I've been coloring films for thirty-five years. Titanic. Minority Report. The Revenant. A hundred more. And lately I hear the same quiet fear in every room I walk into — that the machine is going to take our seats.
I'm not going to tell you that fear is foolish. I'm going to tell you the truth, because I haven't just read about this technology. I've spent the last while building with it, with my own hands, on real work.
Here's the plain version. AI is fast. It never gets tired. It'll give you a hundred versions of a thing before lunch. But it has no taste. It doesn't know why a scene should feel cold, or when to break the rule on purpose.
It has never lost anyone. Never fallen in love. Never sat in a dark theater and felt the whole room go still.
That part is still ours. It always will be.
Let me show you how it really goes, in the studio I build with my partner Örvar. He's in Spain, on the Mediterranean. He builds the machine — and he builds it, on purpose, so that it can never finish anything by itself.
It does the heavy lifting. The grunt work. The hundred versions. Then all of it crosses the ocean to me, here on my farm in Wisconsin. And nothing — nothing — reaches the world until it has passed through my hands.
We've changed tools before, you and I. Film to digital. Tape to file. The darkroom to the timeline. Every single time, somebody stood up and said the craft was finished.
And every single time, the ones who learned the new tool didn't vanish. They got faster — and the good ones got more valuable. This is the same. The artist who learns to drive this thing doesn't get replaced. They get multiplied.
So here's what I'd say to my friends — the ones who've been doing this as long as I have, who are lying awake about it.
Don't be afraid of it. Don't ignore it either. Learn it, the way we learned every tool before it — and keep your hands on the frame.