He Got 1 Million Followers in 30 Days—Here's How AI Changed Everything

0:00Brandon Baum:We shoot all of our content on iPhones, which I think is quite unique. These phones, they're not really phones. They're just, they're supercomputers that are incredibly small that have these like really advanced gyroscope sensors on them. Also have these really advanced LiDAR sensors on them. The idea that anyone could imagine that there'll just be this one broad stroke where a single person could write a string of words and that output, the level of quality that goes into any form of like art at scale is preposterous. I'm basically trying to offload as much of my administrative tasks that I do as physically possible because I don't ever want to do any of them ever again.

0:37Brandon Baum:So if I can basically offload all of them and just focus on being creative for more of my life, I'll be very, very happy. Welcome humans to the Neuron AI Explained, the show that helps you make sense of what AI is changing, who it's changing for, and what all of that means in the real world. I'm your host, Corey Knowles. And as always, Beam again with enough enthusiasm to power a small inference cluster. We have Grant Harvey with us. How are you, Grant? So in this scenario, I am a solar-based space-based data center. Yes. Yes. Okay. Okay. Cool. I'll channel my enthusiasm appropriately. Well, I am actually pretty enthusiastic because today we're talking about one of the places AI is moving fastest, which is internet video.

1:20Our guest is Brandon Baum, better known to millions as HeyBrandonB, a creator who spent years making mind-bending cinematic videos for YouTube and beyond. These things are sick. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, seriously. We'll get into how he built all of that creative engine, what his workflow looked like before AI, what it looks like now, and whether these new tools are actually democratizing storytelling or just raising the bar for everyone. Brandon, welcome to The Neuron. It's great to have you.

1:48Brandon Baum:It's a pleasure to be here, guys. Thank you so much for having me. Also, what a lovely intro. What a warm stage to welcome into. It's an honor to be here. Appreciate it. Appreciate it. We're super glad to have you here. And I guess to get started, maybe for people who know the videos, but not the backstory, how did you get into making videos? And what made you stick with this long enough to get as great as you are today? So I guess my origin story actually started probably when I was about 10, 11 years old. I've always been obsessed with YouTube. I was bit by a spider. Yeah, sorry. Prior to this call, we spoke about, you know, sort of like geeks uniting.

2:25Brandon Baum:And we spoke about how you would hide the fact that you used to play D &D to your friends. So the version of that for me was actually YouTube. And I used to watch YouTube videos. But back then, over a decade and a half ago, if you watched YouTube content, I mean, I don't want to say you were a loser, but it wasn't the cool thing to do. And I remember very avidly pretending or like hiding that fact from my friends, but just being so obsessed with it. It was the first time I sort of experienced this idea of like parasocial relationships where you would watch and sort of every day you just kind of be with these creators.

2:54Brandon Baum:And it felt like they were just your friends. And I was indulging into the worlds of at the time, much earlier stage YouTube creators, but just falling so in love with this idea that I almost felt like I had this like direct communication with these amazing creators. Of course, by about the age of 12, it was then my dream to become a YouTuber. So I started uploading videos every single day. and of course they got the grand total of about two views yeah that's good you and someone else or you twice exactly and then probably i'd say five years on from that i then decided it was time to get some you know traditional experience under my belt i started working in tv for a bit trying to learn how uh i guess real production pipelines worked and and and how real sets and infrastructure um came together then i guess four years into that journey i was kind of looking around.

3:40Brandon Baum:I was like, I'm not really watching TV myself. And I'm still obsessed with this YouTube thing. I want to dive back into it, but I don't want to make videos that get two views again. So at that point, I started reaching out to pretty much every YouTube creator I could and saying, hey, I'm just desperate to start shooting content. Please let me come on board and help me make your videos. Thankfully, there was a bunch of incredible creators that really took a shot on me and opened the door. And they really taught me the ropes. They're kind of like my first mentors in the space and showed me how to create content.

4:09Brandon Baum:There were two guys specifically called Woody and Kleine that I had the honor of getting to work with directly for four years as their producer director. And help them kind of build up their YouTube channel. Then when COVID hit, it went from us shooting videos every day to a complete halt. Then at this moment, I was like, well, I've got the itch. I need to go and create content. I can't leave the house. We tried to make videos over Zoom and just it wasn't working. So when we decided that we would kind of take a little pause in the channels, I thought, well, why don't I just start my own channel again and just start making daily videos?

