“Nobody wanted to do this work”: How Emmy Award–winning filmmakers use AI to automate the tedious parts of documentaries

How did you think about what problems there were to solve in AI relative to your job and the people that you work with? And why did you start where you started? Post production is like a technical mess of media management. Filmed out in the field, interviews, transcripts. So it ends up being hundreds of hours of footage, tens of thousands of photos. The data management piece when when you're dealing with all that different stuff is the mess that I have used AI to tackle. My goal was to automate this. For years, this has been manual data entry. Automate away toil. That's what we wanna do. No one was gonna make me this app. And so the ability to make an extremely specific app that makes a workflow on my team and my company easier, it's been an unbelievable moment. Welcome back to How I AI. I'm Claire Vaux, product leader and AI obsessive here on a mission to help you build better with these new tools. Today, we have Tim McLear, a producer at Ken Burns Florentine Films who's responsible for the technology and processes that bring these amazing films to life. Instead of focusing on how AI can create creative for these films, we're actually gonna talk about how Tim uses AI to build software products that make his post production and research team's lives a lot better. If you're working with images, video, sound, or just a lot of data, this episode is a great one for you. Let's get to it. This episode is brought to you by Brex. If you're listening to intelligent finance platform built for founders. With autonomous agents running in the background, your finance stack basically runs itself. Cards are issues, expenses are filed, and fraud is stopped in real time without you having to think about it. Add Brex's banking solution with a high yield treasury account, and you've got a system that helps you spend smarter, move faster, and scale with confidence. One in three startups in The US already runs on Brex. You can too at brex.com/howi a I. Tim, welcome to How I a I am excited to have you here. Thank you for having me. What I love about what we're gonna talk about today is you work in a very interesting and creative industry putting out amazing content. And we're gonna talk a little bit about how AI is impacting the creation side of things. But you've actually used AI to smooth out some of the challenges you've had on the production and post production side of things. So I'm curious, how did you think about what problems there were to solve in AI relative to your job and the people that you work with? And why did you start where you started? Yeah. I think most of the flashiest use cases of AI in, creation or media and entertainment right now are often in, like, generating full video content or images or …