On craft, AI, and what hasn't changed since 2016
Production is not dying. It is being asked a better question. What a decade of making things teaches you about the tools that promise to replace you.
"AI will take away our jobs" is the most repeated piece of advice in this industry, and it is wrong in the same way "print is dead" was wrong. Production will not die. It is being challenged to work differently, and the difference is mostly about who you need in the room.
The prediction with a losing record
Every wave of tooling arrives with the same funeral announcement. Print died, except it did not; it became the thing brands do when they want to signal that something matters. Photography was going to kill painting, television was going to kill cinema, the phone was going to kill the camera department.
What actually happens each time is quieter: the floor rises. Adequate gets cheap. And when adequate is cheap, adequate stops working, because everyone has it. The premium moves to whatever the tool cannot do.
What the tools cannot do
A camera does not have opinions. Neither does a model that generates footage. An ALEXA will not make a bad script better, and no amount of generated polish makes a half-baked idea premium. That was true when the expensive thing was the camera. It is still true now that the expensive thing is the judgement.
The same logic runs through the whole stack. An A-list face in front of a half-baked set still reads as half-baked. A viral music video shot on a phone does not mean anyone with a phone can make one; the phone was a choice inside a strategy, not the strategy. Lofi works when it is deliberate. Right tools, right job. The tools changed. The sentence did not.
What actually changed: the room
Traditional production was built on big crews of narrow specialists, and at traditional budgets that made sense. Every role has its craft, and we would defend each one. But a DOP does not think about shareability. An editor should not have to think about copy placement; that is the art director's job. In the old model, someone senior sat above all of them stitching it together, and the budget paid for that someone several times over.
Today's budgets do not. What they need instead are generalists: people who can hold the strategy, the craft and the audience in the same head, and orchestrate a campaign rather than execute a department. That is the gap we fill, honestly, because someone has to and the budget insists.
What has not changed
Since 2016 the cameras have changed, the formats have changed, the feeds the work lives in have changed twice over. What has not changed: the audience can tell when something was made by people who cared, the strategy decides the outcome before the first frame is shot, and a set where people are enjoying themselves produces better work than a set where they are not. No tool has managed to automate any of those three. We are not holding our breath.
If a partner tells you AI makes production cheap now, ask them what they think the expensive part was.
Questions we get asked
- Will AI replace video production agencies?
- The tasks are changing; the job is not. The job was never operating equipment. It is taste, strategy, and the orchestration of a campaign for a specific audience. AI raises the floor on execution, which makes those three things more decisive, not less.
- What should brands look for in a production partner now?
- Generalists who can orchestrate. Traditional production assumed big teams of narrow specialists. At today's budgets, the partner you want is the one who can hold the strategy, the craft, and the audience in the same head.