4:44Brandon Baum:So I kind of divulged in the space that I was really passionate about, which is these kind of visual effect videos using like after effect skills I'd learned at a younger age again through YouTube and putting that kind of like visual trickery into my videos. Originally very inspired by Zach King. To be honest, he is still an incredible inspiration to us today, but kind of went went down that avenue. And I guess at that point, because I then had the experience of both working in production, but then also on YouTube, kind of brought those two worlds together and within a month managed to grow about a million followers.

5:16Brandon Baum:Oh my God, that is really fast. What the heck? So at that point, I kind of looked around and I went, okay, cool. I think there's a real opportunity here to start trying to grow and scale this out. Thankfully, I got a ton of support from Woody and Klein, who I was working with at the time, who then really kind of helped me on my journey and my path onto that next stage. And from there, the rest is history. I guess five years later, we're now up to about 25 million across platforms. And it just, day by day, just consistently keep blowing me away of the scale and how far this thing keeps growing.

5:47How many videos did you make in that month? Was that like you made like 20 videos or was it like you made three or four that just blew up?

5:55Brandon Baum:Yeah, so it was about one a day. I was really just pumping these. I mean, my life cycle back then was, I mean, incredibly unhealthy. It was COVID. Everybody's in the same home. I remember thinking at the time, this weird thought, like, I know I'm going to look back at this time and go, like, how did I survive this? I was so almost like breaking the fourth wall aware of like how crazy that stint in my life was. but it was like i would wake up i'd then have to just ideate kind of on the spot on my own try and come up with a video idea but within the confinement of a house and what props that i could source and then also only being able to have the production team that was my family that of course have no production training or experience whatsoever so kind of like on the fly teaching them how to shoot and like how to be like prop hands etc and sometimes help me build props but anyway i'd come up with the idea which some days were easy and i'd do it within 10 minutes and other days i would drain half a day with nothing just still spinning sitting waiting for the idea um to develop i would then go and try and source or build whatever props i needed to try and choreograph with my parents my brother um to help me try and shoot the video and then for the next you probably anywhere from like five to ten plus hours i would i would be locking in in after effects just editing those videos like some nights i'd be going i'd be you know at 11 o 'clock it wouldn't be that bad some mornings i was going all the way to like three four in the morning and i i knew i just had to wake up again early so i could keep the cycle going so i could just keep pumping the content chain oh that's amazing yeah you you put the pedal to the floor like right out of the gate yeah and also got enough how do you even like like almost don't even know what to do like so much would change with that level of a following in 30 days like your whole life is different now yeah look it was an incredible honor to get to have learned the ropes doing it with other creators for so long and yeah it's a it's an opportunity that i really realized how special that was because it did really feel like when i hit a million for the first time it almost felt like i'd done it before but almost sort of like vicariously through the people i was working with so when i then hit it on my own channels it was like great i feel like i've kind of got a bit of a path that i can see uh i almost felt like i was in uh i was in like uh mario bros like i've explored this map before like maybe not as this character but like i know what's to come you're playing as luigi now exactly exactly no what i what i also love about that is that like you actually were doing essentially what anyone who is 12 years old making youtube videos could do you're limited in your house like you're using your family you're using just the effects that you learned how you've learned how to do on youtube but you're just doing it again having already gone through the map you've speed run the whole game and now you're like okay now i know how to do this like force it's like yeah it's redemption for your 12 year old self that only got two beers exactly and don't get me wrong like the pc i used when i was 12 was like almost it barely worked i remember sure the pc i used to use when i was using after effects at the time uh it had such little ram that it would only was only able to play back two frames at a time which obviously you can't do any form of animation with two frames of playback keep in mind there's like 24 25 or 30 frames at a second so um every time i wanted to watch back any minute change of any video i created i'd have to render the entire video so i was basically just 90 of what i was doing when i was four was just rendering because i just needed a watch back why i was i was i was guessing and just throwing keyframes about and then going I hope this is okay.

