The Ai Revolution – Jim Reed
I presented my AI Revolution talk to club members at the Friday evening Club night. This also marked my last appearance as a club member – I’m leaving to spend more time researching the depths of Artificial Intelligence.
The original intention of the presentation was simple enough: to explore what AI can do for filmmakers today. What emerged, however, was something much broader — a look at how quickly artificial intelligence is changing not just our tools, but the context in which creativity, work, and storytelling now sit.
I began by describing AI as a “tangled ball of string”. Every time you pull one thread — image generation, video, scripting, sound — it leads immediately into others: economics, labour, automation, authorship, and power.
AI can’t really be understood in isolation, and treating it as a novelty or a clever toy risks missing what is actually unfolding.
One of the most important points of the evening was the speed of change. Unlike previous technologies, AI is advancing on monthly rather than generational timescales.
Image and video tools that felt experimental a year ago are now capable of producing work that would previously have required teams, budgets, and time. Whether we engage with this or not, the ground is already shifting beneath our feet.
I spent some time demystifying how modern AI systems actually work — not as rule-following machines or databases of copied material, but as probabilistic systems that generate outcomes rather than retrieve them. This helps explain both their power and their limitations: why they can surprise us with novel solutions, and why they can also be confidently wrong.
From there, we moved into practical filmmaking workflows. I demonstrated how AI can be used as a creative collaborator rather than a shortcut machine: developing scripts through better prompting, critiquing story ideas, generating first drafts, and refining tone and character rather than replacing human judgement.
The same applied to image and video generation — where starting with strong visual references, controlling style, and guiding motion produces far more reliable results than relying on text prompts alone.
We looked at character consistency, AI “character sheets”, image-to-video workflows, dialogue generation, sound design, and the importance of directing AI using familiar filmmaking language: camera movement, lighting, cuts, anchors, and negative prompts. Used properly, these tools start to resemble a writers’ room, a storyboard artist, and a rough animation department rolled into one.
Alongside the excitement, I also tried to be clear about the risks. AI doesn’t replace jobs all at once — it replaces tasks, steadily and quietly.
This has implications far beyond filmmaking, and raises uncomfortable questions about work, inequality, and who controls these systems. Whether AI becomes a broadly shared resource or a concentrated source of power is not a technical question, but a human one.
The evening ended where it began: with creativity. AI does not replace imagination, taste, or judgement — but it does amplify them. Used lazily, it produces bland results. Used thoughtfully, it becomes a catalyst. The challenge for us, as filmmakers and storytellers, is to be curious, and intentional as these tools continue to evolve.
Our future won’t be decided by what AI becomes, but by whether we “stay awake” long enough to oversee what it does.
Thanks to everyone who attended, asked questions, and stayed engaged throughout. And for those who missed it — the conversation is only just beginning!
The evening ended with Mike thanking me for all the work I’d done for the Club over the past years, and in particular for creating this website.
On behalf of the committee and Club, he presented me with a magnificent bottle of 15 year old malt whisky!
Thank you all, it was a good experience being a part of Surrey Border Movie Makers, and I’m sure that our paths will cross again.
My very best wishes to you all!
Jim