BUSINESS

AI Will Make Local Filmmakers Unstoppable

Everyone assumed AI would hit the small shooters first. It's landing at the top instead — and down here the job is getting easier.

By Reuben Mowle September 21, 2026 4 min read

“Has AI impacted the filmmaking business?”

A question that deserves some thought.

“Yes,” I said. “In a really positive way, to be honest.”

“Oh yeah? Let’s hear it.”

These conversations are normal now. And I think most people expect AI to have hit local filmmakers and photographers hardest. The perception is that we’re smaller, and therefore easier to replace. That’s generally the perception behind most AI replacement logic.

The truth is close to the opposite.

Rather listen? The whole write-up as audio, about 5 minutes.

Read aloud by Ezay Read, the little Mac app I built that reads any text you highlight, on your own machine, with nothing sent to the cloud. If you would rather listen than read, it is yours for a one-off price too. No subscription. You may be noticing a theme.

The local restaurant test

Say you want to shoot a local restaurant. New menu. You want visual content that looks and sounds like your restaurant — your room, your light, your chef.

Generating that in AI without spending thousands of pounds is very, very difficult. And even if you did spend thousands, you’d be rolling the dice on whether it lands.

I’ve watched small brands try to cut this corner. It doesn’t look convincing. And when it doesn’t look convincing, you’re telling your audience they weren’t worth spending time on. At a local level, where reputation is the business, most people try that once and never again.

There’s a skill problem too. Don’t read me wrong — there is real skill in making good video with AI. I’m not dismissing it. I’m saying it isn’t a good fit for a local business. A lot of the time people burn the budget generating content that gets scrapped anyway. Wasted tokens, wasted money.

So when a small business actually weighs it up — employ local media people, or try to recreate this on an AI platform — the decision usually lands the same way.

Employ the filmmaker. Employ the photographer. At least they know what they’re going to get.

The curve: budget times skill

Now look at the other end. The people filming for Netflix, the BBC, Amazon Prime. That industry is shrinking fast.

Their budgets were big enough to justify experimenting — to find out whether AI could generate material they’d genuinely use. And increasingly, it can.

Picture a curve. One axis is available budget. The other is the skill to direct it. The result is how real the output feels.

Budget against directing skill, plotted against how real AI-generated video feels A curve rising slowly then steeply. At low budget and low skill the output looks like garbage. In the middle it is uncanny and usually scrapped. At studio budget with real direction it becomes convincing and dangerous. DANGEROUS ZONE The small brand having a go No budget · no skill · looks like garbage Some money, some idea Uncanny · scrapped anyway Studio budget + real direction Convincing · and very effective AVAILABLE BUDGET → SKILL TO DIRECT IT → RESULT = HOW REAL IT FEELS
The pressure isn’t travelling down the chain. It’s landing at the top.

No budget and no skill, and the video looks like garbage. A decent budget, a decent level of skill, and a producer who knows exactly what they’re looking for — that’s a dangerous combination. And a very effective one.

Meanwhile, the job is getting easier

Local filmmakers aren’t just surviving this. The work itself is getting lighter.

If other local videographers are anything like me, they’ve started handing the repetitive, boring tasks to an AI agent — and replacing subscriptions that cost hundreds a month with their own tools, software and websites. Remotion. The everyday reasoning you get out of Claude or ChatGPT. It all makes the job noticeably easier.

I walked through exactly how I did that — which subscriptions went, what replaced them, and what it actually costs to run — in this one:

Film makers: This is the Subscription killer. The full breakdown on the Fix It In Post channel.

Anecdotally, here’s where that’s got me.

£700 /month
Saved in subscription fees.
End to end
The shoot process systemised. Less time, less effort, less energy on every job.
−£140 +£99
A bespoke customer journey on my own software and my own websites — turning a £140/month cost into a £99/month chargeable service.

That last one is the part people miss. Cutting costs is nice. Turning a cost centre into a revenue line is better.

It also means I can make content at scale — long-form and short-form, a few clicks apart. And it isn’t AI slop. It’s decent content that helps people like me.

Meanwhile the big players are left twiddling their thumbs, wondering what they do next.

I’m not here to gloat, and I’m not here to make anyone feel good or bad about themselves. I’m just stating what I’m seeing.

Local filmmakers and photographers are going to be hard to replace for a very long time. If at all. Ever.

Shooting locally and building your own tools? Tell me what you’ve replaced — I’m collecting these. And if you want the walkthrough, the channel is where the builds live.