The whole studio is one guy | Jonathan Brazeau

Jonathan Brazeau joins Reid Hoffman and Parth Patil to explain how AI animation and filmmaking are making the one-person studio possible—letting small teams create films that once required 100 people. From Dungeons & Dragons world-building and an RPG art book illustrated with Stable Diffusion, to a fantasy-western short film made with Midjourney, Luma AI, and Suno, Jonathan breaks down his workflow: character design, storyboarding, mocap, rotoscoping, music, and human curation. The conversation explores the “cogs and sparks” framework, what a lean AI-native studio can realistically accomplish, how taste separates art from AI slop, and why technology still can’t provide the essential creative spark. Read Questmaxxing on Substack: https://reidhoffman.substack.com/p/questmaxxing

• 0:00Speaker 00

  I had generated forty thousand images in the stable diffusion at some point. And the reason was I was trying to make my own RPG and I had designed the book. You know, my background is in product design, but when I laid out the book, I realized I needed forty five pieces of art. And I didn't have it. And so I turned to stable diffusion. This was kind of like when stuff couldn't do faces or hands that well. I could draw faces and hands. I would draw over those and make the characters and stuff. And it was really fun. It's just like an idea generator. True art, right? Creativity is improbable. It's statistically not probable.

• 0:34Speaker 01

  The token grantee program gives a thousand dollars a week in tokens to high potential creators already deep in AI. Across film, gaming, comics, print and digital art. There are no tool restrictions. The freedom to choose is the point. Grantees also get access to my own custom fleet of agents and an ongoing collaboration with me. The goal, to close the gap between an idea and the world.

• 1:01Speaker 02

  So Jonathan, thank you for joining us on Read Riffs. Part of this, this token grant program, which I love as meeting people who are enormously creative, who are leading the edge of what kinds of things to do. And so with that path, why don't you kick us off with an introduction of Jonathan? And how you added him to our fellowship of token grantees?

• 1:26Speaker 01

  The fellowship. Um, yes. So Jonathan, super glad to have you, both in the program and on today to share your, your creative wisdom. I, I met Jonathan almost, I want to say maybe around eight or nine, maybe 10 years ago now. We were working at a startup in, in West Los Angeles working. And Jonathan was a designer at the startup. And, but more importantly, we started, a couple of us at this company, we started playing Dungeons and Dragons together after work, once a week. And we would take a meeting room and we would play D and D. And Jonathan, as being a design superstar.

• 2:02Speaker 02

  And that's why I said fellowship, but yes.

• 2:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly, exactly. Into the dungeon, right? He had his little iPad and he would be drawing our characters throughout the adventures as they changed. And like the experience and the different characters that we had, like my character was a purple dragonborn. And, and we just had some such, and we played for years, actually. It was one of the most interesting campaigns and getting to know his like creative side and the world building behind him. It was just so much more than just a designer. So really excited to have you on to talk about your creative vision, your ambition, and what you think is possible.

• 2:35Speaker 01

  Now we have some, some of the most interesting tools available.

• 2:38Speaker 00

  I mean, no, thank you. I mean, it was super fun. I mean, honestly, I would recommend D and D to anybody. It made me a better, almost better at everything in life, I feel like. So yeah, it was, it was very formative for me.

• 2:51Speaker 01

  So let's, I want to talk about like how you first got into playing with AI and what your kind of like stance on it was from your perspective. And, and I guess like before, like who you were before AI and how, what your lens on, on your creative aspirations were. And maybe like where that, how that has changed in the last couple of years since the generative AI kind of moment.

• 3:14Speaker 00

  Happened upon AI by accident. I actually definitely remember when it was. It was like November twenty nineteen. There was, I had just started running my own Dungeons and Dragons campaign. So I was transitioning from a player to, you know, dungeon master. And I needed like backdrops. I needed landscapes for the game. And I was, you know, we had sessions every week and I was, I'm not that fast of an artist. You know, it takes me like 10 hours to do like one piece. So I was struggling. And somehow I found this thing called Art Reader. And Art Reader would, I would say would let you smash two images together.

