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EXCERPTS - AI Expert Panel July 13 2025
Scott Mortman - AI Law and Ethics Professor at Purdue Global
"The pull toward vertical is very real. My kids don’t rotate their phones. They’re native to vertical, and it’s becoming their default screen language."
"Can we use AI to compose vertically? To break the fourth wall in new ways? These are things I’ve started testing. I was speaking with a young creator recently who said, 'If it doesn’t work in portrait, it doesn’t exist.' That hit me hard."
“We talk about AI as a whole, but it often breaks down into Generative AI and Agentic AI. Generative AI lets these incredible filmmakers do all of these creative things and get them out to a mass audience—and distribute in ways that were impossible earlier, or at least are much easier. But Agentic AI allows us, as a receiver, to look for content that is personalized, that we have a particular interest in.”
“I'm old enough to remember when everybody watched the same thing on the same network, but that almost never happens anymore. We’re all getting content that’s tailored to our own tastes. And that will accelerate with Agentic AI. The model will shift from mass broadcast to precision targeting. That includes overt customization and subliminal behavior shaping, especially as avatar-based content starts to dominate."
Stuart Acher - Writer and Director of "Next Stop Paris"
“I’m a filmmaker and I do think AI is here to stay. It’s adapt or die."
"As a traditional filmmaker, I feel it’s important ethically to incorporate the human element: the artist, the talent."
"On our last film, we hired over 80 people. I could never do that alone. But I also acknowledge that AI will become part of how audiences find our work, and how that work evolves based on their interaction.”
Isabel Martinez - Independent Creative Director at Usted, Writer and Director of "Soledad"
“I think the most complicated part, at least from my experience, is this: I have more than 600,000 people following my account on Instagram. But how to monetize that amount of people who really like the work? That’s a complicated question to answer. Distribution isn’t just about visibility anymore, it’s about converting attention into sustainable support, and that’s where AI may help or hurt depending on how the platforms evolve.”
Simone Bocchino- Award-winning AI Artist and Music Producer, Director of "King Kong"
“From my perspective, working for a long time with both American and Indian companies, I’ve seen them all switch to AI. These are traditional film companies. And actually all of them are either already switched, or they are in the process of switching completely or partially into AI-based pipelines.”
“Hollywood and other major players are watching us. They’re watching what we’ve been doing for a while, and what we’re going to do next. Because what’s happening now is a very interesting rise in new generations of storytellers: people working with essentially no budget, creating amazing movies using AI. The game has changed. It used to be CGI that pushed the boundaries, and now it’s AI. But at its core, it’s still storytelling. It’s still cinema. The technology just keeps evolving.”
“Some people think AI is a threat to jobs, but I don’t see it that way. I genuinely believe AI is not here to take jobs, it’s here to enable better, more creative filmmaking. If someone wants to continue shooting in a traditional way, they absolutely can. But now we have these new tools, and they’re allowing more people to participate, people who wouldn’t have had access before. That’s a big shift.”
EXCERPTS - AI Expert Panel JuNE 22 2025
Andy O. - OpenAI forum leader, AI product manager and designer
"Whenever we say that we've done something like 'I made a movie' 'I made a song' 'I took this picture'. There's a lot baked in that. And there's a lot of assumptions in that. That I spent like thousands of hours making it, or I spent all this money doing it, or it just it took all this time. We're all slowly and organically going to have to go through changing that assumption and sort of unpacking that. Making a movie still takes a lot of work. But, maybe it doesn't take millions of dollars?"
"There's not this thing where just because AI art is happening, it's taking something away from you. If you want to paint something by hand, or if you want to make a movie with film, you still can. We're just expanding the options and the diversity of what's available."
"When I say I made a poster 5 years ago, the assumption was that I hand-painted it myself. Right now, when I say I made a poster, we can't make that assumption anymore."
"I went to a Japanese store, and there was a handcrafted wooden spoon that was $140. That's valuable to many people. And I think that's beautiful. I think that's still going to exist."
Rachel Greenhoe - Screenwriter, Actress
"AI is going to be the next big thing in the same way, everyone getting a phone in their pocket that has video capabilities has made the influencer culture a big thing."
"The flooding of the market with AI tools is going to actually emphasize the human more because we're going to see the human minds and human innovation are still going to rise to the top. The only problem is. we're going to see that through a lot of grime and a lot of trash and a lot of wasted electricity on things that are ultimately going to be not very good."
"There's no such thing as truly free AI. Everything is pushing an agenda, and everything can be snatched away."
Alex Naghavi - Creative Director, Storyteller
"AI is just the biggest enabler and expander of what you think you're capable of."
"We're going to see a swath of people, especially in underrepresented communities, whether it's women or in Africa, or wherever it might be, having the tools and the access to create from their own creativity and originality."
James Jones- D.I.C.E. Film Director
"The most important part about AI: I worked in film for 20 years as a sculptor, and it takes me out of the position of looking for a job and having to become the creator."
"I don't think you can go past super saturation, and I think we're already supersaturated."
"Right now there's Escape and other platforms that host AI filmmaking to sift through. So you don't have to go into YouTube to sift through that. You can go into a specific hosting platform that is set up specifically for AI. You're going to see things like Tiktok being AI driven instead of AI curated."
