Waymark’s next idea is to make use of generative AI to create images and video for businesses that don’t yet have any—or don’t wish to use those they’ve. “That’s the thrust behind making ,” says Parker. “Create a world, a vibe.”

has a vibe, needless to say. But it is usually janky. “It’s not an ideal medium yet by any means,” says Rubin. “It was a little bit of a struggle to get certain things from DALL-E, like emotional responses in faces. But at other times, it delighted us. We’d be like, ‘Oh my God, that is magic happening before our eyes.’”

This hit-and-miss process will improve because the technology gets higher. DALL-E 2, which Waymark used to make , was released only a 12 months ago. Video generation tools that generate short clips have only been around for a number of months.  

Probably the most revolutionary aspect of the technology is having the ability to generate recent shots every time you would like them, says Rubin: “With quarter-hour of trial and error, you get that shot you wanted that matches perfectly right into a sequence.” He remembers cutting the film together and needing particular shots, like a close-up of a boot on a mountainside. With DALL-E, he could just call it up. “It’s mind-blowing,” he says. “That’s when it began to be an actual eye-opening experience as a filmmaker.”

Chris Boyle, cofounder of Private Island, a London-based startup that makes short-form video, also recalls his first impressions of image-making models last 12 months: “I had a moment of vertigo after I was like, ‘That is going to alter the whole lot.’”

Boyle and his team have made commercials for a spread of worldwide brands, including Bud Light, Nike, Uber, and Terry’s Chocolate, in addition to short in-game videos for blockbuster titles akin to Call of Duty.

Private Island has been using AI tools in postproduction for a number of years but ramped up throughout the pandemic. “During lockdown we were very busy but couldn’t shoot in the identical way we could before, so we began leaning so much more into machine learning at the moment,” says Boyle.

The corporate adopted a spread of technologies that make postproduction and visual effects easier, akin to creating 3D scenes from 2D images with NeRFs and using machine learning to tear motion-capture data from existing footage as an alternative of collecting it from scratch.