The Best Use of AI in Filmmaking Is the Part You’ll Never See
Google just put $75 million into A24 to build AI tools for filmmakers. If your first reaction was a groan — great, now the movies are going to become AI slop too — I get it. But I think this is one of the rare AI stories where the people in charge actually understand the assignment.
Here’s the thing most of the panic misses: AI can be of immense help in the creative process without a single frame of it ever making it into the final release.
Join the PERA (Personal Entertainment Research Assistant) waitlist.
The World's Most Indispensable Movie App
The RunPee app tells you the best times to
run & pee during a movie
so you don't miss the best scenes.
Download the RunPee app.
100% free (donation supported)
That’s the distinction A24’s Scott Belsky drew, and I agree with him. He said the AI developers who pitched this stuff got it wrong when they sold it as a way to make films cheaper and faster. The better uses, he argues, “preserve creative control and support risk-taking” and “won’t look anything like the prompted generation type of AI that people feel uncomfortable with.” That’s exactly right.
Let me give you some examples of what that actually looks like.
What people are saying
about the RunPee app.
Movie Watching Must Have!!
I go feral for this app. I love it so much and I wish everyone knew about it and used it. It is incredibly useful and I would be devastated if this app ever disappeared. Things I love: 1) the pee times! It’s so handy to know the best time to go and then read the synopsis of what’s happening while I’m gone. I never have to worry about missing the good bits! 2) knowing if there is a post-credits scene or not. This might be my fav feature because I would have missed out on some pretty critical scenes if it weren’t for RunPee. 3) the movie review and viewer rankings. This info has made me watch some movies that I normally wouldn’t and it’s nice seeing things outside of my usual scope. 4) that it’s a small family run business. I love shopping small and it really does feel like I’m part of the RunPee family! If you reach out to them, Dan will personally respond to you and he is so warm and helpful. GET THIS APP AND THEN SUBSCRIBE! It is absolutely worth it and you’ll be using it again and again!
View all reviews
Apple App Store | Google Play Store
Download RunPee app
The part you’ll never see
Take storyboarding. A writer and a director can sit together and quickly sketch out scenes with AI — not to shoot them, but to argue about them. To explore six different ways to shoot a moment in real time instead of describing it with their hands and hoping they’re picturing the same thing. That’s not replacing creativity. That’s creativity with a faster feedback loop.
And it cascades down the whole production:
– A director can hand an assistant a detailed animated sketch and say, “Go shoot this.” Now the assistant isn’t guessing at what the director wants — they’ve got clear instructions and real ownership over the shot they were entrusted with.
– A casting director can drop photos of potential actors into a storyboard and see how two people actually look together in a scene before anyone reads a line.
– A set designer can look at the animated boards and know exactly which parts of a set need to be built and which parts can be skipped because they’ll never be in frame. That’s real money saved on the stuff the audience was never going to see anyway.
– A writer can ask the AI to examine the characters as written — are they consistent? Does this character’s arc follow believable beats? Is there a scene missing that would give them enough motivation to actually change? — and get a second read at three in the morning when there’s no one else to ask.
None of that ends up on screen. All of it makes what *does* end up on screen better.
There are more. Location scouting, where you can see how a spot looks at dawn versus dusk, in summer versus winter, dressed for 1985 — before you fly a crew out there. Pre-visualizing a complicated stunt so you can plan it safely and know what it’s going to cost before anyone climbs on a rig. The brutally unglamorous work of breaking down a script — tagging every prop, location, and day-or-night scene to build a shooting schedule — that eats a production coordinator’s life. Logging hundreds of hours of footage so the editor can find the one take where the actor’s eyes did the thing. None of it shows up in the credits the audience reads. All of it is the kind of grunt-work that, if a machine does it, frees a human to do the part only a human can do.
Enhance, don’t replace
That’s the whole argument, really. Creatives are going to use this to enhance their creativity, not replace it. The tools that try to replace the artist will keep making people uncomfortable — and they should. The tools that hand the artist a faster brush are a different thing entirely.
I can speak to this part personally, because I’ve been living it.
A lever for one person
I’ve always been a solo founder and a solo developer. RunPee sometimes doesn’t make enough money to cover groceries. It definitely doesn’t make enough to pay for translators, or designers, or a second engineer, or any of the things a “real” company has.
What AI has done for me is reduce the mountain of grunt-work it takes to keep RunPee running, and — more importantly — act as a lever. It helps me lift more weight than I could on my own. I get more done in a month than I used to get done in a year. That’s not an exaggeration for effect. It’s just the number.
So when A24 says they want to put powerful tools in the hands of the best minds in the field, I know exactly what they mean. I’m not the best mind in any field, but I’m one person who can suddenly do the work of several, and that changes what’s possible. Now imagine that same leverage in the hands of a director who actually knows what they’re doing.
The honest part
It would be dishonest to wave all this around without acknowledging the other half. A Pew study out last week found that roughly half of adults under 30 think AI will harm society. That’s worth taking seriously — especially because that’s the same young audience A24 built its whole reputation on.
They’re not wrong to be wary. AI is going to have helpful effects and harmful ones, and most of us are going to get a dose of both. If you’re under 35 today, it’s a near certainty that some AI-discovered medical treatment will improve your health at some point in your life. It’s also nearly a certainty that AI will reshape your career, no matter what field you’re in. Both of those things are true at once, and pretending otherwise doesn’t help anyone.
And here’s the part that should really sit with you: we’re only talking about agentic AI, in a pre-AGI world, with robots that haven’t even scratched the surface of what they’ll eventually do. Give it five years. Today’s AI and today’s robots are going to look prehistoric.
So no, the $75 million isn’t the end of movies as we know them. If A24 actually holds the line Belsky drew — AI as the thing that helps the artist, never the thing that replaces them — it might be one of the better bets anyone in Hollywood has made in a while. The technology that scares people the most might turn out to be most valuable precisely where you’ll never see it: in the room, before the camera ever rolls.
Shamless Plug
I’ve been immensely fortunate to carve out my own career on my own terms. I’ve been self-employed for the past 20ish years, and it’s mostly been a dream come true. And I’d like to try and help pass that on to others if I can. If solo entrepreneurship is something you’re interested in, or if you have a small business that could use some AI-consulting, then consider contacting me and setting up a free 30-minute conversation to see if I can be of service.
Creator and developer of the RunPee app. When something doesn’t work right in the app it’s pretty much his fault. 🙂
Aspiring author. Would like to finish his “Zombie Revelations” trilogy if he could break away for working on RunPee and the cottage he’s building for RunPee Mom.