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

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?

The new AIography newsletter is out, and it is worth five minutes of your day. Here is the short version. Martin Scorsese, maybe the last director you would expect, just told the New York Times he used AI to storyboard his next film. The headlines are already getting it wrong, so I wrote the accurate read: he used it for previz, the sketch stage, to get the pictures in his head in front of his team faster. He did not replace actors. He did not replace his crew. The movie still gets shot, in camera, with real people. Previz, not replacement. That distinction is the whole story. The issue also covers the new tool that just took the top spot for AI video and the one piece of dubbing software that is actually good enough to use this week. Best part: there is a move in there you can steal today. The same thing Scorsese did, scaled down to your desk. Read it HERE

NAB 2026 was the week AI got serious about post-production. Eddie AI hands you a rough cut by morning; TwelveLabs lets you search footage by sentence; and Adobe/Blackmagic/Avid all rebuilt features around AI in the same 72 hours. Not the "what's the next awesome video generator" story. Tools you'll actually be using in your work very soon. Read here: https://aiography.beehiiv.com/p/nab-2026-ai-gets-serious-about-post-production What's the one move from this batch you're actually going to try? — LJ

Two NLEs rewrote their color strategy within 24 hours at NAB. Adobe's new Color Mode in Premiere dropped the same week as DaVinci Resolve 21's new Photo page. And for the first time we have ALL the numbers public on an AI-assisted studio feature: Doug Liman's $70M "Bitcoin: Killing Satoshi" wrapped with 55 AI artists in post, a 20-day physical shoot, and a production budget that would have been $300M traditional. Click this link for the full issue Question for the group: When you read "55 AI artists in 30 weeks of post," what's the first thing you want to know about that workflow that the press coverage isn't telling you?