Hi Creatives! 👋 

This week’s highlights all point to one thing: AI is getting absorbed into the parts of the workflow that actually ship. Not just generating clips, but helping with the in-between problems we fight every day, like patching shots, matching continuity, and keeping a process repeatable.

If you’re building content for campaigns, clients, or a team review process, this week is basically less “generate another one,” more “make it fit the cut.”

And the clearest signal is the World API going live. When “world building” becomes something you can call, iterate, and version like any other creative primitive, it’s not a demo moment, it’s infrastructure.

This Week’s Highlights:

• Editing gets faster (the “boring” parts of polish are getting real tooling)

• The World API Is Live: “world creation on demand.”

• 🎬 Veo 3.1 becomes more creator-practical: vertical-first improvements, reference images, upscaling

• 🎬 AI-first film signal: Bal Tanhaji prequel (Bal Tanhaji) first look

• “Gym Rats”: a reproducible AI film pipeline that treats workflow like the product

The New Bar for GenAI in 2026: Reliability

Production-ready means repeatable, reviewable, and accountable.
Enterprise teams aren’t buying AI. They’re buying reliability.

If you’re in Park City for Sundance this weekend, I’m hosting a small, invite-only happy hour for Freepik in partnership with Asteria. We’ll kick off with a short panel on what “production-ready” GenAI actually looks like in 2026, from creative craft to enterprise adoption.

Panelists: Paul Trillo, Henry Daubrez, Paula Vivas (moderated by me)

We’ll cover:

• Consistency at scale: keeping style, characters, and continuity intact when multiple people touch the workflow

• Operational reality: approvals, handoffs, and version control across creative, post, and marketing teams

• Governance and risk: rights, provenance, brand safety, and how teams set guardrails

• The real definition of production-ready: real deadlines, many deliverables, and failure that costs time and money

Invite-only. RSVP: https://luma.com/im18bfuq
If you’re a fit and want details, DM me.

The part of editing we all “love” just got faster

You know that moment when you’re mid edit, you almost have the shot… but you need to isolate a subject, soften a background, or pull a clean mask on a moving object and suddenly it’s 45 minutes of tiny keyframe pain?

Adobe just aimed straight at that problem with new AI powered updates in Premiere and After Effects, announced around Sundance season.

The headline update (Premiere) 🧩

• AI Object Mask: hover over a subject/object, click, and Premiere generates a trackable mask in seconds.

• Redesigned Shape Masks: faster tracking and smoother controls for the usual ellipse/rectangle/pen masking work.

• Frame.io panel inside Premiere (beta): review comments + versions stay closer to your timeline (less tab ping pong).

The motion design side (After Effects) ✨

• Native SVG import as editable shape layers: cleaner “design → motion” handoff for logos, UI, icons.

• Parametric 3D meshes + Substance material support: more “build and texture inside AE” without instantly needing extra tools.

Why this matters for creative teams 👀

Key shift: masking is becoming a default capability, not a specialist chore. When isolation and tracking get faster, you naturally try more variations: selective grades, localized blur, product spotlighting, background tweaks, quick relights.

A practical insight

This is Adobe quietly reinforcing a new creative advantage: iteration speed becomes part of your taste.
When the technical friction drops, the winning editors aren’t the ones who can rotoscope the cleanest. It’s the ones who can:

• choose the right moment to isolate a subject

• know when not to add an effect

• move through options quickly without derailing the story

Also worth noting for client work: Adobe is emphasizing workflows that fit real production constraints (speed, collaboration, and “can we use this on brand work safely?”), which is where these updates start to pay off.

Read full details here.

The World API Is Live

Picture this: you have a moodboard, a few frames, maybe a quick phone video of a location… and instead of sending it to a 3D team (or opening Blender and spiraling), you call an API and get back a navigable 3D environment you can explore in a browser.

That’s the promise of World Labs’ new World API, built on their multimodal world model Marble. It generates explorable 3D worlds from text, images, panoramas, multi view inputs, and video, and is designed to plug into apps and workflows as “world creation on demand.” 🧩

This is “previs (pre-visualization) and spatial ideation” getting software-shaped

Instead of worldbuilding being a one-off asset project, it becomes something you can generate, iterate, version, and integrate like any other creative primitive.

If you’re a:

• filmmaker / studio 🎬: think virtual scouting, blocking, camera angle exploration, and grabbing high quality stills for pitch decks or shot planning.

• game / immersive creator 🎮: turn 2D references into spaces you can prototype inside faster.

• architect / spatial designer 🏛️: generate a walk-throughable concept early, before you commit to heavy modeling.

World Labs even points to early integrations in filmmaking workspaces and architecture tooling, which is a signal they’re aiming beyond “cool demo” into “workflow infrastructure.”

Practical bits (the producer brain stuff) ✅

• Credit based pricing 

• Async generation (you request a world, it generates, you fetch results)

• Rate limits apply

• You’ll need an account + API key 

Tiny “do / don’t”

Do: treat it like previs and alignment tooling first.
Don’t: assume it replaces production design or environment art, or use client assets without clear rights/approval.

Read full details here

🎬 Veo 3.1 just got way more “creator practical”

Veo 3.1’s “Ingredients to Video” workflow now puts mobile-first vertical video front and center, improves character and scene consistency using reference images, and adds upscaling to 1080p and 4K for cleaner outputs that hold up better in editing. Also, Google is emphasizing watermarking and verification as the content gets more lifelike.