• 3:58Speaker 00

  I know it sounds weird, but you would pick two images and it would combine them to make something new. And you had all these sliders that you can adjust the parameters and weights of things. And I didn't know this was like machine learning or AI at the time. I just thought it was a fun tool. And I was making all these backgrounds and, you know, they were low res. They were very abstract. Cause you know, this is like early days, you know, image gen. And, but the cool thing was I could paint over them. And so I would paint castles and bridges and, and things into the, in Procreate over this image. And it made me, it allowed me to make, you know, these landscapes of this world that were super fast.

• 4:40Speaker 00

  And the players loved it and they were kind of amazed by this tool. And we had no idea what we were doing. But yeah, that was my first foray into it. It was like, yeah, December, November twenty nineteen. And then of course, things progressed, right? We got mid journey at some point and then I was heavily into stable diffusion. When it first came out, like from two point O to like XDXL. And I, this is going to sound wild, but I had generated like forty thousand images in the stable diffusion at some point.

• 5:14Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 5:15Speaker 00

  Yeah. And the reason was I was trying to make my own RPG and I, I was, I had designed the book. You know, my background is in product design, but you know, I, I have a design degree. And so I had designed the book and when I laid out the book, I realized I needed like forty five pieces of art. And I didn't have it. And so I turned to stable diffusion. And this was kind of like when stuff couldn't do faces or hands that well. And so, you know, but I could draw faces and hands. So I would draw over those and make the characters and stuff. And it was really fun. And it was like working with another artist. It was like working with someone who had

• 5:58Speaker 00

  these wild ideas. And, and so I would, I would draw over those. And I, I end up making this whole book with art from stable diffusion that I had drawn over. And so that was kind of like how it started to evolve. And of course, now there's many, many tools at our disposal, not just image gen, you know, so.

• 6:17Speaker 02

  By the way, part of the whole D and D background, which Jonathan, you may not know, like I started playing D and D when I was nine. This was a long time ago. But it's not just obviously the, the images and the, and the world building and the creativity, all of which is super important. But also of course narrative story, interactiveness and other kinds of things. And so kind of say a little bit more about how the kind of the, the, the, the choose your own adventure or make your own adventure or make your own world to D and D. Is not just kind of all of the images, mid journey, et cetera, but also the kind of narrative story. The, the kind of land of imagination. Amplify that a little bit too. Cause I think, by the way, among other things, it'll go with a hat.

• 7:03Speaker 00

  Yeah. So character building, world building, stuff like that. I think for me, it all starts with an idea. And some people are very creative and they have all these creative skills. And you might have these ideas in your head. What the AI can help you do is like put them together. You just have to know where to point it, right? And so I would use it as like a tool to kind of like, hey, I need, give me one hundred names for a magic staff that does X, right? And then you might tell it, or you know, make them esoteric, right? Or, or relate them to this poem and get some interesting ideas.

• 7:47Speaker 00

  And out of those hundred names, none of them might be perfect, but it's enough for you to pull maybe two names together. And now that's the, the best name for the staff, right? That's kind of how I would use it as I'm like building worlds or narratives or things like that. It's like, almost like a, I don't know. It's like, it's like you're sitting in a room with someone and you're bouncing ideas off of them. That's kind of how I use it.

• 8:14Speaker 02

  Yeah. So let's go, um, because this is great. And I think the D and D starts at the beginning, but let's now move this to kind of a film or creative project. It's almost like, you know, the, the, the film is the dungeon we're going into. So, you know, what, what parts of this feel, you know, kind of genuinely creative? Which parts feel more mechanical? You know, and kind of like, what are the different jobs around this?

• 8:41Speaker 00

  I didn't make up this theory, but a, a good friend of mine did. He's also a genius and he is deeply into AI. And we were having a conversation about, this was about building products, but about UI UX and engineering. And, and, but also creative fields like making music, making movies and stuff. And the one thing he said, well, there are cogs and sparks is what he was talking about. There's cogs and sparks. And he was saying, he's, his background is engineering and QA. And he was like, I think, you know, UI UX and music making and these creative fields are sparks. And that's where the power is. That's where the human, you know, comes in. And that's where the AI can't really go that far, right?

