This week's AIography newsletter is live, and I'm especially proud of this one. Our Video of the Week comes from inside this community: Sarfaraaz Shaikh's Harry Winston "Sapphire Collection" AI fashion film. Sarfaraaz isn't a hobbyist who found an AI button. He's a motion and visual design lead with 18+ years (including a long run at Red Chillies VFX) who's now pointing that craft at generative tools, and it shows. It's exactly the kind of work this group exists to spotlight. The rest of the issue: • Hollywood just put AI-generated footage under the director's control (the Director's Guild's new deal) • ByteDance quietly open-sourced a free video editor that rivals the paid tools • Where the AI video models actually rank right now Go give Sarfaraaz's film a watch, and drop him some love in the comments. The best part of this community is the people in it actually making things. Read the full issue free

If you've felt whiplash this month, you're not imagining it. One week a festival puts a fully AI-made film in its lineup. The next, a craft guild publicly tears into a legendary director for promoting an AI tool. And now the Directors Guild has a tentative deal that writes AI rules into the contract. The signals point in every direction at once. Here's the thing I want you to hear, because nobody seems to be saying it plainly. The split isn't tech people versus artists. It runs straight through the working pros. People doing the exact same job are landing on opposite sides. The colorist feels it at a different moment than the location scout. Both reactions are completely rational. What I've noticed across a long career of these turns is that the divide tracks one thing: exposure. Whoever's paid work the tool can already touch feels it first and feels it hardest. That's not fear talking. That's people doing math about their own livelihood, and they're not wrong to. So if you're standing in the middle of this, confused about which side you're supposed to be on, here's my honest read. You don't have to pick a tribe. The belief-system version of this argument is a trap. The useful version is a much smaller, calmer question. Try this: Make two short lists. On the left are the parts of your work the tool can genuinely touch today. On the right are the parts it can't. Be honest, not hopeful, on both sides. Then get fluent in the things on the left before the decision gets made for you, and stop losing sleep over the things on the right. The people who do worst in a turn like this treat it as a fight to win. The people who do best treat it as a skill to learn. You don't have to love it or hate it. You have to know exactly where it lands in your work and act from there. Where do you land right now, and which part of your job made you land there? I read every reply. (Founding Members: this week I'm breaking down the single hardest technical problem in AI video right now, keeping a character looking the same from shot to shot, and the workflow tricks that actually help today.)

Is anyone interested in attending the InfoComm 2026 Pro Video Summit together? I received an email from FMC about Team Pass discounts: a team of 3 is $599/person, and a team of 5 is $549/person, which is cheaper than registering individually. The summit focuses on professional video, corporate/event video, AI post-production workflows, live/virtual production, and branded/social media content. If you’re interested, feel free to message me. Maybe we can put together a 3-person or 5-person team pass. https://www.infocommshow.org/pro-video-summit

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I just spent two days at Amazon/MGM Studios in Culver City at AI on the Lot, the biggest AI filmmaking conference in the world, and I wrote up everything for this week's newsletter. It's a long one, on purpose. Paul Schrader got up and explained how he's writing with ChatGPT now. (Spielberg, in the same week, said there's no substitute for the soul about AI). Studios that wouldn't say "AI" out loud two years ago were on the main stage with their names on the work. And the films aren't hypothetical anymore; they're shipping, and a few are selling. I covered every session I could get to and owned up to the ones I couldn't, since I still can't be in two places at once. Read the full thing here. If you read it, I'd love your take below. What surprised you? What are you going to try?