Stories
- Kavan the Kid's Chronicles of Bone is fantasy TV that stands tall against the studios
Kavan the Kid's The Chronicles of Bone returns with a 24-minute Chapter Six that works even as a first episode, with rich characters, blockbuster fights and a world built from his own masks and costumes. The series is a Magnific Original made with hosted models including Seedance and Nano Banana, and its 12 episodes have 40.9 million YouTube views.
- AI Bible's studio is now for sale to churches. Budget for more than $19
PRAY.COM has opened Pray Production Studio, the AI pipeline behind its AI Bible channel, to every church. The $19 plan buys about 20 video takes, the company's own case-study films cost about $802 and $1,008 to generate in-house, and the real opening is for genre channels that can package a house style.
- Voice actors get a vote on AI. They don't get the AI clause yet
SAG-AFTRA's animation voice actors vote until 29 October on a four-year deal with 3% raises and better streaming residuals. The union says it imports this year's live-action AI terms, but that text exempts non-human characters and its human-preference test expires in 2030, and the animation clause itself is not yet public.
- Rory Flynn rebuilt the Fast & Furious finale as one drone shot, and showed his work
Rory Flynn rebuilt the Terminal Way finale of The Fast and the Furious as a single FPV-drone take, using Opus 5.5, a gray-box Blender previs and a second-by-second Seedance 2.5 prompt. The crash physics and paint hold up and the full workflow is public, though it re-stages the 2001 scene and leans on frames of the film.
- Christopher Fryant's Blackout LoRA kills the lights and keeps the motion
Part 3 of Christopher Fryant's You already know LTX series switches off a bumper car hall and lights it with a flashlight, and the motion holds even as the model redesigns the cars. Parts 1 and 2 use official Lightricks LoRAs, every part runs through the $30 Grok Bot plan, and the series is labeled a paid partnership on X.
- Guadagnino made his OpenAI movie with 'zero AI'. That label now cuts both ways
Luca Guadagnino told THR that zero AI went into Artificial, his OpenAI film starring Andrew Garfield as Sam Altman, and one repost of the line drew three times the impressions of THR's own post. It is the director's own claim and no standard exists to check it, so for AI filmmakers the opening is to show their process just as openly.
- Your AI Christmas short could air on cable this December. Read the rules first
AFRO TV's free Cue Film Fest takes AI Christmas shorts until 20 November and airs its awards live on Comcast Xfinity and NOW TV on 12 December. The terms rank 45% of the shortlist on audience ratings, likes and views, start a two-year license at submission, and still publish no prize amounts.
- The AI creative tool map turns four months old. Here's what changed since
Machine Cinema mapped more than 250 AI creative tools in May. Four months on, models still rule, Adobe bought the upscaler that sat beside it, Sora is gone and Kling 4.0 is only partly out. Here is the map phase by phase for newcomers, read as one well-connected community's view rather than a census of the market.
- Astana's $450,000 prize shows AI film contests are now a career
Latvia's Nikolay Shestak took the $450,000 Grand Prix in Astana on 3 October, his second big contest win in seven months after a $100,000 Higgsfield prize in March. The film is not yet public, Dubai and XPRIZE have paid AI films more, and ByteDance sat on both sides of the table as partner and juror.
- Google's next Nano Banana is sitting in Flow, and its number just got smaller
An unreleased image model has turned up in Google Flow's character menu, first as Nano Banana 2.5 Flash and then renamed Nano Banana 2.1. The only evidence is two screenshots from one leak account, Google has confirmed no name, date or specs, and the smaller number says nothing yet about the model itself.
- Runway wants a cinematic desktop. For now it lives in a demo reel
Runway Labs showed Project Continuum, a research desktop where some windows are generated video that reshapes itself as you click and resize. It runs on Runway's Solaris model, but the company has published no latency, frame rate or access date, and its own notes say legible text and long sessions are unsolved.
- An AI music video every 2.6 days. What do Chris and Crystal actually own?
Crystal Trimble and Chris Marsh post a polished AI music video every 2.6 days and sell the songs on YouTube and Spotify. Their legal line calls the work fully owned, but Suno's September terms warrant no copyright, cap Pro downloads at 20 a month, and the Copyright Office protects only the human lyrics and edit.
- Kerala's CM wants tougher AI laws. A copyright order already says who owns AI work
Kerala's CM V D Satheesan asked for tougher piracy and deepfake laws, and copyright is Delhi's call anyway. The real answer sits in a 31 August order from India's Registrar of Copyrights: DABUS cannot be an author, the human behind it could be. It covers one artwork, not a film, and leaves AI authorship to Parliament.
- LightBox Expo calls generative AI theft. Its studio sponsors are betting on it
LightBox Expo co-founder Jim Demonakos calls generative AI theft, and the show bans text-to-image work from display and sale when it opens on 23 October. The written rule still allows image upscalers and names no detection method, and the Disney, Netflix and Adobe names on its sponsor wall are betting heavily on generative AI elsewhere.
- Valve lets you monetize a Counter-Strike video. Its rules never imagined an AI remake
An AI clip that turns Counter-Strike's Office map into a live-action raid copies no file from Valve's game, which is exactly the case Valve's video policy never addresses. Ads through YouTube are fine and sales or licensing are not. Larian's fan policy already bans generative AI recreations, and YouTube adds its own rules on mass-produced AI and disclosure.
- Apple's VFX crew got a union contract. The AI clause came off the shelf
Apple Studios' small VFX unit, mostly coordinators, wranglers and in-house compositors, has a first IATSE contract with minimum rates and backdated benefits. The AI protections are imported from the 2024 Basic Agreement: they bar forcing staff to prompt colleagues out of work and require consent for likeness scans, but no arbitrator can restrict AI use, and vendor artists are not covered.
- Kling 4.0's real upgrade is control. The catch is in the terms
Kling 4.0 adds ten keyframes, a 15-item reference budget and element edits, but 4K is old news and 30 seconds only matches Seedance 2.5. Flash is live at 720p for top-tier subscribers, the full model is due in October with no price or API, and Kling's terms bar commercial use of outputs without its written permission.
- Hollywood fears rogue AI agents. The gate indie filmmakers hit is paperwork
The Ankler asked what happens when AI goes rogue inside the studios. No such incident has been reported, and the documented ones all involve OpenAI's own agents. The gate an independent AI film actually hits is paperwork: Netflix's written-approval rules, E&O underwriting, copyright disclosure and provenance records that transcoding can strip.
- The world's first AI feature film has now been made six times
DreadClub was the first animated one, Brainstare the first live-action one, Hell Grind and Apocalypse Tape 1990 made their own claims, and Krishna Chandra Das has now called two of his films the first. His new trailer strikes the words through on screen. The claims add qualifiers faster than they add audiences, and the constraint story is the one nobody can beat.
- Adobe just bought the last step of your AI film for $340 million
Adobe's SEC filing puts the Topaz Labs price at about $340 million, a number neither announcement gave. Topaz was already inside Premiere, After Effects and Resolve before the deal, so what changed is ownership. The plugins for rival editors, the fal and Krea resale and any Creative Cloud bundling have no public answer yet, so now is the time to check which finishing steps depend on one vendor.
