Ben Field, Andrew Keats and I started a new company in August 2023 and launched Deep Fusion Films at Mipcom that October, around a proposition designed to make people slightly uncomfortable.
Synthetic media has a bad reputation and it has earned it. The reputation exists because people keep using the technology to take things that are not theirs. Ben put it plainly at the time: the problem is that people are trying to exploit it.
So we built the company the other way round. Consent before anything is made. The person’s own material. Credit where it is due and payment for it. A fully insured pipeline, on the grounds that if you cannot insure it you probably should not be doing it.
None of that is a marketing position. It is the only version of this work I am willing to do, and it is a good deal harder than the alternative. It is also, I think, the only version with a future.
We took it to Cannes the following spring. People were more interested than I had expected, and rather more relieved than I had expected too.
