Essays, production diaries and interviews from the people making the work — on craft, tools, and what it takes to finish a film in 2026.
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Featured · Manifesto
On being AI-native
Why we treat generative tools as a camera department — not a shortcut, not a gimmick, but a new lens on story.
Alex Ren·May 2026·8 min read
Production DiaryApr 2026 · 6 min readBy Iris Vance
Notes from Nocturne / 01
Building a fragrance film that had to smell like something. Scent, sound and synthetic light on a five-day shoot.
Nocturne began with a brief from Maison Verre that fit on a napkin: 'a film that smells like the last hour of a party you didn't want to leave.' Five days of prep, five days of shoot, six weeks in post. No CG plates, no green screen. What we did have was a generative pipeline dialed into the exact palette of our practical lighting.
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InterviewMar 2026 · 12 min readBy Mira Halden
The director's new cut
A conversation with three filmmakers on how the edit bay changes when every frame can be re-imagined.
We sat down with three of our roster directors — Iris Vance, Kenji Oyama and Amara Sol — on a Sunday in March, in the color suite, with the projector cooling behind us. The question we opened with was simple: what has actually changed?
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Field NotesFeb 2026 · 5 min readBy Nia Okafor
Field notes: three weeks in Tokyo
Location scouting a music video across Shibuya, Shimokitazawa and the coast — what changed, what didn't.
Three weeks, one director, one producer, one very small camera. The brief: find a version of Tokyo we hadn't seen in a music video before. The catch: we had to do it without any of the usual crutches — no drones over Shibuya crossing, no time-lapse of Tsutaya at night.
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