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VISUAL CREATORS
For your artistic side.

📸 Adapt or Get Deleted: Photographer’s Hustle

Photography's changing and your beautiful stills might not cut it anymore. Usage payments are down, video’s the new normal, and photographers are now turning into "content creators".

• For mid-level gigs, the pay's shrinking faster than your grandma's wool sweater. Choucino suggests slashing costs and exploring new revenue streams.

• The reel deal: Video is king, and you better not be a one-trick pony. GIFs and stop-motion are part of the visual buffet now.

• Photographer or content creator? The lines are blurring faster than an indie film. Adaptation is the aperture to success.

That doesn’t mean you have to ditch your Leica for a Red camera, but adapting is key. The market's hungry for more than just stills, demanding video content like GIFs and stop-motion.

To stay in the game, photographers must become more than just masters of the single frame. They're morphing into content creators, hustling multiple income streams from YouTube or studio rentals.

It’s not all doom and gloom, but 2024 is the year to make your shots count.

PRODUCTION MASTERY
The commercial aspects of creativity.

🤖 AI-Generated or Real? Hygiene ‘Spokeswoman’ Stumps the Internet

A woman starring in a viral ad is revealed to be a mix of real and AI-generated footage.

Here’s how it works: The woman’s real, but the video’s made using AI that can mimic her mannerisms. It’s from a French company called Arcads.ai, and they’ve got a library of clips from creators that customers can merge with custom scripts.

Users were blown away by how authentic the AI-made video looked, but the creator behind it, @beckylitv, says it still took a lot of human finesse.

But will AI ads like this become the norm? Hard to say, but the line between real and fake is getting blurrier by the upload. You can’t trust your own eyes anymore…

CREATOR ECONOMY
Navigating the digital creative world.

🎵 UMG & Spotify: It’s More Than Just Audio

Universal Music Group (UMG) is expanding its partnership with Spotify to include music videos. This comes after UMG’s catalog, including artists like Taylor Swift and Billie Eilish, was pulled from TikTok earlier this year.

Spotify had already been testing music videos in select markets, but this deal will bring them to the US as well.

UMG and Spotify haven’t shared details on which videos will be available, but with UMG’s deep artist roster, fans could soon be watching the latest from Swift and Eilish alongside their favorite playlists.

🔥 Press Worthy

📽️ VISUAL CREATORS

How to deal with rejection as a filmmaker: Film festivals reject movies for many reasons unrelated to quality: genre saturation, limited slots. Quitting after one 'no' is the real tragedy.

Canon’s latest lens patent spices up the ultra-wide game: an RF 14-20mm F2.0 with a full-frame image circle. It's a patent for now, but we’re already drooling.

📈 PRODUCTION MASTERY

BBC defends using AI to replace actress Sara Poyzer in a voiceover for an upcoming documentary, citing the need to recreate the voice of a dying contributor who can no longer speak. The move sparks outcry from industry peers.

Disney+'s "Percy Jackson" shot 30% of scenes on a new LED stage in Vancouver, testing over 50 lenses before opting for Cooke/i S35 2x anamorphics on a Sony Venice 2 as the go-to setup.

🎭 CREATOR ECONOMY

Why has LinkedIn become so weird? From stuffy resumes to oversharing Stepford employees, the platform is now a weird mix of cultish work worship and personal brand promotions.

YouTube tests "jump ahead" feature, using AI to skip to video highlights.

📚 Learn & Grow

📽️ VISUAL CREATORS

• The Insights of 5 of the Greatest Street Photographers Alive

• What does it take to create an award-winning black and white image?

📈 PRODUCTION MASTERY

• SXSW 2024 Recap, 12 Favorite A.I. Sessions, and More!

• The Disney Plus-Hulu merger is way more than a streaming bundle

🎭 CREATOR ECONOMY

• YouTube says over 25% of its creator partners now monetize via Shorts

• X use is down by nearly a quarter since the Musk Era started