The new possible: pitching Crawford to both sides
Selling an AI-produced series to an industry that is equal parts desperate for it and afraid of it.
My partner Sean Canino and I came up with the idea for Crawford in December. By January, I was writing the scripts—head down, crafting a character, building out a world. February. March. Scene by scene, episode by episode, the show took shape.
At the beginning of April I began the pre-production phase of the show and have been creating the Master Reference Images for each script that are essentially dual purpose: detailed storyboard and the basis for video generation. Already I can see the words on the page coming to life, far faster than I ever could have imagined when I first started writing scripts and working in television.
But then this week, a familiar part of the Hollywood process came back into play: Sean and I were out there pitching. We were in rooms. Talking about our show.
For the first time since this whole thing started, we were sitting across from executives—pitching Crawford to real decision-makers at companies on both sides of the divide. ElevenLabs. Promise AI. Lionsgate. AI tech companies and Hollywood studios, and to my surprise quite often a mix of both. (”You should also meet with so-and-so who is running our Generation Team” or “our tech guys can definitely work with you on the AI workflow integration, but they need to understand story” or variations of these were common refrains we heard from the execs.)
You could see it on their faces, even over video conference—the moment the pitch clicked, or the moment it challenged something they thought they already knew.
The Synthetics Question
One question caught me off guard. An executive asked if we were working only with “synthetics”—I suddenly felt like I was in a Ridley Scott movie. What she meant was fully AI-generated “actors”. Characters who don’t exist, rendered to look like they do.
I explained that we were interested in human actors working alongside (within?) the AI but that the notion of a character that is fully AI-generated but who connects emotionally with audiences was one of the core ideas we were testing with Crawford.
A conversation ensued. Where was a performance human, human-driven, or strictly synthetic?
The room’s conclusion? Fully AI-rendered characters are “animation.”
I’m fine with that categorization—for now. But when the rendered characters are indistinguishable from real people on screen, I’m not sure that label holds. That’s a conversation this industry is going to have whether it wants to or not.
But here’s what was far more interesting to me—and far more relevant to where we actually are right now: the discussion about synthetic characters interacting with real actors. The way I see it is not as the AI replacing the human element, but augmenting it. An actor can now walk onto a set with another actor and perform a scene without any mo-cap balls stuck to their faces and bodies or any green screens, and they as well as the environment can be rendered (increasingly in real time) using AI technology. Or imagine a real performer acting opposite an AI-generated character in a scene that feels seamless. AI’s Who Framed Roger Rabbit?
When this moment—this movie or series—arrives it will not be a gimmick, it will be cinema. It will represent a gigantic shift in production capability. And it will still be made by human imagination, artistry, and creativity.
That is at the core of what we believe at CanEl Studios. The creative process is driven by humans and powered by AI. Not the other way around. We’re not trying to remove people from the frame. We’re trying to give creators tools that expand what’s possible inside it.
Where AI Actually Stands Right Now
Let me be fair. AI is legitimately strong in several areas: pre-visualization, concept trailers, and rapid prototyping. If you need to show someone what a world could look like, AI can get you there faster than anything we’ve ever had.
But it’s weak where it counts for finished content. Consistent, polished, studio-quality output across a full production? We’re not there. Fully AI-native feature films that hold up next to traditional work? Not yet.
The honest bottom line: AI is a powerful pre-production tool. It is not yet a full production pipeline. Anyone telling you otherwise is either selling something or hasn’t tried to ship anything.
The Massive Unlock for Independents
For creators working outside the studio system, AI is genuinely transformative. One person can now generate scenes, build sizzle reels, and prototype entire shows on a timeline that would’ve been impossible five years ago. The barrier to entry hasn’t just lowered—it’s been blown open.
A big part of what we are building at CanEl Studios is a production services infrastructure that incorporates AI into the process.
But here’s the part that doesn’t get said enough: craft is still the bottleneck. Not tools. Craft. Bad storytelling plus good AI still equals bad content. The technology amplifies whatever you bring to it, and if what you bring is weak narrative instincts and a good prompt library, the output will reflect that.
Hollywood Isn’t So Hesitant
A lot has changed in the two years since the WGA and SAG strikes shut down the industry, one of the key negotiating points being the use of AI in TV and movies. The unions weren’t having it. There was an air of outright rejection and resistance to anything AI.
These days… maybe not so much. It’s still there. Only different.
The resistance isn’t as ideological as it once was. It’s actually more practical. Executives I spoke with pointed to real, operational concerns. It’s hard to make AI workflows visually compelling on screen. The platform instability is real—tools change, disappear, get acquired, pivot their models overnight. And there’s no level playing field across proprietary systems, which makes it nearly impossible to build a repeatable production framework.
The technology is evolving too fast to lock into a repeatable format. By the time you shoot a season, the tools you built the show around might not exist anymore.
That’s not a knock on AI. That’s just the reality of building on shifting ground.
Over the years, I taught myself filmmaking and video creation with YouTube tutorials and created independently using Adobe products like Premiere, Photoshop, and After Effects. Today’s AI creators may never know the pain of rotoscoping frame-by-frame. And now as an AI creator—filmmaker? Artist? Everything?—I find myself trying to bridge the divide between the entrenched infrastructure and distribution system of traditional Hollywood, and the emerging democratization of creativity now in the hands of millions of independent creators.
The Bridge, Not the War
The future of this isn’t “AI versus Hollywood.” That framing is fearful and far too absolutist. The future is more nuanced and cooperative. The future is AI embedded inside Hollywood workflows, the same way digital color grading, motion capture, and virtual production were once exotic and are now just part of the process.
The best near-term applications are already here: pitch materials like lookbooks and concept trailers, script formatting and iteration, pre-visualization, and selective AI-generated shots woven into traditional productions. That’s not a revolution. It’s an integration. And integrations are how real change actually happens in this business.
That’s what the process of creating Crawford is teaching me.
Where This Is Going
Three forces are going to define the next phase.
First, capital still controls distribution. You can make anything you want on your laptop, but getting it in front of an audience at scale still requires the machinery that money builds.
Second, storytelling craft still wins. Every technological shift in entertainment history has confirmed this. Sound didn’t save bad silent films. Color didn’t save bad black-and-white scripts. AI won’t save bad stories.
Third, the current tool fragmentation is temporary. Consolidation is coming. The platforms that survive will be the ones that prioritize reliability and integration over hype.
What all of this ultimately means is a shift from a linear production process—where each phase happens only after the previous one is completed, where filmmakers don’t really know how their movie or series is coming together until long after the cast and crew have moved on to other things—to something circular. AI collapses the production timeline. Writing, generating, editing—all happening simultaneously.
This is not about replacing actors or writers. It’s about freeing us to tell the stories we want to tell, with the benefit of technology helping us do it without the same cumbersome constraints (looking at you, mo-cap balls).
The Bottom Line
AI is democratizing access. It is not replacing expertise. Hollywood isn’t rejecting AI—it’s rejecting non-cinematic uses of AI.
The creators who will win this moment are the ones who combine three things: story sense, AI fluency, and production discipline. Not one. Not two. All three.
That’s what we’re building at CanEl. That’s what Crawford represents. And these conversations—messy, honest, sometimes uncomfortable—are exactly where the real work gets done.