9:30Brandon Baum:Oh my gosh. Well, before AI came into the picture, at least in a meaningful way where it adds value, what did your production workflow look like from shoot to say final edit? What were the biggest bottlenecks pre-AI? Interesting. It sounds like rendering. Rendering, yeah. When I was 12, definitely rendering. Thankfully, we live in a world now where like cloud compute continuously gets cheaper and cheaper, but also like i don't know like i'm using apple silicon and it is just insane what you can pull on here it's just it's really remarkable the world we live in now what computer are you running if you don't mind me so i'm using an m okay so this is crazy i've been a mac pro user my whole that's actually i had an iMac but anyway since i've had laptops i've always been mac pro die hard macbook pro um would never even think of going to the other side until the apple silicon series of laptops came out um it was m4 i was like okay let me just experiment with an air let me just let me just try an air i just tested it as a daily driver doing all my day-to-day tasks including like don't get me wrong not full scale like humongous 3d scenes or anything but the things that i was doing which is bits of after effects work some editing photo editing as well as the emails slacks etc and it was able to do everything i needed it to do flawlessly at that point i was like why do i need to carry around a laptop that is like triple the weight even bigger than what i would need for what i do i use a monitor anyway it's like it's not like i need the extra scale i was like the computer's got so good right now it's like let's just take advantage of it and just really slim down i never ever thought i would see see the day where i would say that it's crazy just to see how much the technology has progressed and now they killed the pro line yesterday apple killed mac pro last night really really interesting and i think neo is a really really interesting move for the whole market because that was typically the area that apple stayed away from so i'm quite curious to see how that now affects the rest of i guess the windows and yeah market but considering that was that was basically their territory so i think it's going to be interesting now and also it's got an iphone chip in it uh which clearly that's showing how powerful their silicone is yeah do you ever do well i mean i want to get back to cory's question which is about the workflow do you ever do editing on an iphone like like have you done that like are you doing your full edit workflow on the air how does that work yeah so i'm definitely not doing full edits on an iphone but um every video that we shoot to consist of multiple shots whilst we're on set we shoot all of our content on iphones um which i think is is quite unique we've tried shooting videos on our i mean we have cinema cameras we've got black magics we've got a7s and R5Cs.

12:21Brandon Baum:Sorry, Canon R5Cs. We've got like a decent range. And on most shoots, we will bring both. Then we'll be like, cool, which one do we prefer the look of? And like, I'd say 95 % of the time, we end up running with the iPhone. They've just done such a good job. $50 ,000 here to cameras and we go with the iPhone. I know, it is crazy. So there's a couple of reasons around it. The first one is all the work that we do is these very elaborate CG scenes. To do work in CG, the first job within the pipeline is having to 3d uh track your camera so we basically need to do a solve so our software understands the 3d environment the camera sorry so the software understands where the camera is within 3d environment now of course if we're shooting everything on phones well these phones they're not really phones they're just they're supercomputers that are incredibly small that have these like really advanced gyroscope sensors on them also have these really advanced lidar sensors on them so we then thought well great everything that we need to be able to capture that data in real time is actually built into the phone after a ton of research and trial and error we found like an array of apps that we were able to use really printed a case where we could essentially have two iphones rigged together wow hold it on on one sort of mound which basically means one of the cameras is one of the iphones is just filming one of the other one is capturing all sort of spatial data around us it's capturing a point cloud scan of the environment we're in and it's capturing the gyroscopic data in in time code sync to the footage we're recording wow so when we bring all of that into the edit we no longer need to do a 3d camera track which previously was like two three days out of our pipeline now we're capturing all of it in real time straight in camera with a box and two iPhones that's sick yeah it's crazy because the pipeline I just explained to you is so insanely complex, yet a piece of technology that is in everyone's pockets or a lot of people's pockets, and they don't even realize the capabilities of what's really what they're spending all that money on.

