Issue link: http://digital.copcomm.com/i/1545302
www.postmagazine.com 23 POST MAY/JUNE 2026 all look the same, and then a softening, and then a grain layer and then the aspect ratio." What were you using for editing? "I edited it in Resolve." What was the cost of all the AI prompting and exporting? "I did not do a per-cost export. Now, what I will say, with the :08 sequences, is that it is very rare that the entirety of that :08 is usable. Usually, it will give itself away. You get every frame you can, and then suddenly something will happen that gives it away. Someone grows an extra finger or something weird, where you're like, 'Okay, that's not usable.' And then you'll have to cut out at that point. Sometimes your editing decisions are sort of informed by that — usable footage. "With Veo 3, you have a certain number of cred- its. I had a subscription. It's a few hundred bucks to subscribe. It was the Google AI Ultra subscription plan. If I remember correctly, you get a certain number of credits for that subscription, which was enough for me to do this. Obviously, my time is separate, but in terms of the subscription, it was a few (hundred dollars) in actual hard costs — not my labor." It's pretty incredible to think that such a creative video could be produced for that amount. "That's the thing. David is an independent artist, and to make this video would be millions of dollars. I mean to do everything we did in this video would be millions of dollars, and it would never have hap- pened. So that's the thing, and that's how I see it as a filmmaker. It is a tool to tell a visual story. Create images that work in tandem with the music (for a) particular emotional effect. It would never have happened were it not for this technology. That's the way I see it…I think for the independent film- maker and the independent sort of music artists, and people like that, it's exciting because it kind of opens up things that traditionally were only open to people with very, very large budgets, very large VFX budget and very large production budgets. So suddenly you're able to tell those kinds of stories with those kinds of images. It's a very complicated issue and I think we must tread carefully. But I do think the technology is here to stay. And I think it's important for filmmakers to kind of educate themselves about it. We all will arrive at a different perspective on it. "Obviously, I think (there's an) artisanship of a VFX artist. I've worked with amazing VFX artists who have blown my mind. There's a wonder to that process as well. And then you're engaging with a human, and you're bouncing ideas off each other. That's a wonderful process. But that was on a proj- ect where there was budget to do that. "On this project, where you're working with an independent music artist and the budget just isn't there, but you want to do something that sort of feels epic and feels like the enormity of the imag- ination is matched in the visuals, which it kind of is…There's a sort of expansiveness to the human imagination in this story and in this song that you want the visuals to match." What was the timeframe to complete this project? "It took me a good month, maybe a bit longer. Six weeks maybe. Not necessarily doing it all day every day, but chipping away at it every day I would say. I was doing it full time, I would say sort of a month for something like this." What are your thoughts of the results? "As my friend said, 'This is the worst the technolo- gy will ever be.' Isn't that crazy?" How often do you get to work on music videos compared to your own work? "Most of my work is longer-form work. I'm a feature filmmaker mostly, but what I find really wonderful about music videos and kind of short- form projects is that you get to try something new, so this is kind of a really good opportunity to try something I would never probably have tried with- out this excuse to try it." What's next for you? "I'm currently writing a horror film called In Bloom, which is about an algae bloom in New England. It's a red bloom — red tide — so the ocean turns red and there are neurotoxic effects that happen because of the bloom, but also sort of veers then into horror basically. It's an eco/horror, which I think is a genre that kind of, in literature, has been very well explored, and in film, less so. So that's what I'm writing. "I always do a look book for my scripts, so I've done a look book for this, but I'm wondering whether it would help people imagine the world? Would it helped to do a sizzle — a little, short one-minute something with AI to kind of show people what that would look like? So I'm thinking about whether I should do that as well? "It's a great tool for previs. It's a great tool to pitching — for writers and directors who want to kind of pitch an idea and help people imagine what the end product is going to look like. People are increasingly risk averse and they want to know more and more about what something is going to be like at the end of the day. So it's a good that for that. I think it's indisputable as kind of previsualiza- tion/pitching tool. It's a great app for filmmakers to have access to. And then I think the broader question is in terms of art made using AI. I've seen film festivals — programs (with) AI films — and responses have been very mixed. People have been like, 'Why are you programming these films and taking a spot away from (humans)?' I think that's where the gray area is. As a film community, we have to figure that out, right?" It often took 20 refined prompts to deliver usable footage. Rarely would an AI prompt deliver the desired result on the first try.