Rogier Hendriks- Film Director, Designer of visual stories
"I was amazed that AI was already capable of doing post-production work that would take me two weeks. I was blown away by the fact that that AI already understood how to create film leaks, jump cutting and frame skipping, for example."
"Hollow Caterpillar was more an exercise of seeing where, if I could, implement my own style and signature. I never had the budget to do it. But I started with this exercise. And it worked for me."
EXCERPTS - AI Expert Panel December 8 2024
Rachel Greenhoe - Screenwriter, Actress
“There will be regulation. It will probably happen during or at the tail end or after the 5-year period, but it's going to be Written in Blood. And it's going to, you know, look at what happened in New York the other day (murder of United Healthcare CEO).”
“And now if we're celebrating a man being shot dead (I won't say how I feel about that), but it suddenly revealed that we have a real problem (with AI). AI is a problem that is not going to be solved without enormous amounts of fraught regulation. So that's unfortunately what the next 5 years is going to entail I think.”
“In the next five years we're going to see a lot of growing pain, a lot of unregulated usage, and a lot of people are going to be out of jobs.”
“I know we all don't want to think it, but when we say that AI will allow humans to have more time for creativity, they're doing that creativity with what money?”
Stephen Gibler - AI Producer, USC Professor
Quote 1: “Film making, Hollywood-grade big budget tempo full filmmaking, AI is going to drop that down a lot. AI is going to change the psychology of Hollywood in big ways.”
“So that means AI gives us open opportunity for filmmakers to spend $500,000 to make something that looks like $30 million. Kind of a District 9 type level quality.”
“What ends up happening? That film, with not much of a marketing budget or whatever, goes into theaters and makes about $5 million over a year and a half or two year period. Just playing in theaters.”
“If you were a filmmaker, you could spend $500,000 to make $5 million. After taxes, actors, distribution cuts, and stuff like that you walk away with $2.5 million - that's life-changing money.”
“What's going to happen is you are going to see a lot of people making films that again are getting singles instead of a Hollywood home run. Those singles are going to put them on base.”
“I'm going to finish with this: Because of this, because AI makes the budgets much lower, we're going to see much riskier thought-provoking line-pushing type content to get people to check these films out. That's also going to have an impact on our culture and on our economy.”
Jepson Taylor - CEO Veox, Keynote Speaker
“So one of the things I've blogged about in the past is I've said Hollywood is not smart enough to prepare us for a true autonomous War like World War III.”
“But I think really there's an audience. So I'll give you a few examples of concepts like:
- Hive Minds,
- Full Spectral Vision,
- Genetically Diverse Droids and Drones”
“Because that would really make sense. Those things are very complicated and communicating that to an audience is a lot for a storytelling narrative, but it's also a very depressing movie because humans can't win against this. “
“Like in Terminator when you had a human hiding behind something. But you can't hide with full spectrum Vision; you can't fight a Droid when you have concepts like Hive minds.
So when you look at some of these things, like Star Wars (movies), the technologies shown are really disappointing compared to what could come. That (AI warfare) would be depressing if it became real, but it’s something they're thinking about from a technical perspective.”
“From an optimistic perspective AI will save an incredible amount of brain Cycles. For most of us, we are overqualified for the work we're going to do tomorrow. That will not be true of our kids and our grandkids. I think AI is going to allow more, much more people to be creative, spend more time doing amazing things like this! Entertaining other people.”
Daniel Roger Smith - TCL Film Machine Director
““What we are seeing, I think what we see in this festival today, what we're seeing in the work that we're doing, and the projects that I'm working on, is that these AI tools can take an Artistry and make it flower, but really everything that I'm seeing is coming from Human artists.”
“I think where we will see AI's effects is amongst people with great Visual Talent. I think, as I understand how we're using it, we're going to see those people becoming much more powerful in their ability to execute their visions. “
“That's the thing that's really exciting is artists actually have powerful AI tools that are going to make them more prolific. That is very exciting.”
Stephen Gibler - AI Producer, USC Professor
Quote 2: "You know when we talk about regulations, this is a two-part thing.”
“It requires politicians to pass regulations that benefit regular people and not regulations that entrench the power of corporations that already exist. That's the biggest thing. If regulations are to pass it's going to be probably rigged. Where Open-AI, Google, with Gemini, and other companies have a moat now around them, it's hard for competitors to get in.”
“The argument is going to be: “well we made an AI model that also learns just like students, and it now regurgitates stuff, that's what AI does; this model just learns from nature”.”
“I really think US Case Law is going to go on the side of these AI companies right now. Unless regulation is pushed through that really is globally beneficial at the state level, that's probably the most action, to make sure that any intellectual property learned within the state by a machine (humans are exempt) has to be paid for, and start copyrighting things that are different than what a human being learns.”
Caperton Barnes Miller - Film Director, Composer
“I've had some discussions with people in my side of the industry, the Ad Agency and Production Side. One of the things that to me (I'm going to age myself here) is AI reminds me of sampling from like the early 80s from early hip hop and stuff.”
“But I think it's different, I actually think AI is less intellectual property stealing (than sampling), it's a little bit, it's cut up into tiny pieces, almost like those mortgage loans. It's cut up so finely but it's very similar!”
“But it's kind of a wild west. So the intellectual property thing I think we have to work it out and we have to figure out a way to compensate people for what they do whether it's for movies or commercials or whatever.”