Filmmaking / Directing

Val Chiper The hard truth is that you're using a retail AI platform, and that means several things beyond this issue: (1) You're subject to any regulatory framework that government or industry imposes, or the service you use wants to get ahead of (such as this issue). (2) Your creative work becomes part of the platform IP, and will be used to generate images for other retail users. (3) The images created for you have already been created for many, many others, even if you haven't seen them before (unless you provided original source material, in which case see #2 above). (4) Copyright provenance on the images and sequences you prompt is specious, and US Copyright Office, followed by other copyright authorities around the world, will only register copyright in specific cases. Even if registrable, the outlook for the commercial value of AI generated video is currently very questionable. The practical solution is, use more traditional tools like Toon Boom for your animation, which are in fact pretty good.

I understand your point, Shadow Dragu-Mihai, and I agree with the bigger issue you’re raising: if you build a production around a retail platform, you’re accepting a dependency on something you don’t control.

That’s actually what this situation has made very clear to me.

Where I’d separate things a little is that ownership, training use, licensing, and commercial rights aren’t identical across every AI platform - each service has its own terms and restrictions. So I try not to treat all of them as one system.

But on the practical filmmaking side, I agree with you: relying entirely on one external platform creates risk. A model can change, a feature can disappear, a policy can tighten, or a workflow that worked yesterday can suddenly stop working.

My frustration here is less about defending AI as a technology and more about the fact that I built roughly 70% of a film around a workflow that was functioning consistently, and now one of the central production capabilities may no longer be available.

Traditional animation tools would certainly give more control and stability, although they also require a very different skill set, workflow, time commitment, and production structure.

So I think the lesson for me is probably not “never use AI,” but "never let one platform become the single point of failure for an entire film."

Val Chiper The truth is that all AI restrictions can be worked around more easily than people realize, and I’ve explored the limits of what these tools can and cannot generate beyond a simple prompt. That said, I would never encourage using someone’s likeness without permission, especially children or minors, unless it is your own image or you have clear approval from the parent, guardian, or rights holder. If you have original photos, approved images, or your own person, character, or creature, I’d definitely be open to helping. I also shared a few tools recently that can check images for duplicates or visually similar matches if you’d like to use that as an extra safeguard.

Thanks, Dwayne Williams. I appreciate the offer and the point you’re making.

Just to clarify, Nika is a completely fictional AI-generated character - I made that clear from the beginning. And yes, I’m fully aware that when a real minor is involved in any production, permission from a parent or legal guardian is essential.

The point of my post was really a different one: the production risk that comes from depending on a platform whose rules or capabilities can change suddenly.

In my case, I had already built a large part of the film around a workflow that was working consistently. Then that workflow changed, and I didn’t have an immediate backup that could preserve the same character and continuity.

So for me, the bigger lesson is about dependency and production planning rather than trying to work around safety rules.

I do appreciate the offer to help, though, and the duplicate-checking tools sound useful as an extra safeguard.

Just clarifying Val Chiper, though: even if it's 'fictional,' an AI-generated character is still trained on real people's faces. So be careful with that distinction. The model learns from actual faces and features, so there's always that underlying data provenance to consider, especially with a minor character.

Worth keeping in mind as you move forward with the project.

It's definitely a risk if you have no previous graphic software skills or enough knowledge of the software you're using to adapt to the changes. When a platform shifts its restrictions or capabilities, you need the technical foundation to pivot; otherwise, you're completely dependent on that one workflow staying stable.

I think the filmmaker's first responsibility is to emotional truth, because a story that is factually accurate but emotionally flat won't connect with an audience. What's the most important element of your own experience that you want to make sure you get right in the adaptation?

I agree, Alfred. For me, the line should be drawn at the emotional truth of the experience.

Facts can sometimes be condensed, rearranged, or dramatized for cinema, but the meaning and emotional reality of what happened should not be distorted.

With Beyond the Five Senses, this is particularly important because the story is based on my own life and moves between Egypt, Italy, and Spain. There are many events, so the challenge is to shape them into a compelling cinematic journey without losing the truth that makes the story meaningful in the first place.

I think the best adaptation doesn't necessarily reproduce every event exactly as it happened — it makes the audience feel the truth of what happened.

Thanks for the thoughtful question, Alfred. I'd be interested to hear where you personally draw that line when working with real-life stories.

I completely agree, Zoltán. That distinction is very important to me, especially because Beyond the Five Senses is based on my real-life experiences.

For me, the goal is not to recreate every event exactly as it happened, but to preserve what the experience meant emotionally and personally. Chronology can be adjusted, events can be condensed or dramatized, but the fundamental truth of the story should remain intact.

I believe that’s where the creative freedom of cinema and the responsibility of telling a true story can meet.

Thank you for sharing your perspective. I really appreciate it.

Shadow Dragu-Mihai, I agree that audiences connect with the human beings and their emotions, not with facts alone. For me, though, when a story is based on real events, the challenge is finding the right balance between cinematic storytelling and the truth behind the people and what they experienced. The emotional truth has to remain authentic, even when chronology or certain details are shaped for the screen.