14:28Brandon Baum:It's like the 0.001 % of users, which is like the people like us that are like a really getting to experiment in those worlds. I just think that's so cool that thankfully these like big tech companies are making rules for these like really specific creative use cases for people like us in the world yeah what's kind of true with like ai like like they're making these like incredibly powerful models that can do all sorts of things and they have no idea what people are actually going to do with it and and they're constantly surprised by the things that people come up with it's actually out in the wild yeah i think i think it's a great example of that which is obviously like okay let's take fireflies an example firefly boards is like one of my favorite tools at the moment and um obviously with firefly board you you can use it as um a brainstorming tool sort of a visualization it can help you do uh character um sprints it can basically just like really help you kind of define and lock in your ideas so like such a granular level it's unbelievable and then i what do i out of all of those like really technical tools that um help you in your production pipeline what's the thing that went really viral and people putting photos of themselves and saying give give me 10 options of new hairstyles yes it's like it's like yeah well cool yeah cool the tools the tools can tell you what new hairstyles to get but it can do like way more advanced stuff but like hey if that's what the users want to do with it then cool the tools are working they're doing their job it's really cool to be able to have a thing like boards where you can integrate that type of work that part of the process into your existing pipeline i imagine where it's really easy to be like all right send this to after effects send this to wherever yeah exactly and i think the cool thing with uh where firefly is going as a whole is like even from where the tools are today you can really clearly see where it's going and how this sort of just becomes even more and more so just a full suite just going back to just a early bookend but going back to where we started where i was talking about you know my first pc didn't it was just a family household pc and we didn't each have our own computers because that wasn't really a thing back then but i couldn't do any sort of rendering because i was just trying to render on the the local amount of compute power i had well now like everything in this kind of like firefly suite it's all just cloud compute so suddenly as long as you've got internet access like everyone's kind of playing to the the same spec which i think is really interesting and it means a good point yeah i love this kind of like access slash democratization piece which like i understand i was very lucky that i even grew up in a household with a pc and because of that i was able to then start creating and learning how to make videos not very well but i was still doing it yeah you got early reps in exactly like now the bars dropped even lower and now we've kind of entering a space where cool it feels like the trajectory of where tech is going right now is to this kind of like cloud compute infrastructure well then suddenly now it's not a question of like okay well how much compute can you personally afford in your own house it's now a question of like well do you have a device and are able to connect to the internet 100 let's go back to the workflow question what was it before yeah what was it before ever we also egged you on throughout that entire thing what was it before and what is it now because we met we mentioned firefly boards like tell us everything you used to use and what you use now cool so uh let's go very binary from from my early days, it was when it was me in my bedroom.

17:51Brandon Baum:It was lots of pieces of paper and post-it notes around me. I was the post-it note king back then. I'd have a stack of post-it notes next to my bedside table. Every time I got an idea, I'd scribble it down and slap up with a wall as I was half asleep. That annoyingly was always my best time to come up with ideas as I was drifting off to sleep and I'd have to force wake myself up just to store them. Then I would usually wait until i could see how like two or three of these post-its could come together and actually start building and i one idea on its own was never enough to actually go and create a video it's too basic and too obvious and the chance are it's probably already been done where you start getting the magic is when you're actually able to start bringing these these kind of strings and these threads together and those were always the highest performing videos that i'd come up with because they always felt innovative and new as just sort of frankensteining some like fun different concepts and styles together i'd then shoot all the videos myself i always start the process in premiere doing a time remap um something that we're very very very precise on across the studio even before it was a studio it was just me is we time remap our videos to the specific frame we probably have no exaggeration between like 50 to 100 um time remap marks in like 30 second video every beat so someone's hand swinging up well we would time remap the swing to the stop making sure that every beat of the video has a perfect rhythm and consistency to it the kind of rule of thumb i use is i like tap my like my fist my foot on the floor and if i feel there's one beat of a video that doesn't have new information injected to the audience well it's an opportunity for them to be bored and click off so we would really just sort of tighten up the video so um it felt like really engaging starts when.

19:35Brandon Baum:Anyway, once we've done our time remap and I was sort of locked on my timing, then I would then go into a more traditional pipeline in After Effects and start compositing and working on the video. The reason I do the time remapping first is because anyone that's ever rotoscope before would realize the grace of cutting out your frames before you jump into the process just to really cut down that timeline. At Adobe Max last year, when they showed off the auto rotoscope tool, like you could hear the oxygen suck out of the room as people were like... yeah here's the thing we hate doing nobody likes photoscoping exactly exactly so yeah that that that was really really exciting so i would then work on the video i guess it's traditional after effects pipeline and then i would bring it back into premiere to do my last little time remap and last touches doing add a mix add a grade and then send it off and post it and my cycle would start again amazing so that was the before the evolution time does that take from beginning to end then good question well to be honest i was forcing myself to do it within a day so it was a sprint so it was whether whether this video should take three weeks or not you got a day to do it and there was a really fun exercise for me and i think that was the that was the experience that made me lose the whole like perfectionism idea and just go it's really where i've kind of like embodied this philosophy that you know of a project that you do 50 of your time is spent getting 90 % of the project together.

