C3.AI
We made this at the beginning of 2025 when the tools were hard to use. The tools have gotten exponentially better. Still a little unwieldy, but much more reliable. The next couple years will be pivotal and it’s up to creative people to decide how best to direct its use for the best. My position is that it should be a tool to achieve a result, not a replacement for art and artists. Some of that is becoming inevitable, but ultimately I feel we’ll come to reject ai as an artform while embracing it as a production tool.
In 2024, C3ai, an enterprise AI company based in Redwood City, came to us for a film. We wrote one. We hired a director. We cast actors. We booked locations. Then it went away. Then a very large fire happened in Los Angeles. Cut 2025. They want the video again. We started over. We had no time. And not very much money. So we made it another way. In three weeks.
None of this is ideal. The process reminds you how amazing humans are. Actors conveying subtle meaning. Directors having vision and leadership. DPs making things look beautiful and consistent and deliberate. You sacrifice a lot of great things to do it this way. But it can work. And it will work better and better every day with every new iteration. But it won’t be the same. Maybe almost but not quite.
The actual dimensions of the screens where the video was to be shown required us to think beyond a 16x9 format, which created opportunities for a more creative approach.