Sophiere Ford, I completely agree. For me, emotional truth is the foundation, while the cinematic structure is what allows the audience to experience that truth.

My project, Beyond the Five Senses, is based on real events from my life across Egypt, Italy, and Spain. The biggest challenge is that real life doesn't naturally follow a screenplay structure. There are many events, relationships, and turning points, so I’m working on finding the strongest narrative arc while deciding what should remain faithful, what can be condensed, and where chronology can be reshaped for suspense and emotional impact.

I believe we can take cinematic freedom with the details, but we should never lose the emotional truth of what actually happened or what those experiences meant. That balance is one of the most important parts of developing the screenplay.

Thank you for your thoughtful perspective. I’d be very interested to hear more about how you approach this when adapting real-life stories.

How many scripts have you read? How many have you written?

I've definitely had to cut out scenes while writing plays in the past. Some scenes just seem irrelevant so I end up cutting them out. It also sometimes takes me a few years to write an ending. Sometimes I even feel like I'll go back to one of my screenplays and write even more because it feels like the journey of the character isn't finished. Sometimes I'll reuse the character in another play so the character can grow in that story. I think I have a problem with writing stakes into a play. At least I can't write high stakes into a play, maybe low stakes. I rarely put any characters into life or death situations.

@ Jeniffer Cole This is such an important point. Many writers try to fix a screenplay by adding more, when the real solution is often understanding what is already there and identifying what is missing.

I think character motivation is one of the hardest things to diagnose because when a protagonist’s goal and emotional journey are unclear, it affects structure, pacing, and even the ending.

A strong rewrite is not always about expanding the story, but about making every scene and choice serve a clear purpose.

The hardest problem to diagnose is often structure, because it requires stepping back from individual scenes to look at the overall shape of the story. What's the most common structural issue you've found in your own scripts?

hi Sylvio Pretsch I understand your concern, especially when a profile makes very big claims but there is almost nothing to verify outside the platform. I think some kind of stronger verification could definitely help.

At the same time, I’m not sure industry credits should be required to join, because many genuine filmmakers, directors, writers and composers are here precisely because they are still trying to get their first opportunity. For me, I tend to look at the consistency of someone’s work and conversations...

You have to be careful - I think I have been fairly accurate in being able to ID the spam accounts but if I ever have a question I send a screen print of the account to Success@stage32.com and ask them for feedback. Usually within a couple of days I will notice the account has been deleted.

The double edged sword of technology continues to be a challenge but I suppose every tool is in one way or another.

I think verification and transparency are important on any professional platform. At the same time, everyone has to start somewhere, so having limited credits shouldn’t automatically make a profile questionable. For me, the key is being honest about your experience and who you are.

Thomas Harrison My favorite thing to drink was whatever you were buying.

My favorite to think about when financing a movie - yeah, pretty much the same thing.

Hey, @Thomas. I've written micro-budget scripts. It's driven what script ideas I've written, what I put in the scripts and left out, and the genres I picked.

That's a great question, and a budget just above zero usually means you can afford one location, a few days of shooting, and food for your cast and crew, which pushes writers toward contained thrillers or horror films that rely on tension rather than spectacle. What genre have you found works best when you're working at that level?

Thomas Harrison Great question. I think budget awareness can actually make writers more creative. Understanding production limitations often pushes storytellers to focus more on strong characters, emotional stakes, and compelling concepts rather than relying only on scale. A powerful story can still work with a smaller budget when the writing is intentional and the core idea connects with the audience. Sometimes constraints help reveal what the story truly needs.

Absolutely. At that budget level, limitations become part of the creative process. Fewer locations, smaller cast, strong concept contained thrillers and horror can work especially well.

Before film school, it was a film program called Cine Club at the university I attended. Every Friday evening, they showed 16mm classics -- foreign and domestic -- and I soaked it all in. It was the catalyst that erased my dreams of becoming a lawyer and sent me to film school.

My film school was mostly classrooms. Drama classes performing monologues and scenes, playing the game Switch which was a lot like the Meisner technique where we just had to begin a scene and the other person just had to go with it, seeing movies in English classes after we read To Kill A Mockingbird and Rebel Without A Cause. I also loved watching movies since I was a teen. I'd often watch Family channel, TBS, Bravo, and watch a lot of movies that ranged from the '50s through the '90s. I think in drama class I got techniques taught to me that were never taught in film or theater classes in university as the university classes focused more on theory than acting. Even though it seemed like a setback when things closed down during the pandemic and I couldn't attend open mic nights, several youtube channels, facebook groups, film challenges as well as stage32 were available with plenty of information to learn from which helped me to stay motivated and to learn even more about the craft.

I grew up in west Texas. It wasn't the end of the earth, but you could see it from there. My film school was small town theatres, drive-in movies, television (black & white, of course), and an affiliation as an actor in a community theatre. My parents saw to it that I got exposure to Broadway shows, many of which became movies. We have a large collection of movies that kept us entertained during the COVID pandemic. Growing up, art imitated life. That seems to be reversing somewhat, but I continue to look for those films that evoke real feelings. So, as many readers of this will have guessed, I am so old that I can remember when sex was dirty, and the air was clean. Regards == Barry

I had an unusual route. I went to film school, but studied dramatic writing. So I got a lot of story theory and the language of cinema, but no production whatsoever. I also got a lot of schooling by watching westerns and war movies with my father, classic story structure. I only later went to production school by working on sets. My first time producing, I'd never been on a set before. Trial by fire, but eventually I did every job on a set except for hair and makeup. Rough way to learn, but man has it helped me as a filmmaker.