• 9:24Speaker 00

  And the, the cog jobs are more of like logic based things. So for my project, I have the vision and I'm kind of setting everything up. I don't want to offload things like storyboarding to the AI. Of course you could, you can ask GPT and say storyboard me a movie about a dragon or something. And it will, but this might be the wrong theory, but I feel like with those kinds of things, it kind of regresses to the means a little bit when you rely on that creative output. Like the AI is giving you kind of the, the best average, right? And true art, right? Creativity is improbable, maybe.

• 10:10Speaker 00

  Right? It's, it's like statistically not probable. And so storyboarding, like for me, is something I want to do. If you relate it back to say like Kurosawa, right? And let's look at a movie like High and Low, right? The way he frames a scene is, is based off of composition. And he might have someone in the foreground, someone in the background, you know, someone in the middle ground. And then there's a, a negative space like right here. And he's getting you to look at this negative space. For me, I don't even know how I would prompt that, you know, to get the perfect composition. And that's why I want to do the storyboards. That's why I think that's like a spark job to me.

• 10:55Speaker 00

  It's like that framing is really hard to achieve without like the human creativity part of it. And so, yeah, that's just kind of my theory behind it. So I put things in categories like spark jobs and cog jobs. In the short film that I'm making, the cog job to me is, there's, there's a very mechanical part of this, this, this film. And that is, I'm trying to make something that looks like nineteen eighties.

• 11:25Speaker 00

  Filmation, Hanna-Barbera, Ralph Bakshi, you know, the first Lord of the Rings animated movies, right?

• 11:34Speaker 01

  Right.

• 11:35Speaker 00

  Where they are rotoscoping over a person, over a scene.

• 11:40Speaker 00

  To me, that's a cog job. Once you have the style, right? No artist really wants to rotoscope, right? Because for a five-minute movie, you're gonna be drawing over like 7,000 frames. And that's not fun, because you already have the costumes, you already have the aesthetic. So that's something I offload to, like Luma, right? Luma AI. And that way, Luma's doing the rotoscoping, and I don't have to draw 7,000 frames. Because I designed the characters, I designed the scene. But, and I shot the scene, but Luma is kind of doing the cog job part of it, which is the rotoscoping part.

• 12:16Speaker 01

  So you really think about this more like it's like this AI acts as like a studio that you're directing on your behalf. But then you're taking, you're taking the like high level, like what's your, you're the director? Or the, what do you, where do you think you fit in if you view these tools as like doing the execution, the cog jobs?

• 12:34Speaker 00

  Another example is the song that I use in the film in the opening. I had played that on guitar 10 years ago. I recorded it 10 years ago. I remembered I had it, and I thought, this is perfect for this film. And so I put it into Suno and made it electric with like drums and stuff. And it fit like perfectly, right? I think like for me, it's almost more than a director. You're almost like this like all encompassing creative. I'm not comparing myself to Da Vinci, but like imagine like what a Da Vinci would do with all these tools, right? It's kind of like that, where I think the people that have a lot of creative skills right now are gonna be able to almost make anything in their mind. We're kind of getting to that point.

• 13:19Speaker 00

  And so I don't know what I would call myself. I, I, I, I mean, I guess like creative director, a little bit of everything.

• 13:28Speaker 01

  It's interesting, you get to put yourself in, in whatever level of it that you'd like to.

• 13:32Speaker 00

  Yeah, if you have a breadth of skills, I think it's, yeah, it's like you're picking your spots where I think you're best at and where your creative skills are. And I think that's a, that's a huge advantage. That's a huge thing. Like, there are things that I can do now, like making the short film, that before I would have just stopped at the storyboards or the script. And I don't, I wouldn't know how I could actually make it, you know, without AI video. I don't think it would be possible.

• 14:02Speaker 02

  Well, let's, let's kind of, kind of amplify this. Well, you know, go big, and not just because we're talking about film, you know? We'll go beyond 11 for the Spinal Tap friends of, of, of, of our listeners.

