Mackay Bell

Posted my first X article. It’s something I’ve been wanting to comment on for a while, but I waited until the new #GrokImagine refresh to finally address it. I have a long background in post-production and film tech, but I only started exploring AI generation a few months ago. I settled on Grok Imagine because it seemed like the cheapest way to test things out, and I was highly skeptical of AI. Very quickly, I was impressed, not just by Grok itself, but by the whole AI creation experience. I made an early decision to “stick with Grok.” In my experience, when competing software is changing this fast, it’s smarter to master one tool deeply rather than bounce between them. If a clear winner emerges later, you can always switch. Right now, that winner isn’t obvious. A bigger concern for me has been all the hype around the “thick wrapper” AI creative suites promising to help indie filmmakers disrupt Hollywood. I’ve heard these kinds of promises over and over during the digital revolution, the film festival boom, the social media revolution, and so on. They rarely pan out well for either the startups or the creators who buy into them. You can read my full article for my detailed business/tech take on where this sector is headed. So here’s my looser indy content creator opinion: CONTENT CREATORS BEWARE I don’t want to attack any specific companies, but if you read the article you’ll see that many of these exciting “AI creative suite” startups are designed to pull you in and then make it hard to leave. That’s basically what they have to do if they want to survive. Investors can throw money at dozens of them knowing only one or two will win. You, however, don’t get your time back if you pick the wrong one. If they provide a good service and you can afford it, great. The bigger risk is getting hooked on free credits, spending money you shouldn’t, and then realizing you’re locked in because all your assets and projects live inside their platform. Then they fold, get acquired, or change their terms to charge you even more. So heads-up: be careful about deep commitment while the market is still sorting itself out. Have an exit strategy. Back up your assets regularly. Test alternatives before you go all-in on big, complicated projects. AI creation is incredible, just be careful out there. CREATIVE STARTUPS BEWARE If you’ve read the article, you already know why I’m extremely skeptical about most of these companies’ long-term survival. That said, I genuinely hope some of you succeed. So I'll share a few hard truths in hopes you find ways to avoid potential pitfalls: You can’t effectively serve Hollywood, serious narrative/indie creators, and social-first creators at the same time. The needs are too different. You’ll have to pick one (or at most two) and go deep. • Focusing on Hollywood feels doomed in my opinion. The Ben Afflecks of the start up world will eventually take that market. • Narrative/indie creators need serious tools at reasonable prices. They can’t afford to be gouged, and they need long-term support. If they don’t succeed with their work, they won’t have money to keep paying you. • Social-first creators are the biggest market, but also the most likely to be swallowed by Google, Meta, YouTube, or the big labs’ own tools. In my view, the only realistic (though still difficult) path is to go all-in on indie narrative creators. That means thinking long-term, having a big runway, and accepting it probably won’t be a wildly lucrative market. There is one exception: the Pixar pivot. Instead of just selling tools, support great creators, find the best ones and back their talent. Then pivot to creating original IP. Study how Pixar started as a tool/company and evolved into a storytelling powerhouse. That might be the only way these startups can actually compete with both Big Tech and Hollywood. By becoming the kind of company the studios eventually have to buy for billions. Because the one thing the big studios and big tech companies still struggle with is consistently making great movies. That’s the real path to disrupting Hollywood. x.com/mackaybell/sta…

My new essay dropping tomorrow spends a ton of time taking apart the problematic methodology and findings of activist studies like this one. Stay tuned!

when the selling point is 'no ai' instead of why it's fun I just assume the game sucks

Pratt: Let's reduce regulations to make it cheaper to film in LA and rebuild homes for production crews! Access Media: PRATT IS LA TRUMP *Productions leave* Access Media: WHY IS HOLLYWOOD DYING!?

@AVARY A frighteningly accurate prediction of where Britain is heading right now.

But in what order will they play the episodes? We want information!

@cfryant @AVARY Same actor who got bored of the action show. Only agreed to continue if they let him do a new show and try something different. It's implied it's the same character, but not stated. (Possibly for legal reasons.)

@AVARY Is that a related series, or same people who made it?

@MatthewModine Great movie. You were great in it.

This is a great trailer for the 4K release of FULL METAL JACKET. It premiered 39 years ago #OnThisDay in Beverly Hills, CA. It was the longest production I’ve ever been involved with. While working with Kubrick in London, we found out my wife was pregnant, my son was born, and he turned 1 — all before the film was complete. If you’d like to support the @FMJDiary project and exhibition, you can bid on a signed set of Kubrick movies here: ebay.io/m/xAODig

@WriterMcG The poster looked like a show designed by agents. Let's give easy jobs to a bunch of older stars. Doesn't matter what it's about. Hey, what if we get the guys who did Stranger Things?

