Hey everyone, You've probably seen the news: Darren Aronofsky just released "On This Day… 1776," a short-form Revolutionary War series created through his AI studio with Google DeepMind. SAG voice actors, AI visuals. I haven't watched it yet, so I'm not here to tell you it's good or bad. But I AM here to talk about the reaction — because we've seen this exact movie before. And I mean that literally. 1903 — "The Great Train Robbery" comes out. Audiences panic at the image of a gun pointed at the camera. Some people want films banned entirely. Late 1920s — Sound arrives. Silent film purists, including legendary filmmakers, declare it a gimmick that will destroy the art form. Chaplin refuses to make a talkie for years. Then it was color. Television. Home video. CGI. Digital editing. Streaming. The sky has been falling for 120 years. And yet here we are — with more ways to tell stories than at any point in human history. Now it's AI's turn to be the villain. Look, I get it. There are real ethical concerns. We should absolutely have conversations about compensation, attribution, and impact on working artists. Those conversations matter, and I'm not dismissing them. But the instant pile-on? The "AI slop" mockery before most people have even watched it? That's not thoughtful criticism. That's fear wearing the costume of principle. An Academy Award-nominated filmmaker is experimenting publicly. Taking a risk. Whether this project lands or not, he's pushing into territory most of Hollywood is too scared to touch. For those of us in this community — many of you would never have had access to traditional production resources. These tools are giving you a voice. That's not a threat to creativity. That's an expansion of it. So yeah. I'm going to watch Aronofsky's series with an open mind. Maybe it's great. Maybe it's rough around the edges. Either way, I'd rather see someone swinging than an industry paralyzed by the same fears it's had since a train first rolled toward a camera.

For the last seven months I’ve been building Lumarka, a platform that sits between AI video generators and actually making a movie with AI. It’s ambitious. I probably bit off more than I can chew. But the journey taught me something I didn’t expect. I started with n8n. Built two or three dozen workflows. Got pretty good at it. But somewhere along the way I noticed something: most of my workflows were basically code with a visual wrapper. I was writing logic, handling edge cases, debugging errors… just through little boxes instead of text. And at some point I had this very simple thought: why am I adding this extra layer at all? With Claude Code, I can work directly with the source. No translation layer. No dragging nodes around to represent logic I could just write. When something breaks, I’m not debugging a workflow and the code inside it, I’m just debugging code. When I want to change something, I change it. The feedback loop is tighter. The power is more direct. Don’t get me wrong, n8n still has its place. Modular automations, swapping tools in and out, quick experiments… it’s great for that. I still use it. But for building an actual product? Working directly in code with Claude as my partner is just on another level. What really blows my mind is that I’m even able to say this. For most of my career, “code” might as well have been hieroglyphics. I avoided it. It felt like a different species of thinking. I never imagined I’d understand what was going on under the hood, let alone enjoy it. I’m still lost sometimes. But now when I hit a wall, I have a partner who explains what’s happening in plain English, and I push through instead of bouncing off. That alone feels like a small miracle. So what does this have to do with AI filmmaking? At first glance this probably sounds like a nerdy tooling story. But for filmmakers, this shift is actually about something much simpler: creative control and speed. Right now most AI filmmaking workflows are fragile. You bounce between tools, UIs, prompts, formats, and half the time you’re fighting the software instead of shaping the story. Every extra layer adds friction. Every abstraction hides what’s really happening.

Adobe just rolled out Premiere 26, (They've removed "Pro" from the name for some reason?) and this one feels like more than incremental polish. A few highlights that stood out to me as someone who’s been using Premiere since version 3: One-click object masking & tracking: Hover, click, isolate. AI-driven masks that actually track moving subjects, without frame-by-frame pain or immediate round-trips to After Effects. Massively faster shape masks: Ellipse, rectangle, and pen masks rebuilt to track up to 20× faster, with live previews and much better refinement controls. Frame.io built directly into Premiere (beta): Review notes, comments, versions, and media ingest without leaving the timeline. Less context switching, tighter collaboration. Built-in Adobe Stock access: Browse, license, and drop clips straight into your edit. Not flashy, but very practical. Firefly Boards import: Early ideation and visual development flowing more directly into the edit. Now, a fair question some people might ask: What does this have to do with AI? Isn’t this just a Premiere update? Here’s my take: If you’re making films with AI, you still need to edit them. There are tools out there calling themselves “AI editors,” but that term is often misleading. Editing isn’t just cutting silences or removing flubs from a talking-head video. Film editors create stories. They shape pacing, emotion, clarity, and meaning. That requires both technical skill and creative judgment, whether the footage came from a camera or a prompt. Generating AI video clips is only the first step. Someone still has to assemble those pieces with intention and care to entertain, educate, or move an audience. That’s why improvements to real editing tools still matter... A lot. One last thought, as someone who’s also seen Premiere grow over decades: As it’s evolved into the Swiss Army Knife of NLEs, it’s also gotten heavier. Not crashy for me, but slower. That’s the tradeoff of being able to do almost everything. Compared to something like Avid, which excels at a few mission-critical things for long-form work, it’s a different philosophy.

So I got a bunch of Tavily API credits for completing their course AND I wanted to show how to use a Boilerplate template to start apps. Combined this with a system (Claude Code Plugin) I've been developing the past couple of months I'm calling 'Apex Spec System' and I made a pretty awesome and good looking app. Complete open-source here: https://github.com/moshehbenavraham/tavily-app How it works: - Phases → major feature groups - Sessions → focused implementation units - Specs → detailed requirements per session - Task checklists → 15-30 items to complete - Validation gates → quality checks before moving on The result: - 15 sessions across 3 phases - FastAPI backend + React frontend + PostgreSQL - Auth, CRUD, 4 Tavily operations, save results with metadata - ~15K lines of production-ready code - 2 afternoons The key insight: AI doesn't drift when it has clear scope, explicit constraints, and traceable progress. It's not magic—it's just structured prompting at the project level. Video below! Curious if anyone else is experimenting with structured AI dev workflows such as BMAD, Github Spec Kit, etc. What's working for you?

Before you jump in, there’s one important thing to understand about this community. AIography exists to explore how AI is reshaping filmmaking, storytelling, and creative workflows from script to screen. This is a place for learning, sharing experiments, asking smart questions, and helping each other navigate a rapidly changing creative landscape. To help keep the signal high and reduce spam, posting is unlocked once you reach Level 2. You’ll get there quickly by engaging in discussions, reacting to posts, and participating thoughtfully. What this community is NOT: - A place to pitch “make money” schemes - A place to drop affiliate links, funnels, or cold offers - A place to self-promote unrelated products or services If your first instinct after joining is to sell something, this is not the right room for you. What is encouraged: - Thoughtful discussion around AI tools and workflows - Sharing work in context (what you tried, what worked, what didn’t) - Helping others learn and think more clearly about AI and creativity - Genuine collaboration and curiosity Promotion may be allowed later and in the right context, but it is never the starting point here. Posts or comments that ignore this will be removed. Repeated behavior will result in removal from the community — no drama, no warnings loop. We’re here to build understanding and craft, not noise. If that sounds like your mindset, you’re in exactly the right place. If not, it’s better to know that now. — Larry