Friday December 5, 2025 - St. Louis, MO - I was almost giddy with excitement when I saw the story in Variety about a new documentary film studio planning to use AI to bring archival photos to life.   

As a digital archival nerd and documentary filmmaker who is currently using archival materials to bring a true story to life on screen with Steak Guerrillas, this development makes a lot of sense to me. 

Call it confirmation bias, but when I read Unfeatured Films’ announcement that they were using artificial intelligence to animate archival photographs and restore old footage, I felt a jolt of affirmation.

Their pitch of “cost-effective AI-driven innovation” that could “restore and resurrect archival footage in ways never before seen” is a signal to me that we are on the right path at STORYSMART®.

It is also a sign that documentary filmmaking, especially the kind rooted deeply in history and personal testimony, is about to enter a new era.

For filmmakers like me who work archival materials, this moment matters. In my documentary project Steak Guerrillas, we’ve been wrestling with a familiar challenge: how do you visually reconstruct moments that were never filmed?

How do you help the audience see and feel the tension of history when the camera wasn’t there?

How do you bring a story to life in an entertaining way with a minuscule production budget?

AI is now offering an answer, but with that answer comes responsibility, risk, and a new competitive landscape for storytellers.

This is post is my attempt to make sense of that landscape before we all rush headlong into it.

The Bottleneck AI Is Finally Breaking

Documentaries rooted in history often face the same limitation: there simply isn’t enough video. Until recently, filmmakers had only three choices:

1.    Use still photographs,

2.    Create live-action reenactments, or

3.    Rely on animation, which can be both expensive and stylistically limiting.

Unfeatured Films is proposing something different: using AI to add motion, dimensionality, and continuity to archival images, essentially transforming still photos into sequences that can play like raw footage. Clarke, the studio’s founder, frames it not as a shortcut but as a breakthrough—one that “allows us to tell the past with the vividness of the present.”

This is a profound shift. It means a filmmaker no longer needs a miracle discovery of lost reels to bring a historical moment to life. The image itself can become the seed of a cinematic experience.

For under-documented communities, for immigrant families, for grassroots movements that never had the luxury of filming their lives, this is a transformative development.  AI has cracked open a closed door.

The Promise: Cinematic Power for the People

This democratizing potential is exactly what industry analysts are beginning to recognize. McKinsey & Company recently posted an article entitled “How AI could reinvent film and TV production” that I urge you to check out. 

Let me give a shout out to the DPA and my fellow member Joe Schroeder for sharing this in the November round up. 

The McKinsey team noted that AI could transform not just how films are made, but who gets to make them. For independent filmmakers, the insight is especially significant: AI may allow small studios with limited budgets to produce compelling visual content without raising massive amounts of capital.

Think about that for a moment. A small team with a collection of photographs, letters, and audio recordings can now create what once required a wealthy large studio with a VFX department, an animation team, a budget for actor reenactments, and the resources to sustain months of postproduction.

This technology moves documentary filmmaking closer to a world where talent, discipline, and careful story development matter more than access to expensive infrastructure.

As someone building a new kind of independent studio, one focused on truthful storytelling, owned IP, and disciplined development, this is game-changing.

The Risk: When Animation Looks Real, Truth Becomes Fragile

To co-opt and tweak a line from Spiderman, with great power comes a pressure we’ve never quite faced before. Documentary filmmakers are custodians of truth.  

We are Truthstorians (stealing a line from the lead character of The Lowdown, journalist/writer Lee Raybon, played by Ethan Hawke). I love that made up word as it fits so perfectly here. As documentary filmmakers we’re not just creating content. We’re shaping how people understand real lives, real events, and real history.  Truth matters. 

When AI can animate a face that never moved on camera, or follow someone down a hallway where no videographer ever stood, we must ask: How close is too close?

When does enhancing the past become rewriting it?

Unfeatured Films says their model will remain “human led,” using AI only within a responsible, creative process. That’s the right instinct. But that won’t be enough for the industry as a whole.

We need standards. We need transparency. We need disclosures. We need the documentary equivalent of nutrition labels. An insight shared in the McKinsey post.

