TAKE THE TEST
IS THIS AI?
So, is it?
My creative colleagues all agreed it is.
If you said yes, you’re wrong. All real — concept, direction, light, talent, even the plants — shot in camera, in studio. I art directed it and worked with a small team to build the rest. That collar, the actual showstopper, was designed and hand-fabricated by Thurman & Fig, a floral studio here in Baltimore. It’s the real hero of the shot. It exists because I had an idea and wanted to make it. So I did.
Flattering, honestly — I’ll take “your work looks impossible” as a compliment.
Then there’s the flip side.
At this year’s Annecy International Animation Film Festival, an animated short called Danse Macabre premiered — built from 75 hand-painted oil canvases, more than 30 artists, 11 years of work, scored to Shostakovich. The team used a narrow AI shader tool trained on the director’s own painted textures, just to help digital elements match the canvas — the kind of assist that still needed correcting by hand on nearly every frame. The premiere got disrupted and received “boos“. Boos!!!
Heavy scrutiny for something that took over a decade to paint by hand. Odd time we’re in — trust has less to do with what you made than how you made it. But perception is still everything, and the lines are blurred enough now that none of us fully control how our own work gets read.
Creatively speaking, if it works — if it hits, slaps, emotes, dazzles — and it’s honest where it counts, do you really care?
But when something this personal gets waved off as “probably AI,” that’s a cost real craft is going to keep paying for a while. As the pendulum swings back toward a deeper appreciation for craft, is “prove it’s real” just the new price of making something that looks this good?
Are you rethinking your approach with that in mind?