Future Film: Building Your Own AI Tools with Carl Cramer

​What if you could build AI tools around the way you want to work? This Tuesday, Lionsgate AI artist and Future Film instructor Carl Cramer will show how questioning the tools he uses has led him to build his own, solve problems in his client work, and make more time for artistic decisions.

​Carl made the leap from professional editor to AI artist, and his approach keeps evolving with the demands of production. When he struggled with Midjourney, he built a tool that got him the results he wanted. Now he's challenging how he uses Claude: where it's useful, where it's overused, and how it can help build automation that runs without needing Claude involved every time.

​His guiding question is simple: “Can I solve this by making my own tool?”

​On Tuesday, Carl will show how he's connecting custom tools with DaVinci Resolve. He'll question assumptions about APIs and MCP connections, explain why he's moving more processing onto his own machine, and talk through how speed, security, and protecting client IP shape what he builds.

​He'll finish with a demo of the app he's developing and using every day. It's built around his own production needs, and he'll show where his experiments have taken him and what he's still figuring out.

​For professional editors and filmmakers, whether you're just beginning to experiment with AI or already building, this is a chance to learn how a Lionsgate AI artist decides what to automate, what to build, and how to make his tools serve his creative decisions.

​Carl presents, then we open it up for questions and conversation with the group.