What’s new (key details)

• Native vertical (9:16) output in the Ingredients to Video workflow, so it composes for phones from the start. 📲

• “Ingredients to Video” consistency upgrades: you can use up to 3 reference images to steer characters, backgrounds, textures, and reuse elements across clips. 🧩

• Upscaling options: base output can be enhanced to 1080p and 4K for cleaner edits and deliveries. ✨

• Where it’s showing up: rolling into places like the Gemini app, Flow, and integrations tied to YouTube Shorts / YouTube Create. 🎬

• Trust layer: Google continues to push watermarking / verification (SynthID) as outputs get more realistic. 🧾

Why this matters for creatives

This isn’t just “better gen.” It’s Google leaning into repeatable social production:

• Vertical-native means fewer compromises for mobile campaigns.

• Reference-image “ingredients” are a step toward shot families (multiple clips that feel like the same world), which is what brands actually need.

Insight 💡 

“Ingredients” is starting to behave like a creative kit system: instead of making one clip at a time, you can build a library (character + product + set + texture) and generate variations without reinventing the entire scene. That’s the bridge from experimental clips to campaign workflows.

Read full details here

🎬 A Bollywood prequel is going “AI-first”: Bal Tanhaji drops a first look

If you work in visuals, this one is worth a pause.

Ajay Devgn just shared the first look for Bal Tanhaji, described as an AI powered origin story that expands the world of Tanhaji: The Unsung Warrior into something built for multi platform audiences, not just theaters.

Why this matters for creatives

A genuinely “useful” assistant changes the shape of creative work, not by replacing taste, but by compressing the annoying parts:

• Pre production at speed: turning a messy brief into shot lists, prop lists, alt concepts, and production checklists faster.

• Cross app handoffs: moving from “idea” to “calendar, notes, tasks, and files” without you playing project manager for your own brain.

• Personal context as a feature: if Siri can reference your project history, brand notes, and prior decisions, your creative direction gets more consistent across iterations.

If this actually lands, the biggest win is less about novelty and more about fewer context resets.

The tradeoffs (quick version)

1. Style flattening is real
   When the same assistant becomes everyone’s default, outputs start to sound alike. Use it for structure, then add your taste so your work doesn’t blend into the feed.

2. “Privacy forward” ≠ “client safe”
   Even with Apple’s Private Cloud Compute, don’t paste sensitive briefs, unreleased product details, contracts, or performance data into any assistant. Think lower risk, not no risk.

3. This is a distribution deal, not just a feature
   Apple ships a stronger Siri faster. Google gets massive default placement. Creatives inherit new expectations around speed, volume, and “just ask the assistant.”

Read more details here.

‘Gym Rats’ — a reproducible AI film pipeline

What I found paints a picture of a filmmaker treating AI like a real production pipeline instead of a magic button — planning shots, building assets, and iterating between fast drafts and detailed final passes to make narrative work like shorts or ads feel intentional and controlled

Here’s what’s interesting from Gabe Michael’s public work and the surrounding material online:

🎬 A director’s mindset, not an “AI trick”

• Gabe Michael is known as an AI filmmaker and creative technologist focusing on storytelling with AI tools, not just one‑off generative outputs.

• His videos show real projects — like short films using Nano Banana Pro images animated through Veo (Veo 3 / Veo 3.1) — which aligns with the idea of layering tools for quality and control rather than relying on a single prompt.

🤖 Tool workflow insights

• Nano Banana Pro is highlighted in multiple tutorials as a go‑to for hero image generation and reference frames before animation.

• Veo (including Veo 3 / 3.1) appears frequently as the next step to animate those still frames into motion, reinforcing a two‑stage workflow (fast draft → refined move).

• Other creators also demo combining these tools (Nano Banana + Veo/VO3) to bridge generation and motion in video projects.

See his workshop and process breakdown here.

💡 Insight

This week’s updates feel less like “new toys” and more like the industry quietly agreeing on a new workflow:

AI is moving from “make me a clip” to “help me finish the cut.”

When World API turns explorable world creation into something you can generate on demand from text, images, or video, that’s not just another tool drop. It’s a signal that the next wave is edit and production workflows pulling generative capabilities into the pipeline, where iteration, versioning, and handoffs actually live. And when tools like Veo lean into creator practical improvements like vertical, reference images, and upscaling, they’re acknowledging what most of us need: not one impressive shot, but a set of shots that belong together.

Then you look at something like “Gym Rats” and the AI-first film headlines, and the message stays consistent: the creative edge isn’t “generate more.” It’s run a repeatable process without losing taste.

What’s changing in the workflow (from my seat)

• Editing becomes the center of gravity again. Gen tools are starting to orbit the timeline, not the other way around.

• Pre-pro matters more, not less. References, constraints, and shot planning are increasingly the difference between “cool” and “client-safe.”

• Taste becomes visible. When iteration is cheap, the value is in what you choose to keep, what you cut, and how you maintain continuity.

The upside for creatives

• Less time lost redoing sequences just to fix one transition

• More continuity across shots without brute-force prompting

• A clearer path to production-ready workflows, especially for small teams

The risk

• You can ship faster while saying less. Bridge shots + upscaling can make everything “smooth”… and also forgettable.

• Workflow templates can quietly turn into style templates. If your process doesn’t include “what makes this ours,” the outputs won’t either.

A small rule to try next week
Before you generate anything, write one sentence:
“This piece should feel like ___, not like ___.”
Then use the tools to serve that sentence, not replace it.