• 14:16Speaker 00

  Oh, nice.

• 14:17Speaker 02

  Yes, exactly. What do you think a five-person-ish AI-native studio could accomplish? What might have previously required hundreds?

• 14:27Speaker 00

  That's kind of exactly what I'm trying to get to. I think if you had that, you could honestly, number one, I feel like you can make any sort of animation that you want nowadays. That's without question. I think we're just getting to the point, right? Where we have, you know, New Seed Dance, New, you know, Kling, you know, all this stuff coming out. That's like really bleeding edge. I think you can, you can compete with actual studios at some point. You know, you have to keep the, the creative spark within the, you know, the human part of it. But I think you have all the tools to, with a five-person team. Honestly, I could probably make any animation possible.

• 15:11Speaker 00

  I definitely, I like, there's not a question in my mind these days about that. If you had asked me this question four months ago, I would have said maybe. But I feel like we're kind of making these leaps right now, where I, I don't have a doubt that it couldn't be made. And yeah, like you said, once you needed a team of like, you know, 100 animators or something, or, or like an entire team to create the music, or to even do voice acting, right? In my film, we still do the acting, almost like, you know, it's, it's like a mocap film, right? With Andy Serkis, or, or something like if you're into video games, like how they made Death Stranding, right? Where they shot everything with the actors and they're doing the performance.

• 15:57Speaker 00

  But the greatest thing is you can change everyone's voices now based off that performance. You can change how they look, you know, and it's still based off their performance. And so like the sky's the limit, right? You just need a small troupe, almost like a traveling troupe of creators. And you could almost make any genre, right? With any characters. Yeah, as long as you have that human creative spark behind there, that curation, that like intentionality behind the work. I think, yeah, you can, you can actually make anything.

• 16:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, we kind of, you kind of already got into this. So tell me more about this project. So you've, this, this, this sci-fi project is that you've had in your mind. You've had this idea for years, you would tell me about it. But it wasn't really possible until now. Like, what tools are you using? How are you thinking about it? And maybe in just the last four months, like, like what that, what that, how that has become like crystallized as possible?

• 16:50Speaker 00

  Sure, yeah. I, I would come up with these ideas, and I would write them down, and I would make a script for them. I would even storyboard stuff out. And usually that's where it stopped, because I can't get props, or costumes, or actors, or, or, you know, you know, even new cameras are, you know, like, to make it, it would be almost impossible. I have notebooks full of these ideas, by the way, over the years. And I would have stopped there at, at some point and never made these things. And, and maybe you can pitch it to a studio or something, but it's like a super long shot that anyone would ever give you any money to make anything.

• 17:30Speaker 00

  I had the storyboard, I had the script, I had made the treatment, went out, shot some scenes in Situation with some friends of mine. We wore vaguely, you know, costumes that vaguely resembled, but again, they're gonna change in, in, you know, in Luma.

• 17:49Speaker 00

  And the way the process worked was I had all the setup already, and then go out and shoot the scenes. You build the characters, right? In Luma, there's a whole, you know, there's, there's a lot of kind of like preset up that, to get the consistency. But that's something you would have done, like if you were working at a studio anyway. You know, you're gonna need to get that character consistency. So you build it all, the characters in Luma, or you can even build them in Higgsville and other things like that. But I would build them in Luma and then use that as, you know, the reference to build the video. And then, so my process is slightly weird in that when you watch those old films, right? Like the, the Lord of the Rings, or, you know, Fire and Ice, you know?

• 18:30Speaker 00

  The characters are like hand-drawn, rotoscoped, but the backgrounds are painted, right? And it's a distinct feel. And so my process is weird in that I take a reference photo for the scene, and then I will change that to a painted style. And then, once we do the mocap and change, you know, the way the character looks, you can also adjust the background to the reference photo to make it look painted. So you, you can get that feel, that sort of like, you know, 80s, like hand-drawn versus hand-painted background feel. And that's kind of like, I, that was impossible even last year, right? It really was. So that's kind of how it changed.