21:00Brandon Baum:And the other 50 % is spent getting that last 10 % together. And I always just think now it's like, cool, maybe get your projects to like 95%. Maybe that's like a good number. But ultimately that last 5 % is really only the things that you notice. You think it's the stuff that's going to bug everyone else. But ultimately people are just engrossed into the story and the last 5%, well, if it's at the last 5%, it's too late and it's not because of the story. It's because you've noticed a tiny little weird thing in the background that there's a voice in your head that's eating at you to fix it it trained me to drop those and just really focus on the things that the audience really cares about so that was a great experience that's awesome i relate to that doing a daily newsletter because we have to publish every day so i can't be precious about anything i often am and i'll sometimes work really late because of it but even still it's like you got i think it's a really good process to just publish daily if you can yeah it's important remember 91 a yeah yeah it's one of the i don't think it matters what it is i just think the the craft of practicing doing something daily forcing yourself to get it out and just being in that creation cycle i'd argue i felt like at my most creative that period there's an analogy i love i promise i'm going to get to the after i promise this is the last time appreciate you appreciate you there's an awesome um ed sheeran documentary and he has this analogy where he talks about creativity and he says okay this is this is your creativity imagine you go into a derelict house everywhere's moldy dirty grimy just everything destroyed and disgusting and in that house there is a a tap and you know you sort of turn the faucet and just dirty dirty horrible water comes out but that dirty water that's your bad ideas flowing out the tap he said if you leave the tap running for long enough and and you keep trying to experiment and make new things eventually for the first time a tiny spit of clear water comes out and that tiny spit is your first good idea but then it's all dirty and rubbish and it keeps going for a while but the idea is the longer you leave the tap running the more you create the more you get in the cycle of just hitting that publish button eventually all that starts running out is clear water you learn how to create you learn the art you learn the craft you put your 10 000 hours in and suddenly all you know how to do is just to keep spitting out clear water and find your stride i think it's an awesome analogy that i think people really assume that there's this this idea that the people at the top are just like so talented that they were born with i think that couldn't be further from the truth or at least in my personal experience i really do just think getting those reps in that repetition is everything and that really just comes from the inner love for experimenting trying new things and just like putting your heart into your work and keeping that cycle going on and on you know it's funny too because you know you always hear you know greatness is a thing you're born with but sometimes it's a thing ripped out of you kicking and screaming just stay in it's you know sometimes it's just just that raw or it's just your overconfidence you're you just are overconfident that you will be great and then eventually the greatness catches up with you exactly exactly like it is really cool i completely agree so yeah i think that's a nice hopefully comforting perspective of like hey no one's expecting you to be incredible or anything but like you and everyone has this like cool outlook of like, cool, well, if I just put the hours into it and I try and rack up my 10 ,000 hours, I can just get closer and closer to the clear water eventually spitting out.

24:23Well, this is a good transition to AI because I feel like AI, if you look at it on macro level, not just with video, kind of complicates that a little bit. Because now, like there was a great debate that I saw recently where it's people basically who are anti-AI or pro-AI. You could possibly divide them into people who like the craft of the work or the outcome of the work i think that's reductive because i think you can like both but yeah ai speeds up the path to the outcome for the output and and it sort of compresses the 10 000 hours but then it's like are you really learning it if ai is doing it like where where do you land on that because it's an interesting debate

25:01Brandon Baum:that's great i've actually never heard it kind of boiled down like that the craft and the output i think that's a really really good point i think both sides are correct in places and um i i kind of feel like i live in this like middle camp between these two things i'm somewhere down the middle i feel like there's less of us out there i feel like everyone's either like die hard this is the final this is the final feat and that this is the end of creativity after this moment and then there's the another camp people are like no no no form of work created with ai can be real art and And I'm like, cool, I'm somewhere between those two things.

