The rules I keep

Generative tools are part of how I make films now. This is the line I hold while I do it.

1. 01

   Original work. Every film is my own story and my own world. Nothing is a reskin of someone else’s work. Influences get named. Nobody’s work gets passed off as mine.

2. 02

   Real people, documentary rules. No real person’s face or voice without their written permission. When a film is about real people, they come from the record: documented minutes, built from reference and research, nothing invented, every recognizable face archival and credited. The film shows where the generated material ends and the archive begins.

3. 03

   Disclosure on every piece. Which models made the stills, which made the motion, what finished it. The people get named too: the music, the archive, the sound. Labels on, on every platform, and said plainly in the caption.

4. 04

   The record. How every shot got to the cut can be shown: the references, the prompts, the take folders, the frames that lost. The originals keep the credentials their tools embed.

5. 05

   The edit is the work. A prompt’s first answer never ships. Every kept shot beat the takes that lost, then got finished by hand: the VFX, the retime, the grade, the cut, the sound. A clip is not a film; a scene has to hold.

This is an open conversation, and it should stay one. The training-data question is unresolved, the law that answers the real harms is still being written, and the tools change faster than either. Most of that work sits with the labs and the lawmakers, and none of it is a reason to make films without a line. It’s the reason to hold one in public, and to move it when something real changes. Here’s mine.