The danger isn’t simply that AI-generated scenes might mislead an audience; it’s that they might mislead a memory, especially for viewers who trust documentaries to show things as they truly happened.

This responsibility becomes even heavier with true-crime stories, civil rights histories, political narratives, or testimonies of trauma. These are not playgrounds for generative flashiness. They demand precision and respect.

The IP Issue: Who Owns the Story That AI Learns From?

Just as important, maybe even more so, is the issue of rights and source material.

The McKinsey team makes a crucial point that is going to define the next decade of filmmaking: the industry is moving toward commercial-safe, IP-protected AI models, systems trained only on content a studio legally owns. 

Why? Because creators and studios are discovering that when you feed your footage or archival assets into large, publicly accessible AI models, you risk losing control of them. In a competitive industry, that risk is existential.

For families, journalists, public figures, athletes, estates, and storytellers of all kinds, this means something simple but transformative: The most valuable asset you own may not be the story itself, it may be the archive behind it. Your photos, home movies, documents, audio recordings, letters, memoirs, notes, curated scrapbooks and other ephemera matter. 

These, along with your investment in developing storytelling source material (ex. Documentary interviews), will be critically important going forward.  If you own them—and if you protect the rights to them—you hold leverage in a world where AI needs material to learn from. 

This is one reason STORYSMART’s emphasis on “storytelling source material” is more important than ever. AI doesn’t diminish the value of these artifacts; it multiplies it.

The AI Reallocation of Power in Documentary Production

One of the most interesting insights in the McKinsey analysis is that AI may reallocate value pools across the industry. In plain English: Production houses, VFX teams, Postproduction vendors, and Distributors will see the flow of money shift. I will not disappear, but it will move.

And documentaries will feel this shift first. That's because documentaries lean heavily on the three areas AI is already transforming:

1.    Archival processing and restoration

2.    VFX-light but style-heavy visual storytelling

3.    Lean budgets with high creative demands

If AI can automate parts of postproduction and elevate the creative quality of archival material, the balance tilts toward studios that:

·     develop well,

·     work efficiently,

·     own their materials, and

·     operate with speed and clarity.

In short, the future belongs to those who control their stories and prepare deeply on the front end.

A Case Study: How We’re Using AI with Steak Guerrillas

Our film, based on the memoirs and archives of Dr. Arturo M. Taca, sits right at the intersection of these shifts. We face the challenge shared by many historical documentaries: much of the story lives in memory, testimony, photographs, and moldy archive items.

There are no video recordings of the most dramatic moments. We must reconstruct them respectfully and accurately on a minuscule budget in a compressed timeframe.

Our approach has been simple:

·     Use AI-enhanced animation where the memoir and source material supports it.

·     Avoid inventing scenes not anchored in the factual record.

·     Ensure all materials are used within a rights-secure workflow.

·     Make transparency a core storytelling value.

AI helps us illuminate the truth, not embellish it. It allows us to widen the lens of history, but not to fictionalize it.

The Independent Studio Advantage: This Is Our Moment

Massive consolidation is underway in Hollywood. Netflix acquiring Warner Brothers is the latest example. As studios merge, their risk tolerance shrinks. Fewer films get greenlit. Fewer directors get chances. Fewer unconventional stories see the light of day.

But AI flips that dynamic for independents. Suddenly, a small studio with strong development discipline, ethical clarity, and rights-secured archives can produce a film competitive in quality with mid-tier studio output.

This is the opportunity for STORYSMART®, and for every filmmaker who believes in honest, ethical storytelling.

AI Will Not Replace the Truth. It Will Test Our Commitment to It.

AI isn’t the threat. AI isn’t the danger. AI isn’t going to replace documentary filmmakers or erase the need for careful research, deep empathy, and rigorous ethics. The real threat is careless stewardship.

When you animate history, you become responsible for how that history is remembered. When you use AI to bring the past into motion, you must ensure you are not distorting the truth you set out to preserve.

In the next era of documentary filmmaking, the winners won’t be the people with the best technology. They will be the people with the best stories. Stories that are protected, clarified, ethically stewarded, and grounded in real human truth.

AI will reshape how we work. But our integrity will define what we make. And that is the future worth fighting for.

-- Ron Watermon