25:36Brandon Baum:I think both two things can be true at the same time. Now, I think the reason your question is quite hard of like, okay, what's my workflow in a post-AI world? It's so hard because there are so many ways to execute things now. There are so many ways to get from A to Z. And honestly, every week our pipeline is changing. And I guarantee you, if I go around, I've got an incredible team of artists in the studio who are all incredibly talented. I guarantee if I went around the room and asked each one of them, they'd each have a different answer that they'd give you. So I guess where I'll go is some sort of maybe rough amalgamation between all of those different ideas.

26:12I think at its core basis, my passion around AI kind of boils into two camps. One is this diversifying opening opportunity for creatives and opening the door to people that didn't get access to go to film schools and get access to shooting on nice cinema cameras and big sets, etc.

26:34Brandon Baum:And still being able to have tools that teaches them how to become a filmmaker. I think that's really special. I think back to the opportunity that I had when I was young. And I love the idea that that's now being expanded out even further and wider. Hopefully almost everyone can agree that is a good thing at its core. I think two, then how does that affect the creative professional today? Now, my gut instinct is on how this is going to evolve is if you look at a film, like a Hollywood production, you've sat and you've watched the credits at the end. You'll see that there is one to three, four thousand names on that list.

27:10Brandon Baum:Now, that isn't one, two, three, four thousand names for the sake of two, three thousand names. those names are there because each person on that list or each sector and group of people are there because they are the specialists and the best at what they do in that specific field of what they do the idea that anyone could imagine that there'll just be this one broad stroke where a single person could write a string of words and that output the level of quality that goes into any form of like art at scale i.e a film a series a music album etc um is preposterous it's absolutely crazy because no single person can have that humongous variety of skill sets that go into creating that final output however what i believe is each one of those individual people within that process can supercharge their process and their pipeline the speed in which they get to what they get to the opportunity to experiment, try new ideas and improve the quality of the outcome, I think can be set on fire and can give them explosively better results.

28:18Brandon Baum:Yeah, absolutely. You know, we see that in every industry, every like we we cover AI very directly, but we also talk with people who are scientists. We talk with people who are building things. And in doing that, one of the things that stands really, really true is that AI is at its most powerful in the hands of an expert at a specific thing. They know the questions to ask. They know what they're looking for. They know what it's called to spin a camera horizontally. They don't just say, do that horizontal spinny thing. They know what to ask. And I think that ability to put the right people with an amazing tool and is an opportunity to create something that is maybe even more amazing than what we've seen in the past.

29:04You know, you've basically given them the electric drill from a hand drill.

29:09Brandon Baum:Exactly. Exactly. So, yeah, I think drawing parallels from my old pipelines where it is today. I think it's quite funny what my old ideation pipeline was with the post-it notes, which, by the way, I'm not against post-it notes. I do think there is something still quite nice about physically writing when it comes to brainstorming. When I do brainstorm sessions, I usually have these humongous whiteboards up on the wall. We've got these whiteboards in our studio that the entire like wallpaper of one of the walls is just a whiteboard. So you can literally write from the very top of the wall to where your feet are and across the whole stretch of the wall.