The predictable essence is what Hollywood always sells. And when you start looking at careers that way, the pattern becomes obvious. Jim Carrey isn’t really selling Ace Ventura, The Mask, or Bruce Almighty individually. The audience is buying elastic-faced Jim Carrey chaos. The particulars change. The core experience stays recognizable. Ben Stiller isn’t selling Zoolander, Dodgeball, or Tropic Thunder as completely unrelated products. The audience is buying a particular flavor of awkward absurdity, social discomfort, and comic escalation. M. Night Shyamalan isn’t selling individual premises. For years he was selling the feeling that reality is hiding something from you. The Duffer Brothers weren’t merely selling Stranger Things or The Boroughs. They were selling a specific experience: “Normal reality contains a hidden adjacent reality.” That’s the product. The monsters, children, laboratories, retirement communities, portals, towns, and settings are interchangeable pieces around the central experience. Hollywood is a reduction machine. A creator makes something complex. The audience loves it. Hollywood then asks: “What single thing did people actually buy?” Then it reduces the work down to that answer. Jim Carrey becomes “funny faces.” M. Night becomes “twists.” The Duffer Brothers become “secret worlds.” Then future projects are built around preserving that recognizable element. From a business perspective this makes perfect sense. Investors want familiarity. From an artistic perspective it can become a trap. A studio succeeds by making surprises predictable. Those goals coexist for a while. Then eventually they collide and a career comes to a screeching halt and power remains in the hands of bureaucrats with no imagination who forced this situation and guaranteed their own survival.

So I’m starting Odd Kid (@thisisoddkid) Odd Kid is a small IP studio for strange, emotional stories. The goal is to build original worlds with artists, filmmakers, designers, animators, musicians, and technologists. Use new tools when they help, old ones when they don’t. The goal isn’t to make more stuff faster but It’s to make the right weird things better. The focus is original IP. Films, series, shorts, experiments, and worlds that deserve to exist. We’ll also collaborate on the occasional project with studios, artists, and partners when it feels creatively right. But the ambition is simple: create and nurture original stories, and help bring them into the world. None of this would have happened without the support of Google and the people who opened the first doors: Thomas Iljic, Elias Roman, Josh Woodward, and everyone who believed there was something worth exploring here. Each new project led to another conversation, another room for collaboration/teaching/learning, another chance to meet streamers, studios, executives, producers, and artists I used to watch from very far away. It gave me a real foot in the door of an industry I’ve always loved, but never fully knew how to enter. For the time being, I'm going to juggle this between my role close to Google Flow, quality family time, and building up more meaningful relationships. We’re not trying to be the next Pixar Animation Studios because we’re busy figuring out how to be the first Odd Kid. More soon.

I’d like to stop you at art being human expression. Read Lord Von Balthasar on truth, goodness and beauty. Read CS Lewis on myth, Tolkien on fairy stories. Plato on the forms. Roger Scruton on Beauty. Art predates human expression so it can’t just be human expression. A beautiful stream in the woods you didn’t make is art but not human expression. Seek and you will find.

After yesterday's major Variety piece about the death of Hollywood, an anonymous Hollywood insider writes what Gene Maddaus and everyone else is afraid to. "Maddaus, being a mainstream journalist, rattles off all the acceptable explanations. California’s failure to compete with production incentives of other states. California’s harsh environmental and labor regulations. Even California’s bureaucratic incompetence. But of course he never mentions the real reason, which is the mentality behind all of these superficial causes. That Hollywood isn’t dying of old age or infirmity. But that it’s killing itself." Read full article just published here: mamathemagazine.com/the-inexplicab…

Higgsfield is using my videos for their "Unlimited Seedance Month" campaign on Instagram (without my permission of course) let me tell you I HATE this platform I never use Higgsfield I will never promote them DON'T USE HIGGSFIELD

@romanhelmetguy And an AI created South Park movie wouldn't create the same emotion at all?

Tech bros need to hear this: Nobody wants AI feature films. Imagine if Obsession was exactly the same, but all the actors were AI. It wouldn’t produce the same emotion at all. Art is human. I know we all hate Hollywood, but the solution isn’t AI. It’s funding a new Hollywood.

Though I must admit, the character consistency is improving.

Elon: Full movies by the end of this year. Mackay's Brain: Oh no! Everything I've been learning about how to edit and prompt Grok Imagine will be useless! I've wasted six months of my life. (Beat.) He can't be serious, the current software is no where near that capable. Yet he makes rockets and is a trillionaire. What do I know? (Beat.) Agent mode sounds super cool. Are they really getting close? (Beat.) Actually, it would be nice to just input a script and have a full movie created. Wow, that would be incredible! Elon's the best! (Tries out Grok Imagine's new agent mode beta.) Oh.

@CoordinatesDH @GoodBadFlicks Yes. Odds are a 25 million dollar film shot for 10 million instead would end up being much better.

@mackaybell @GoodBadFlicks The compression isn't about austerity. It's about removing the layers that exist to justify their own existence. The budget is the production's first piece of architecture, and most of it is load-bearing nothing.

Chasing Amy, Ben's first starring feature, was made for $250,000. It only opened in 21 theaters & it still made 12 million dollars. Roger Corman could have made 25 movies for 25 million Hollywood needs to admit it has a spending problem.

Full movies by the end of this year

@taherdhanera Yes. But also be prepared for someone to create something really sloppy and dumb, and for it to take off for some strange reason. Not advocating for sloppy and dumb, but what breaks through in popular culture is more complex than just "the good stuff."

Controversial Take: If you look at the current scenario in AI films, only a handful of sensible AI films have been made and are worth watching. I would say less than 1%. The rest are all social media hype and AI slop movies. Authentic storytelling is the real winner, and only a handful of people have achieved it. No matter how popular you are or how many millions of views you get, in the coming years only a handful of AI studios are going to survive because not everyone can produce great storytelling in AI cinema.

DAY 18 of Making a feature film with AI in 30 days. Today I have a new plan! And a new workflow to hopefully help me speed up. Follow my journey by subscribing to my channel on Youtube below.