LOG 022: A Crisis of Infinite Aesthetics

Open any of the new models and everything comes back stunning.

The same greatness. The same amazing. The same spectacular.

And somehow, it doesn't click.

Lately I've been trying to go back to my old artistic discovery habits. Just exploring. Opening the latest Midjourney model and hunting for new aesthetics. I've been trying really hard to find joy in that phase. But something is not working.

If you make work with AI, you've probably felt it too. You explore, you curate, and everything starts to look the same. Even in the exploration phase.

It used to be enough

Not long ago, new tools kept coming out and they were really cool.

You could spot the adventurers and the explorers. The ones pushing the limits, showing things that looked very difficult to achieve. That took taste. Technique. A lot of curation.

I think back then people were actually looking for value, and delivering it. Those artists did great.

Then the video models came. The ones who jumped in, played with video and were able to make edits benefited too. We took a skill and put compilations, work and small stories out there.

And that was enough.

Enough to grow an audience. Enough to make a statement, share something new, feel excited, try different shots.

The Aesthetic Commodity

The models got so powerful that we all have the same spectacular quality of work now.

Aesthetics are commoditized. Just another thing you can get for cheap.

Even the latest video models do the editing for you. You give them the shots, you give them the prompt, and they execute. That's exciting. It also starts to take away part of the craft.

I've written before that you used to need a studio to make a film, and now you need a laptop and an internet connection. That's really cool. But it brings its own problems.

So where's the f**cking value?

There's no main character

AI video is exploding, and it's kind of always the same. Maybe we're just talking too niche. But what I see blowing up is mostly political commentary and current events with an AI twist. A bit of absurdity. Some irony. Exaggeration. Boobs. Surreal things inside a day-to-day context. There is a lot of reach to be done.

What nobody is doing is sharing stories with new memorable, flawed and charismatic characters. A lot of people are recycling, doing their own version of pop culture. There are no new, exciting characters that people are resonating with right now.

That's what the scene needs. Stories we can relate to. Being taken out into a new place.

I see a lot of great directors building stories with AI. But they fall into the same trap. Everything kind of looks like everybody else's.

It's very hard to get to a place that is unique. If everyone can have the crazy monsters and the crazy designs, which one stands out?

This worries me. When all this amazing output is so easy to get, where do we get our constraints?

Finding them is the real effort now.

Real stories, real characters

Exploring, finding a cool aesthetic, posting it. Getting feedback, getting likes. Maybe one pops and you follow it. I've always said the timeline is the canvas.

But now I think the real work is telling real stories. Real characters that move across platforms, that people recognise. Characters living in worlds we get familiar with. Their logic. Their aesthetics. Their environments.

And then sustaining that over time. Which is not easy.

Thinking About Cinema

Think about a movie. Years to shoot. Years to market. Years of distribution, from cinemas to VHS, DVD, Blu-ray, and now streaming. Pushed again and again.

I like science fiction, so take Dune. Two hours, and you're inside that world. You understand its dynamics. You're captivated.

The visuals are only one part of that. There's the music. There's the collective effort of a whole industry building the world, sharing it, making you part of it, then distributing it, selling it and marketing it.

That's real work.

Today you can be one person with a studio at your fingertips. You still have to build your audience. Your distribution. Paths to get your work out there. It's a massive amount of work for one person to carry, even with AI, and the latest agent bot.

And you have to think beyond the piece itself. I usually do poster design and brand design too as part of the distribution package. The things that support the world around it. That needs its own knowledge and its own decisions, and it takes time. Making a short film is one thing. Making the poster for it can take almost as long (well, not really but in terms of time investment per frame, maybe yes).

Watch Snowcrasher

Can you sustain it?

It looks like the tools lowered the barrier to entry. But now the market will decide who can build something and also sustain it over time.

How do you go from a one-hit wonder, or a couple of small hits, to a sustained career?

It's the same in the movie industry. A short film is really cool. But can you make a feature? Can you spend two years on one project?

These are the problems starting to show up. And they're probably what the market will start scouting for.

Who can deliver a short film with AI? Who can deliver something longer, say ten minutes? Can you sustain ten minutes? Can you make a thirty-minute film with AI that is cohesive and coherent? That makes sense and doesn't drift? Where the characters don't look like they start from the same place every time? Where they carry their emotions across the entire piece?

And can you do that for a hundred and twenty minutes?

Those are the real challenges coming now. I'm afraid single images are not enough to meet them. They are just the starting point. The promise that holds us accountable of the work that we are not doing.

The hardcore intellectual investment is in creating the characters. The villains. The side quests, the adventures, the places to visit, the points of view. Sustaining and delivering a great arch.

It all boils down to story. Which story do you want to tell, and what happens around it?

Back to the fundamentals

This is why the fundamentals matter so much. You need to know your fundamentals first. Your foundation. Your direction. Your craft. A point of view, something to tell.

I have my breakdown of them, the 13 fundamentals, and I'm trying to polish them more every day because I feel this is really important. A lot of you in the community have told me you're yearning for more here. I'm very interested in solving that. If you're patient, I'll try to make them understandable for beginners, intermediate and advanced students, and anyone curious. Anything that helps you focus your work and get better output.

This industry is still in its very early stages. A lot of people entering it come from very different disciplines. All this knowledge takes time.

You don't learn editing and composition one step at a time. Your craft grows with the work. Watching and analysing helps, but mostly you learn by doing. Then doing again, comparing your work with the masters, with what already works and what's spectacular, and building on top of that.

The value is really high and really low

Here's my biggest takeaway. Right now the value of what AI gives us, or the illusion of it, is really high and really low at the same time. It delivers amazing things. The real work is everything that has to happen for those things to succeed.

I live this myself. I started by posting Midjourney visuals, and that grew my profile and spread my work. Then a little bit of video. Now my biggest pain point is that the work I believe has the most impact needs real time, real effort and real intellectual investment. That's what it takes to stand out when the whole planet can do what used to take a studio.

And I'm still very excited.

A lot of cool things are going to surface. From young people. From new people. From veterans of the industry, and people with a bit more of a creative edge. A lot of people are still making the move from traditional film and 3D into AI.

There's going to be a lot of interesting work coming out there.

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Links and references mentioned

• The 13 fundamentals, my breakdown, free to read
• LOG 013: The One-Man Billion AI Media Empire
• LOG 019: The Solved Image Problem

If you want to go deeper

• Cinematique, the book: the full Cinematique library as an ebook, 150 film techniques, each written as a prompt
• World Building Academy: the 13 fundamentals, taught by building one world from a blank page to a finished trailer. Module 1 is free
• Flora: the AI canvas I build my character sheets and posters in. New users get 25% off for 6 months (affiliate link)
• My YouTube channel: I'm trying to grow it, and I'm still finding my voice there. Be patient with me while I go through my cringe phase.