Technically Creative Newsletter
October 2025
Welcome to the October edition of the Technically Creative newsletter.
Editor's Note from CEO & Founder, Orlando Wood:
For decades, Los Angeles has endured a faintly patronizing smile from the other coasts of innovation. Silicon Valley peers down from its northern perch, all Patagonia vests and algorithmic swagger. New York, meanwhile, raises a perfectly arched eyebrow, confident in its mix of finance and fashion. LA? Well, LA was where you went to get a tan, sign a record deal, or pitch a three-act structure…not to build the future.
And yet, once a year, during LA Tech Week, the city briefly stops playing the supporting role and steps into the spotlight. Founders, investors, and engineers fly in to poke around the strange and fertile intersection where code meets culture: film, television, music, streaming. The collisions are messy and electric.
Hollywood, for its part, has never needed technology more. The pace of change, the voracious appetite for content, the demands of distribution…it’s a bonfire, and the only way through is to fight fire with fire. AI will be as essential to safeguarding creative work as it is to generating it. If we don’t wield these tools deliberately, we risk drowning in a torrent of unoriginal, frictionless slop… an endless algorithmic march toward the lowest common denominator.
Social media already gave us a glimpse of what happens when distribution becomes hyper-efficient: a world calibrated not for nuance or beauty, but for whatever makes us happiest or angriest the fastest. LA Tech Week, at its best, is where people come to make sure entertainment’s next chapter doesn’t follow that same script.
KoobrikLabs Reimagines Comic Books for the Scroll Generation
What happens when one of the world’s most iconic comic publishers asks how to bring its legendary stories into the mobile age?
KoobrikLabs partnered with the publisher to reformat its vast library for the scroll generation, transforming thousands of static pages into a seamless, vertical reading experience built for today’s readers.
Our team developed a first-of-its-kind, code-driven conversion system - a Photoshop-based workflow that restructures panels automatically while preserving full creative control. No AI shortcuts, no design compromises, just scalable automation that respects the art.
The result: faster production, cleaner workflows, predictable costs, and a better reading experience for millions of fans.
Who leads when AI takes the entry-level?
Nathaniel the professor?
Our Chief Data Officer, Nathaniel Chadwick, recently gave a guest lecture to students at UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business to explore how the next generation can still find an edge in an AI-shaped job market.
From spotting “quiet opportunities” to mastering adaptability, Nathaniel shared insights on how future leaders can build careers not despite AI, but through it.
Big thanks to UC Berkeley and the Haas School for hosting a conversation that feels more urgent by the day.
The Sora 2 paradox
LBB (Little Black Book) sat down with Orlando Wood and a cross section of industry voices to unpack the release of OpenAI's Sora 2, the latest tet-to video model capable of generating realistic footage and audio from a prompt in seconds. He shared a balanced view of the technology's promise and it pitfalls.
AI’s quiet superpower: turning chaos into clarity
Every few weeks, a new AI model drops and the internet collectively faints. But while everyone debates whether AI will “kill creativity,” something more important is happening quietly beneath the noise.
As Orlando writes in his latest blog, AI’s real strength isn’t in creating - it’s in structuring. Models like Claude 4.5 are helping studios and creators turn scripts, images, and dialogue into searchable, actionable intelligence.
At KoobrikLabs, that’s our focus too: databasing the creative universe, not automating it. The future won’t belong to whoever makes the flashiest tools, but to those who build the smartest foundations.
How production got its groove back
Kati Haberstock has spent her career reshaping how things get made, from Smuggler and Buck to Erich & Kallman, where she now leads as Head of Production and Ad Age’s 2024 Small Agency Producer of the Year. She joins Orlando to explore how the modern producer has evolved from project wrangler to creative architect.
They dig into how AI bidding tools are transforming workflows, why curiosity beats control, and what happens when a team operates unsiloed. Kati breaks down how lean, high-output production can still protect craft, creativity, and sanity in a faster-than-ever industry.
It’s a masterclass in moving smarter, not just faster, and a reminder that production’s heart still beats in the fundamentals.
Inside the lab shaping the next generation of storytelling
Orlando sits down with Erik Weaver, Head of Virtual and Adaptive Production at USC’s Entertainment Technology Center, to explore how Hollywood’s R&D backbone is defining the next chapter of creative production.
This isn’t about shiny tools or hype cycles. It’s about the invisible infrastructure that keeps filmmaking evolving – from the first wave of digital cinema to today’s AI-first workflows. Erik and his team work where creative ambition meets technical precision, building pipelines that make innovation practical, controllable, and copyrightable.
They dig into how AI is transforming virtual production, why provenance and performance will shape the next frontier, and how the industry can push forward without losing sight of story, craft, and culture.
Warner Bros Tech Week
Our CEO Orlando Wood joined Warner Bros. Discovery x SPROCKIT Innovate on the Lot for LA Tech Week, presenting alongside an incredible group of leaders from Warner Bros., NBCUniversal, Fox Sports, Sony Pictures, Paramount, and the Associated Press.
The event brought together more than 50 executives from across media, tech, and finance - including CNN, HBO Max, Amazon, Google, Disney, and JP Morgan to explore how startups and studios can collaborate at the intersection of AI, IP protection, and creative innovation.
It was an inspiring day of conversation and connection, hosted by the teams at Warner Bros. Discovery and SPROCKIT, focused on how the industry can build responsibly and creatively in the age of AI.
From Chaos to Control
In his blog latest post, Nathaniel Chadwick lays out how creative teams can scale from 100K to 10M assets without losing control or momentum. Drawing on lessons from real media and production teams, he details five core pillars of effective Digital Asset Management - clear folder structures, consistent naming, disciplined metadata, shared responsibility, and strong security.
He also includes practical templates, audit checklists, and a 90-minute review teams can run this week to tighten workflows and cut risk. It’s an essential read for producers, editors, and marketers building scalable, secure creative pipelines that actually work in the real world.
Building a studio without walls
When Darren O’Kelly left The Mill to co-found Untold Studios, he wasn’t chasing the next VFX milestone - he was reinventing how creative companies work. Built entirely in the cloud and powered by a culture of independence, Untold has become a model for the future of storytelling, where artistry and technology move in sync.
From Mission: Impossible and The Crown to collaborations with Billie Eilish and Imagine Dragons, Untold’s projects span genres and continents, proving that scale doesn’t have to come at the cost of craft.
In this conversation, Darren and Orlando explore how cloud-native workflows are transforming production, how AI can support rather than replace creativity, and why emotional storytelling will always outlast the tools we use to tell it.
CTO Connect LA
Our CEO Orlando Wood was invited to Google’s CTO Connect LA at their Santa Monica offices last week, a gathering of creative and technical leaders exploring the fast-blurring line between art and technology.
It was a striking reminder of how quickly the extraordinary becomes ordinary. When Google unveiled its latest leap in video generation, the room barely reacted. A year ago, the same demo would’ve felt like science fiction.
We love the story of going from zero to one, the big leaps that grab headlines. But the real progress often happens quietly, between one and two.
That’s where we focus at KoobrikLabs: helping creative teams get more out of the tools that already exist. Because not every breakthrough needs to feel explosive. The best ones often disappear into the workflow and that’s when they truly change everything.
The AI & creativity summit: LA edition
This November, our team will be on the ground at Artist and the Machine’s AI & Creativity Summit: LA Edition, a full-day gathering of 300 top creatives, technologists, and cultural pioneers shaping the future of human–machine collaboration.
Following a sold-out debut in New York, the LA Summit lands on November 19 at The Preserve Hollywood, featuring keynotes, workshops, and live showcases from leading voices across film, design, music, and AI, including speakers from Adobe, IDEO, Universal, Mattel, Coca-Cola, Fast Company, and OpenAI.
It’s a celebration of experimentation and imagination, a chance to explore how AI can elevate creativity without replacing it. If you’re attending, come say hello or drop us a line. We’d love to meet fellow creatives and collaborators.
What do algorithms and addiction have in common?
Benji Rogers, musician turned technologist and Co-President of Surreal AI, joins Orlando to explore how algorithms are designed for addiction and what that means for creativity, culture, and democracy. They discuss how Surreal AI’s attribution system could help artists get credit and payment when their work trains generative models.
It’s a sharp look at how we can build a healthier relationship with technology and protect creativity in the age of AI.
Join the Technically Creative community
Invitations to exclusive events, creative sector roundtables, webinars and on-demand videos, and the Technically Creative newsletter.