The Dog Ate Last Week's Newsletter.
... still wondering if robots have celluloid dreams.
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Edited by Elizabeth Kealoha. Pod + Images by Ant Neely.
Last Week… Today. With Another One On The Way.
A week late but worth it. The community spent Saturday morning in a brand-new two-hour live text chat picking apart trolling, theft, and what art is actually for. Meanwhile, the “clean model” question finally got asked out loud, Jay Judah dropped an entry that broke the room, and Veo 4 (or Gemini Omni, depending who you ask) is starting to leak ahead of Google I/O.
The week the community stopped reacting and started arguing on purpose. Let’s get into it.
🏆 COMMUNITY WINS
A big week for ships and signings.
Charlie Fink — Dropped Linda’s Last Podcast, a 21-episode original microdrama, after three years teaching cinematic AI at Chapman and ASU.
Chris White — BACKROOMS hits theaters everywhere May 29, with a sold-out Burbank pop-up walkthrough this week.
Jagger — Signed for commercial representation with MC&V (Australia) on the back of a Claude spec ad.
Honorable mention to Jay Judah’s Impossible Commute entry, which got the rare “better than 95% of festival films” call-out from a notoriously hard grader.
THIS WEEK IN ‘COMMUNITY’
GenChat Hour Is Live, And It Didn't Stay Polite
Minh launched a new weekly experiment: a one-hour live text chat in Basecamp, every Saturday at 11a PST. After a poll (Saturdays won 12 to 1), the first session ran for two hours instead of one, with members trading takes on the now-famous "real Monet posted as AI" trolling moment and the broader question of how to move the discourse. Danny Ratcliff argued for inclusive education; Carlos Cisneros pitched a moderated panel of pro-AI and anti-AI filmmakers; Brian Wankum quoted from the Pessimists Archive. Minh's read: "Most moderators play it safe. People don't like to disagree in public. It's always 'I agree and also.'"
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The "Clean Model" Question Nobody Wants to Answer
Jennifer Green asked the question that’s been lurking for months: are there any clean models left? She’d just clocked the Asteria/LTX partnership and noticed Firefly now pipes in Runway Gen-4, Veo3, Pika, Luma, and Kling 2.5 Turbo. Fred Grinstein noted that aggregator indemnification is more about due diligence than provenance, comparing it to E&O insurance. Niklas Fissel cited Adobe’s “trained only on data we own” claim; OverJK responded that “the data users uploaded while pinky swearing they own it” doesn’t quite count. Jennifer’s landing point: “Commercially safe is not the same thing as ethically sourced.”
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Jay Judah Drops, And The Room Loses It
Jay shared his Impossible Commute entry — fully generated, four reference pics from a single corporate headshot, character sheet from GPT Image 2. OverJK's reaction: "I went to a major AI film festival last month, and honestly, this is better than 95% of the films I watched there." Within an hour, OverJK had turned Jay into a meme series. Jay, gracious: "Plz don't steal my body." The thread doubled as a casual workflow breakdown — four images, same outfit, one session.
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SPONSORED
Veo 4 Or Gemini Omni? All Eyes On I/O
OverJK kicked it off mid-week — he’s been hearing the new Google model called “Gemini V” or “Gemini Video” more than Veo 4, with people pitching it as “Seedance 2.0 Pro with Kling 4K resolution.” Sunday morning, Eli dropped a more detailed leak: native multi-camera, synchronized dialogue, ambient sound, contextual scoring — a full multimodal system. LOGIK, who’s been deep in Flow, said the trajectory tracks. Minh stayed skeptical on Google’s execution pace, but conceded: “Their ad business is near infinite. And they have YouTube and TPUs.”
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Is The Theater The Next Pop-Up?
Chris White announced a BACKROOMS walkthrough experience in Burbank — fully booked before most people saw the post. Michelle Gold ran with it: genre releases should be leasing dead suburban malls and building Stranger Things–style in-person experiences alongside the theatrical drop. Cameron took it further: with AI democratizing spectacle, in-person + digital hybrid entertainment might be what justifies a $20 ticket. The pop-up is the new poster.
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🔗 This Week’s Link Drops
Industry News
Kuaishou plans to spin off Kling at $20B valuation — Reuters / TradingView
Anthropic catches OpenAI in valuation — Techmeme
Demi Moore on AI in Hollywood at Cannes — Variety
“The AI Filmmaker Outrunning Hollywood” — profile of Charlie Curran — Pirate Wires
Tools & Tech
AI Filmmaking
What Are You Actually Arguing For?
The week’s throughline wasn’t a tool or a release — it was the realization that “pro” and “anti” aren’t the only two options, and that nobody’s hosting the conversation that lives in the middle. If you’ve got a take you’ve been sitting on, bring it to GenChat next Saturday. The mics are open. The mod has no fear.
See you next Sunday (on time, this time).
— Machine Cinema Newsletter.