An explosion in creativity
The bedroom is coming for the movies
In 2015, in a small bedroom in Highland Park, Los Angeles, a seventeen-year-old named Finneas O’Connell recorded his younger sister singing a song he had written. The room had a bed and a laptop running Logic Pro. No studio, no label. They put the track on SoundCloud so her dance teacher could choreograph to it. The sister was Billie Eilish and the song was “Ocean Eyes.” Five years later she swept the Grammys, having made most of that album in her bedroom.
A few years earlier, that story wasn’t possible. To make a record that sounded like a record you needed to rent a studio, which cost more than most people earn in a month. To be heard you needed physical distribution to record stores. And to be discovered you needed to get lucky with a scout walking into a bar the night you were playing. Then we got software, Soundcloud, and the algorithm.
In video, YouTube gives filmmakers distribution, and the algorithm gives them discovery. What film never got was music’s production tools. A bedroom producer can create any sound in existence, but until recently a bedroom filmmaker couldn’t conjure a Roman legion, a spaceship’s interior, or a crowd of ten thousand screaming ogres. They required expensive sets, a cast, and a crew.
Generative video is finally making that possible. Runway, whose founders now run an annual AI film festival, is competing at the app layer and model layer. Google’s Veo, Bytedance’s Seedance and Kling are all pushing the video model frontier, and around them a whole stack has assembled including ElevenLabs for voice and Suno for score. One person at a laptop now has the rough apparatus of a studio.
It looks uncanny today, but the tools are improving quickly. Even without AI, Everything Everywhere All at Once won Best Picture in 2023 with visual effects built largely by a team of five, several self-taught on YouTube.
So who is the Billie Eilish of film?
There are candidates already:
Kane Pixels, who built convincing found-footage horror in Blender as a teenager and now has a film coming out with A24:
the shy kids collective, whose Sora short “Air Head” blew people away:
When generation becomes free, the scarce thing stops being access and becomes taste — knowing how to tell a story, select shots, and pair the perfect score to make people feel something.
Last year, the Academy confirmed that generative tools will neither help nor harm a film’s chances at an Oscar. Within the next decade, I bet an Oscar will be won by someone who started in their bedroom.
Links
A good article on Isomorphic labs’ emergence and where it sits within the AI-for-drug-discovery market:
This website is beautifully designed:
The most accelerationist take I’ve read in a while, worth clicking in:
This made me laugh:
Harness engineering for self-improvement:
David Cahn updates his estimates on how much revenue we need to see from AI to deliver a return on the capex investment:
I’m off here on holiday next week, ciao for now:
