The AI Film Studio Gets a Brain Transplant

Hey gang! Welcome back to Theoretically News!

I'll level with you: around here, this was Paperclip Heart Week. The film, the making-of, and now this issue—it's Paperclips all the way down. But that's okay, because it was a bit of a slower news week, with really only one story dominating the cycle: the release of Claude Fable 5.

Which, oddly enough, ties right back into this newsletter. More on that in a bit.

But let's get to what you're all here for: the latest and greatest in the AI Film Production Studio template. Both versions of the AI Film pipeline are available below—and if you've never run one of these before, there's a full walkthrough for first-timers near the end of this issue. Let's dive in!

If you haven't caught it yet, here it is: Paperclip Heart—my longest AI-generated film to date.

Interestingly, this whole thing began life as a project called The Sub, which you may have caught glimpses of in videos over the previous weeks. The logline: "Das Boot meets H.P. Lovecraft." And while I may return to it at some point, somewhere mid-production I realized The Sub wasn't actually saying anything. It was a collection of scenes featuring characters in increasingly bad situations.

(I still think it would have been entertaining! But the moment I realized it had nothing to say, I more or less lost interest in finishing it.)

Meanwhile, Paperclip Heart had been stewing on the back burner of my noggin for a while: the idea of a different kind of AI takeover. One that—while I don't think it will be as extreme as presented in the film—is likely to actually happen.

We've already seen plenty of "haha, look at this" news stories—like the woman in Japan who recently "married" her custom ChatGPT companion, complete with AR glasses for the ring exchange.
And, of course, platforms like Character AI have run into their own well-documented controversies.

My Take: This only accelerates as voice models become real-time avatar video models. Take that Her-style voice—that ever Text To Speech Model uses—make it even more realistic, put a face on it, and then combine it with the very well-documented loneliness epidemic already in play... yeah. Things are going to get a pretty messy.

And at the end of the day, that was something I had a lot more to say about than a doomed submarine crew meeting a mind-controlling tentacle creature at the bottom of the ocean!
(Although, now I can’t help but think about a Lovecraftian AI film…sigh…)

I detailed the pre-production and scriptwriting process in the Making of Paperclip Heart video I released the other day. As mentioned there, I used Martini.film as the production hub for the entire film.

Now, full disclosure: Martini sponsored the making-of video, and they were also kind enough to sponsor today's newsletter. Martini is still in closed beta, but thanks to a great relationship with the team, they're offering instant access to you all, along with a discount:

To note: this offer is only available through the month of June. But I'm sure we can talk them into a July special.

Oh, and one more thing from the Martini team: once you connect your MCP and knock out a few basic setup tasks, they'll drop $10 worth of olives into your account. (Olives are Martini credits. I love it—) Full details are on the MCP connection page once you're in.

As for the actual experience? I found the entire MCP process refreshing and—dare I say it—easy? Total production on the project ran about two days, working in tandem alongside the MCP agent, which (as detailed in the video) had complete access to every tool available on Martini. I'd fire off shots by chat, generations would run, and I'd keep working on something else in the meantime.

The pipeline, TL;DR: Claude, running my original AI Film Production template (the same one we used on Dragon Blue), now piped out to the Martini canvas via MCP.

And all of that happened before Fable 5 dropped.

Which brings us to...

On June 9, Anthropic released Claude Fable 5—the first model in the new Claude 5 family, and the first of a new "Mythos-class" tier that sits above Opus.

The interesting wrinkle: Fable 5 and the restricted-access Claude Mythos 5 are the same underlying model. Fable is the version with additional safeguards for general release—and when those safeguards trip (Anthropic says under 5% of sessions), your query gets handled by Opus 4.8 instead.

That safeguard system did get off to a rocky start. At launch, the rerouting was invisible—no notice, no flag, just a quiet “dumber” output—and after a few days of well-earned criticism from researchers and developers, Anthropic admitted it "made the wrong tradeoff" and made the restrictions visible, with flagged requests now clearly identified.

The Benchmark Bros analysis is mostly about long-horizon work: the largest gains show up on extended, complex, multi-step tasks—the "give it a complete job and walk away" use case.

Pricing is stupidly high, and lands at $10/$50 per million tokens (double Opus 4.8's $5/$25), though it's currently included on Pro, Max, Team, and Enterprise plans at no extra cost through June 23. So if you want to kick the tires for “free”, the clock is ticking.

My Take: I've had a few days to play with Fable 5 now, and I find it to easily be the best LLM I have ever used. I always enjoyed Opus 4.8, but Fable just has a way of pushing past the roadblocks Opus would occasionally throw in front of you. Fable very much seems committed to getting the job you asked for DONE.

As for the guardrail controversy: for what it's worth, I haven't run into a single one of those safeguards in my time with the model. It's an important conversation to keep having about transparency—but on a creative level, I don't think it's going to affect you at all.

Now, the majority of Paperclip Heart was produced on Opus 4.8, but I'm already starting to play with new projects in Fable. And while—from a production standpoint—it isn't quite perfect when you let it run off and do its own thing, with a guided hand? I think it could become incredibly powerful.

To that point...

QUICK NOTE: If you need a quick install walkthrough, or have no idea what I’m talking about, check below for a Starter Guide!

I had Fable 5 go through the original AI Film Production template—the one we've been using since Dragon Blue—and see if it could improve upon it.

And boy, did it.

The pipeline grew from 6 steps to 8, and here's what the new version (which I'm calling the Fable Film Studio) fixed and added:

Both versions of the template are available for you here:
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1hxT3cc349GsD0kXwOq3y15S6TaTOV9ln?usp=sharing

How to Actually Use This Thing (A Tutorial for First-Timers)

If you've been reading about these templates for weeks and thinking "okay, but what do I actually DO with it?"—this section is for you. The good news: there's nothing to install. The template is just a folder of markdown files. Claude reads them and turns into a film studio. Here's the whole process:

Step 1: Download and unzip. Grab either template from the links above. You'll get a folder. Put it anywhere on your computer. That's the installation. (Told you.)

Step 2: Point Claude at the folder. Two ways to do this:

Step 3: Tell it what you want to make. A logline is plenty. "A lighthouse keeper discovers his radio is receiving transmissions from the future." Claude will walk you through the intake—aspect ratio, runtime, where it's going to live (YouTube? Vertical for shorts?)—and then start moving through the pipeline steps in order.

Step 4: Follow the steps and approve at the gates. The template is built around checkpoints: you approve the story before character design, approve the casting round before scenes get generated, and so on. You're the director—Claude does the paperwork and waits for your sign-off.

Step 5: Generate your images and video. Every prompt the pipeline produces is plain text—copy and paste them into whatever image or video generator you're already using. Or, if you're on Martini, connect the MCP and Claude fires off the shots itself while you work on something else. (This is the "two days of production" magic from earlier in the issue—and connecting the MCP also nets you those $10 in olives.)

Step 6: When a chat session fills up, ask for a handoff. Long productions will outlive a single conversation. Just say "write a handoff doc"—Claude saves the production state to the folder, and your next session picks up exactly where you left off.

That's it. The template handles the tracking, the naming, the continuity bible—your job is taste! Go make something awesome!

And with that, Paperclip Heart Week officially comes to a close!

If you have any feedback or anything you'd like to see, please let me know: [email protected]

Or, just drop a comment on one of the videos! I honestly do see them all!

---As Always I thank you for Reading… Tim