29:39Brandon Baum:And sometimes that is how you need to visualize an idea to properly let it come to life. but what i found quite interesting about my old workflow is what i didn't even really realize at the time or maybe it's just like i kind of gave the idea to what boards now is all of those individual post-it notes that i then used to leave up there and then wait until i could sort of like draw a thread between them to bring them together is essentially what adobe has then gone and built inside of firefly boards yes right being able to kind of create and generate all these different ideas select on like multiple ingredients together and then create new variations of what you want to create based off of those previous generations and then create tons of variations of even that final version to help you spin up even more ideas it basically brought what i had in my head and allowed me to bring it or i guess us as a team bring it out into something that everyone can visualize because i guess when i was doing with the post-it notes it was fine and fun for just me but then how did you get that idea across to the entire team of collaborators that you've got around you right right because you could write like i don't know um to take a recent example that you of a video you just did funny i don't know why this is the one i'm thinking of the baguette that she tells you not to worry about like you could write like baguette like that baguette you know what would you write for that one if you were right the post-it though how would you describe that video see that's a problematic area i would but you know you can write like baguette idea and and you explain it to people and they're like i don't know i don't get it but you can visualize it in much different way and people are like okay this is immediately hilarious yeah yeah yeah that that fits into a pillar of content that we call it our unhinged uh pillar where they're just uh yeah they're just slightly unhinged uh always kind of bordering the fun adventurous line yeah that's been one of those things that the more content that we've created i think especially in this world of like now generated ai content across digital something that we found is like the things that still feel very like natively human and funny are performing even better right now and actually content that did perform the best for us a year ago was that very like high spectacle content we're now almost arguably spectacles becoming saturated well now the thing that's performing the best is the really organic real things that feels very human that isn't in humongous cg environments it's just real people doing funny human things yeah we decided you should probably direct the next spider-man yeah because we watched the spider-man video and i was like get this guy into hollywood like would you ever go that direction or are you happy with where you are now no so look both things are true i'm very happy and love what i do and i will can forever continue creating this content.

32:30Brandon Baum:But yes, the trajectory for us as a studio is producing Hollywood big blockbusters and features and series. I'm obsessed with storytelling. I genuinely, genuinely believe it's one of the most powerful tools in the world. I think the reason storytelling is so incredible is because it's a superpower that anyone and everyone has the ability to harness. And I think that's such a special thing, this idea that if you really learn the power of storytelling, and I'm not just talking making feature films and series or poems or books. I mean, the ability to tell stories to your friends and family and co-workers.

33:02Brandon Baum:I really believe in this power of storytelling, this idea that you can align people on missions and directives and doing good, positive change for the world. And I think that's such a special thing. And I think that's prevalent in so many great human achievements across society. And I love that that's almost become the mission of our studio is it's just to put great, positive stories out into the world. I think there isn't enough of it. And it's something that I love. I love making people happy and smile and fill them with, I guess, positivity and hope in a world that feels dreary and forever focusing on the opposite end of the spectrum.

33:39Brandon Baum:I think we need more players in the space that just focus on bringing the love and the joy and the happiness back into people's lives. I love it. I love it. I agree. I had another question, which was back to the boards idea. Or actually, I guess it was more about how you structure your team because you have your YouTube channel. People know your face. They might not necessarily know your team, but in their minds, they might watch your videos and say, oh, it's this one guy who's doing everything with AI. But you hire an entire production crew. So you're still hiring people. You're still working with a massive team of artists.

34:14So, yeah, just tell us a little bit more about that process and why you're choosing to go that route versus trying to do everything yourself.

34:22Brandon Baum:So firstly, I couldn't. The team are way more talented than me. I need to start with that. If I was still editing the videos, there would still be like 2D composited visual effects videos. I've just got some in. The people on the team, they blow my mind every single day. I'm just forever impressed and just like honored to get to work alongside them. They're all so cool. Somehow we've managed to just find this like awesome group of like incredibly passionate, innovative, just geniuses that just really care about storytelling and their creative craft. I love that my job every day is just getting to work with these amazing creatives, just making new art in the world.

35:02Brandon Baum:So the idea initially was like, okay, at the start, I was doing all the visual effects. I was like, I can only really work in one video at the time. So I started bringing on other artists around me, realized that they were way better than me and just should leave them to it because the quality of the content could get better. And then went, And, okay, is that the same for set design? I hired an art director, a set person, brought them into it. And it was actually someone who's joined us as a runner, a production assistant, and they moved over. But anyway, brought them into it way, way better. And it kind of spiraled from there.

