Today’s filmmakers capture more footage than ever to maximize their creative options, often generating hundreds, if not thousands, of hours of raw material per season or franchise. Extracting the vital moments needed to craft compelling storylines from this sheer volume of media is a notoriously slow and punishing process. When editorial teams cannot surface these key moments quickly, creative momentum stalls and severe fatigue sets in.

Meanwhile, the broader search landscape is undergoing a profound transformation. We are moving beyond simple keyword matching toward AI-driven systems capable of understanding deep context and intent. Yet, while these advances have revolutionized text and image retrieval, searching through video, the richest medium for storytelling, remains a daunting “needle in a haystack” challenge.

The solution to this bottleneck cannot rely on a single algorithm. Instead, it demands orchestrating an expansive ensemble of specialized models: tools that identify specific characters, map visual environments, and parse nuanced dialogue.  — Read More

Controlled video generation has seen drastic improvements in recent years. However, editing actions and dynamic events, or inserting contents that should affect the behaviors of other objects in real-world videos, remains a major challenge. Existing trained models struggle with complex edits, likely due to the difficulty of collecting relevant training data. Similarly, existing training-free methods are inherently restricted to structure- and motion-preserving edits and do not support modification of motion or interactions. Here, we introduce DynaEdit, a training-free editing method that unlocks versatile video editing capabilities with pretrained text-to-video flow models.  — Read More

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Five years prior to his death in 2025, Val Kilmer was cast as Father Fintan, a Catholic priest and Native American spiritualist, in “As Deep as the Grave.” But Kilmer, who was battling throat cancer, was too sick to ever make it to set.

… Even though he didn’t shoot a single scene, Voorhees has been able to realize his vision of having Kilmer in the ensemble by using state-of-the-art generative AI. And he’s done it with the cooperation of the late actor’s estate and his daughter Mercedes (Voorhees says Kilmer’s son Jack is also supportive). — Read More

AI is reshaping the way products are made: It’s accelerating exploration, lowering barriers to entry, and widening the circle of who can participate in the design process. In response, teams are honing new skills to meet the moment. In our recent report State of the Designer 2026, we asked the design community which skills matter most to them in the age of AI. Here, we’re sharing what those skills are—and how to perfect them. — Read More

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In a rare acquisition, Netflix has bought InterPositive, a start-up founded by Ben Affleck that makes AI-powered tools for filmmakers.

… While Netflix historically is more often a builder than a buyer, the company said it saw Affleck’s InterPositive as providing a unique set of AI tools that “keeps filmmakers at the center of the process.”  — Read More

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On This Day… 1776 is Darren Aronofsky’s short-form series focusing on key moments from that revolutionary year. The fact-based short films use a “combination of traditional filmmaking tools and emerging AI capabilities,” SAG voice actors and AI visuals, to dramatize scenes from the year’s most pivotal moments. The series draws on Aronofsky’s Primordial Soup’s partnership with Google DeepMind having each episode drop on the 250th anniversary of the event it depicts. — Read More

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In 2016, the legendary Japanese filmmaker Hayao Miyazaki was shown a bizarre AI-generated video of a misshapen human body crawling across a floor.

Miyazaki declared himself “utterly disgusted” by the technology demo, which he considered an “insult to life itself.”

“If you really want to make creepy stuff, you can go ahead and do it,” Miyazaki said. “I would never wish to incorporate this technology into my work at all.”

Many fans interpreted Miyazaki’s remarks as rejecting AI-generated video in general.

… But as these models have improved, they have sped up workflows and afforded new opportunities for artistic expression. Artists without AI expertise might soon find themselves losing work. — Read More