improvements in film cost and camera portability made the old studio rules…obsolete. Why not take multiple angles, roll simultaneously? Set could have 3, 5, even 10 cameras rolling at once. Shooting ratios *exploded*, 50:1, even 100:1 (Apocalypse Now)! Of course, it also *radically* changed the workflow. Editing use to be the quiet, thankless job in the studio years (30s-50s). Suddenly, they became the most important people on the totem pole! How do you find the masterpiece hiding in the (literal miles) of film? A ton of the footage was…trash, of course. But as each individual camera because *less* important, it opened up directors to take on significantly higher risks. Now, don’t get me wrong. Insane shooting ratios were still *kinda* a niche in the 70s. More traditional directors stuck with only slightly inflated shooting ratios (15:1, 30:1 common); it was the more experimental pioneers (Coppola, Scorsese, etc) that hit the big 100:1 numbers. The huge ratios were still crazy. Until they weren’t. You can probably guess what happened in the early 2000s. Digital cameras reduced the cost of individual footage to a complete non-constraint. Effectively free, don’t even cut on set, just keep the camera rolling. Suddenly…*EVERYONE* starts shooting 100:1. Entire new forms of content get created, like Reality TV, where ratios can hit 500:1! Massive shift of human labor to the editing side. I’d say, we’re currently in the “1970s Hollywood” of AI. It can be easy (and cheap!) to produce things (code, tools, etc), but YOU have to be the ruthless editor. It’s the “miles of film” problem all over again. Hollywood solved it by throwing massively more resources on the editing side, and editing became a “constantly talking with the director about vision/direction” job, instead of a “hide in the back office and do your work” job. It’s a hunch, but I’d bet that filmmakers closer to the experimental 1970s “ratio explosion” directors handled the later 2000s digital shift *much* better, because the underlying principles were the same. They’d certainly be ahead of the curve predicting it, and (hopefully) were less surprised when the digital ratios did hit. I’m not saying AI is exactly the same problem. But it’s a good idea to look at parallels in history where rapid elimination of constraints changed an industry, and how that industry handled it 5, 10, even 50 years later! When something starts to get cheap…helps to imagine what would happen when it’s free!

I gave Claude Opus 5.5 the original 1982 Gremlins screenplay and access to @invideoOfficial's new MCP and told it to make a trailer for the film using only the screenplay. No existing references from @joe_dante's films were permitted. Claude designed the creatures from the script's descriptions, then wrote, generated, scored, and cut this trailer on its own using @invideoOfficial. I provided no creative input beyond the initial prompt, which told it to make it look like it was from 1984 and use practical creature effects. What do you think? How'd it do?

Yeah. Or Ghoulies.

Accidentally running a coverage shot with no faces or dialogue in Seedance 2.5 1080.

Forgive the haters for they know not what you do.

One of the great Lansdowne Road goals! #COYBIG #NationsLeague

The correct presentation of my new novel MICHAEL.. it's a sledgehammer of a yarn guaranteed to make you laugh and weep linktr.ee/michael_bobmortime…

I grew up on this man's movies. Blade 2, Pan's Labyrinth, Hellboy 2, Crimson Peak. He's above average and nobody can take that from him. I still prefer the first Blade. But he's a director who has benefited enormously from the monopoly that is the industry, and that monopoly didn't just corner distribution. It supressed creativity. He isn't doing the set design. He isn't doing the costumes. He isn't writing the score. All of it is outsourced to other talents, and that's fine, that's how movies get made. But it means del Toro is the race car. The guy with nothing but his wits and his ideas is Usain Bolt. One of them was built by a team with a budget. The other one is just a man with only himself to lean on. And the car beats the man every time. That's the whole point of the car. But ai just repossessed that car. Now a guy like del Toro has to race for real. Creativity against creativity, nothing in between. They don't want that. Hollywood decided a long time ago that he was in. You can't bring a knife to a fight where the other guy has a bazooka and fighter jets. And here's the bullshit. When he gave that speech about cinema illiteracy at the BFI dinner, the man who introduced him was Ted Sarandos. Netflix co-CEO. The company that used generative ai in roughly 300 titles this year, and whose CEO bragged about 17 minutes of ai footage made twice as fast at half the cost. Hollywood is already using it, man. After all these duds, what gives them the idea they get to decide who else is allowed to? That's delusion, bolstered by sheer hubris. And while we're here, ask how many set design and practical effects jobs cgi and vfx already put out of business. Whole crafts got swallowed and nobody stood at a podium about it. It is what it is. So yes. The guy who got off work and spent his last twenty bucks on a burrito and a soda is going to use ai to animate that explosion. He'd be a fool not to, when del Toro has the entire establishment standing behind him.