35:32Brandon Baum:Producers, writers, production assistants, all the way through to now we've got an agency team, commercial operations to the business as well. Like it's now just really scaling. And I've had this really fun job of kind of wearing quite a few different hats and being in the middle of it all. and just getting to see so many really passionate people come together as a collective just to tell really fun and awesome stories and at its core and building out a dream you had yeah that's awesome yeah insane and look this dream is part one we spoke about the the movies and tv shows that that's part two i'm excited to continue kind of like leading this journey and and redefining what the future of storytelling is going to look like i think it's no surprise to to anyone like storytelling is in a weird spot right now and we've got this like influx of ip films and prequels sequels and whatnot and i don't want to hate on them because like those are the films that consistently are pulling in the numbers in box office and that's why hollywood keeps remaking them and i don't want to i don't want to pretend that it's a hollywood's fault we should point fingers because ultimately hollywood are funding the things that consumers are going to watch and unfortunately for whatever reason audiences aren't showing up for original stories like they used to at least they're paying up the fourth remake of a star is born or the exactly i kind of to me the thing that feels really exciting is i think we've got an opportunity like we've built this awesome um audience online that love like our scripted fictional worlds i guess my thought process is well if we can start kind of seeding these characters in these worlds and start telling these stories and building what will turn into these movies one day all on digital start building the characters and getting audience buy-in from a digital standpoint first well then at that point if we can prove that hey look we've got billions of people who have already seen these characters and worlds hopefully then at that point that gives us like the ammunition we need to go okay great we can now turn this into a feature film as an original story because we've already seeded these characters and worlds and got audiences excited about what we're creating over here which hopefully should translate to people coming back to box office for some new stories I think people with your background have a unique advantage that probably Hollywood would call a disadvantage in that it's very comparable to Vibe Coding versus Software Engineers grant.

37:46Oh, interesting. Is that you've come to this like as an outsider, you learned how to do things as a how does this work? What do I need? As opposed to a really formal education, a really specifically, you know, here's the doctrine I follow. You don't do things this way because, by God, somebody said for 40 years we don't do them that way. And you come in and you look at this from this whole new paradigm, which gives you this advantage in how you can. what is a movie you can throw that out the window and call it make it what you want it to be you know and i feel like that is a thing that when you get into deeply entrenched industries and i say that comparing to software engineers versus vibe coders to traditional filmmaking versus what you all are doing as a team and it's this it's it's not just led by who's funding it it's led by what do we want to build what's going to be amazing like you already have an audience you have an audience of people who if you make a movie a percentage of those people are absolutely going to go watch it because they like you and what you do and i think i think that's a fascinating new approach and i can't wait to see what comes out of that me too and look we're making we're

38:56Brandon Baum:making a lot of guesses and we've got a lot of uh theories and ultimately no one knows how this is going to pan out all i know is like it feels like the the atmosphere is is like ripe for change And it feels like we're at the cusp of something. Something needs to change one way or another. I think everyone globally can agree that what is going on right now isn't working. I feel like we're at the perfect time for that shift to start taking place. Yeah, so I'm excited to hopefully be a part of that journey, be launching these films and continuing to use the success that we are, the early success that we've got so far from building up our social channels.

39:31Brandon Baum:and then hopefully starting to build stories and worlds inside of those that we can then transition into these much bigger storytelling platforms. I know Netflix and a lot of the traditional streamers find that YouTube is actually their biggest competitor. Could you ever launch a feature film on YouTube and have that be successful? Like, do you see YouTube as being a potential Netflix? Great question. Great question. Absolutely. And that's the thing that I'm really passionate about. Now, YouTube is now the number one thing that people consume on their TVs in the US. It has the most amount of screen time, which is great because we spoke about that kind of like idea of democratized creativity.

40:11Brandon Baum:Well, that can only be true if there's two things at play. The tools are democratized, which Adobe have come in. And day by day, they are knocking that bar lower and lower and lower. And they're going to continue to do that to open up their tools to as wide a market as possible. But that's only half the story. The other half is distribution. The thing that's been sort of this gatekeeping thing by, you know, the big six for as long as media has existed. Well, now YouTube's provided this platform where distribution at scale is free, but not just any distribution. Distribution on the world's largest stage now sitting as the number one thing that people are watching on their TVs in the living room.

40:49Brandon Baum:So, yeah, I think all of this is just kind of aligning to this idea that, like, yeah, it feels like that the atmosphere is ripe for change. Like we're about it's about to happen. And I think everyone, I guess, hopefully listening to the podcast today could see themselves within that world of going, whether you're already, you're a pro user and you've got your Adobe pipeline that works for you today, which is great. Maybe there's an opportunity on the other side to now be distributing your content at a larger scale. Or maybe on the other side of the equation where you're already using these platforms to distribute your content, but you didn't realize you could tap into much greater and larger tools to expand the stories that you're already telling.