Future Film: Who Let the Filmmakers Into the Code?
Say “open source” to a room full of filmmakers and suddenly half of them remember they have somewhere else to be. Fair enough. For years, it meant more setup, more troubleshooting, more technical knowledge and often worse results.
But something has changed, fast. Open source is now giving filmmakers real creative and professional advantages. Look no further than your recent news feed: MiniMax releases H3, a 2K video model headed for open weights. LTX-2.5 arrives with open weights on Hugging Face and ComfyUI.
This Tuesday at Future Film, three of our members who are already pushing into this territory are going to help the rest of us sort out what filmmakers need to know now.
Esteban Valdez, award-winning animation director and founder of NOMUS, will show us the platform he’s building around privacy, flexibility, and creative control, and share his take on where open source is headed and what matters most right now.
Jesse Catlin, OG Future Film member and co-founder of Prompt Delivery, has gone deep into agentic filmmaking with his Prompt Delivery Engine, combining open-source components into a custom creative workflow. He’ll take us inside the system and show us what that level of control lets him do.
Gasper Chiaramonte, Guild editor and co-founder of Novella, is bringing three examples of what open source can already do in production: transfer a performance recorded on your phone onto an AI character, describe an edit in plain English and get back a finished cut, and train a reusable visual look on actual video for just a few dollars.
Together, they’re going to help us answer the questions that matter:
Where does open source create real creative or professional advantages for editors and filmmakers?
And is it time for more of us to start building the tools and workflows we wish existed?
Is open source finally the path out of your infinite Adobe subscription? Well, let’s not get carried away. They know where you live.
The world of AI filmmaking is moving at light speed. What felt fringe a few months ago may be the next thing you need to understand.