Hey there,
Here's what caught my attention this week:
blog.banast.as
I attended a PGA Physical Production Committee meeting with some serious working professionals: Emmy-nominated designers, DPs with 100+ credits, Disney's production innovation manager. Here's what's actually happening with AI on set: it's mostly workflow improvements, not the creative replacement everyone's panicking about.
The stigma around admitting you use AI tools is real but fading fast. Studios like Disney vet every use case through ethics panels, but the shift is happening. What struck me was how practical and unglamorous the actual uses are: organizing footage, testing furniture placement, pre-visualizing costumes, spellchecking ideas. Nobody's crew sizes have shrunk. The pressure to work faster is coming from tightening budgets, not AI.
Image/Video Generation:
Workflow/Process:
Costume/Design:
The future isn't AI replacing creatives. It's creatives using AI to spend less time on tedious shit so they can focus on actual creative work. The key is making sure these tools serve the people doing the work, not the people cutting budgets.
reactormag.com
Glazer's approach on Under the Skin was treating the entire film like an experimental sequence - most studios would never commit that kind of budget to something they know will alienate audiences, but he got them to fund it anyway. The real story here is how he convinced the money people to back something this weird knowing most viewers would bail halfway through.
bgr.com
Anthropic's new feature lets Claude generate functional apps on the fly without downloads, which basically forces Apple and Google to decide if they're gonna let AI assistants bypass the app store tax entirely. Shows why the "generate what you need" approach beats the traditional app model when you can skip approval processes and revenue splits.
premiumbeat.com
Roger Deakins' behind-the-scenes breakdown of Blade Runner 2049 is one of the rare cases where watching how a DP makes actual lighting decisions on set is more valuable than the final film itself. He's showing the real decision-making process instead of just talking about mood boards and inspiration like every other cinematographer interview.