I grew up in Appalachia in the 1970s and got interested in films at an early age through the old and more recent movies constantly being shown in television. Our local public library had a collection of 8mm home films from a company called Blackhawk of old silent Chaplin, Keaton, Laurel and Hardy and DW Griffith films that I checked out regularly and studied on our cheap home movie projector. I couldn't really afford movie film, so I would do "remixes" of films I recorded off of television with a hand-me-down 1960s reel to reel tape recorder, reediting the movies to tell a different story or combining different movies together.

In college, I majored in Public and Applied History, focusing on media history and film courses, hoping to work in an archives, but I needed a graduate degree for that. After college, I was laid off from my job because of the crappy Gulf War economy, which ended my intentions of saving up money to go to grad school.

So, my "hands on" film school, was going in debt on my credit card and independently shooting and editing three feature-length documentaries, editing them on a primitive desktop computer digital video editing system I assembled from scratch. My first documentary was the first feature-length digital video work completely edited and output from Adobe Premiere and I worked with a beta tester for Adobe to pull it together.

I eventually went to work in a university, teaching faculty how to improve their own teaching. On a practical level, I was able to use the skills I learned in filmmaking to help faculty when the started creating video for their own courses (and eventually for streaming classes) starting in the early 2000s.

I kept up screenwriting and researching and writing about film and broadcast tv/radio history as a hobby. Now that I'm retired, I'm focusing on some screenplays and tv pilots I've developed the past few years.

Robert Zwerneman trust me Robert, I’m a writer. We read vast volumes of stuff, see nodes of information in it all and can assess the direction.

@Val - OK, let’s connect and message.

David Taylor Yeah, okay. But listen to this—I went to a friend of my wife’s dog groomer’s third cousin, who has an aunt (or maybe it’s her half-sister’s step-aunt?) who reads Tarot cards.

Naturally, she gave me a reading. The very first card she flipped over was The Fool—NOT KIDDING—and her eyes grew as wide as silver dollars. She gasped, dropped her gin and tonic, and mumbled, "This is a sign."

The next card was some funky-looking dude sitting on a throne with his hand raised—the Hierophant. She tried to explain something about spiritual enlightenment, but honestly, she was pretty tipsy and slurring her words so badly it sounded like Latin. Then came The Hermit, which she claimed meant I was doomed to a life of endless disappointment and unproduced drafts... or some other strange crap.

Long story short: her final interpretation was that I’m surrounded by dreamers, plus a few charlatans pretending to help those dreamers who probably deserve to be [insert family-unfriendly verb here]. I snorted so hard the way she used it, I blew snot bubbles.

Then came the grand finale: Judgement. According to her, it meant I lacked self-awareness. She actually used the word 'clueless.'

"Pfffft," I slurred back, spraying spittle across the cards.

She took my twenty bucks, looked me dead in the eye, and asked if I wanted a... well, let’s just call it a "Bob Kraft special."

I told her I’d be back tomorrow. Surreal AF, but hey—if 2027 is our year, I gotta cover all my spiritual bases.

Robert Zwerneman don’t mess with that stuff or it will mess you up.

David Taylor What do you mean 'will' paleface? When she put her dentures on the side table and smiled... priceless.

Hi Sylvio,

As someone who's also relatively new to Stage 32, I'd say it's definitely worth investing time here. I've found that genuine conversations in the Lounges seem to build stronger connections than simply promoting services.

Your experience with BBC and Discovery productions is impressive, and I think many filmmakers here are looking for long-term creative collaborators as much as technical talent. Consistently sharing your work and joining discussions will likely make your expertise much more visible.

Wishing you and the Cinematic Fairytale team great success on Stage 32!

Hi Jane, hi Mercy, Thank you so much for your replies and your shared experiences! Have a wonderful day! Talk soon, Sylvio

Hi, Sylvio Pretsch. It definitely makes sense for composers to be active on here. I suggest building relationships in the Lounges, making posts and commenting on posts (www.stage32.com/lounge).

Check out the Browse Members section (www.stage32.com/browse) and Job Board (www.stage32.com/find-jobs).

And Stage 32's Introduce Yourself Weekend is the 3rd weekend every month (Friday-Monday). It's a great opportunity to network!

Stage 32 can be a valuable network for composers because there are many independent filmmakers here looking for collaborators at various budget levels. What's the most effective way you've found to introduce your work to filmmakers who might not know they need a composer until they hear your music?

Samantha Rivera The most effective way is the personal contact.

Excellent insights. I especially appreciate how you highlight adaptability, authenticity, character research, and collaboration as essential qualities of strong acting. These traits also show how much a believable performance depends on the connection between the actor, director, and script. Looking forward to Part 2!