• 19:12Speaker 00

  I, the way I look at things when I come up with ideas is almost like, what's stopping me from making this? Kind of as opposed to like previously, I would just stop at the character design and storyboard, you know?

• 19:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's, that's, that's, it's incredible, yeah. Maybe a follow-up to that. So what part of maybe creating this, kind of creating this film, creating these projects, takes a lot more effort than people might assume? Because it's not just one click, right?

• 19:41Speaker 00

  That's a great question. It's the human curation part of it, I feel like takes a long, like a long time that people don't understand. There's a difference between kitsch and like art, right? And that difference is genning 200 images to find the one, you know, or even 300, right? Or genning a scene over and over again. It's the curation part of it, in order to get things perfect. I think people underestimate how long that takes. But to me, that's gonna divide the slop from the non-slop, right? It's that craftsmanship that takes a long time. I would also warn that the character setup takes a while to get that consistency.

• 20:22Speaker 00

  It's very important, but you need to go into it and like fully design these characters. And, you know, down to like what jacket they're wearing, what pants, whether their boots look like, what do their gloves look like? You know, I'm making a weird fantasy western, right? And so the characters have a very distinct style to them. And they're all, like, it's almost like in an anime, right? Where like the main character wears red, and then the side character wears blue. And they like, almost everyone has their own palettes and stuff. And I think that takes a lot of setup too, in, in the beginning. So like that and the curation. But again, it's, it's about the intentionality behind the work.

• 21:04Speaker 00

  You know, you're not just pressing go and genning, and first gen is perfect, right? You might have to go back, like for us, and, and, and maybe even, the cool thing is, I could reshoot in my backyard. So I could go back and reshoot a scene in my backyard and make sure the framing is correct, you know? And then, and then do that one, right? It's that part, I think that takes the longest.

• 21:25Speaker 02

  By the way, I think you're right, that, you know, curation is a very key word here. There's this kind of question around where curation is all human, individual human, groups of humans, all machine. But actually, more likely a combination between, obviously, the notion of how this kind of pulls together in terms of human and machine collaborating, dancing, et cetera, together is, is really important. How has your perspective on curation changed in this new AI-amplified world? And where you, multiple humans, multiple agents, you know, that kind of thing? And what does that mean for how we get to what is meaningful creative work?

• 22:07Speaker 00

  My perspective on it has changed a little bit in that I think we have access to like a lot more. Before AI, you were a little bit limited in what you could explore, I think. And that would be like, I can only explore things that I was good at illustrating or things that I had on hand, maybe. You can search the internet, sure, but I feel like there was, it was very limited. Now, you can get wild with, with production, right? You can get wild with things. It's one of the reasons I kind of prefer Midjourney in exploring, because Midjourney

• 22:48Speaker 00

  still has a little bit of this artistic wildness to it, that we're like, some of the other things like Nano Banana are like very like pointed and distinct. And so I like the randomness. And I would almost rather gen like 100 random things to find one good piece out of it. So I think our access to ideas is like completely amplified. And I think that's, that's, that's where, you know, the curation is kind of like evolving is now you have access to so many more ideas than you would have previously. It's, it's almost like giving you new directions, in my opinion.

• 23:29Speaker 00

  That's almost one thing I kind of loved about the early Stable Diffusion days was the, the image gens were so wild that it was like almost not even what you were prompting, but there was something chaotic about it that I loved. And I think it just, it's just like an idea generator, almost.

• 23:49Speaker 01

  It, it reminds me back to D and D. It feels like chaos magic sometimes. I'm like, you're like, it's like not random. It's actually not random. It's like a probability distribution, but it's also like potentially something you've never seen or an idea that no one's ever combined and remixed. And then you can kind of just go to latent space and explore the space of possible ideas to find that one thing that no one's ever seen that might, might need to be seen by someone, like might be worth like showing to the world.

• 24:15Speaker 00

  Okay, I'll give you an example. When I first started to do this project, I had this, you know, I wanted that rotoscope feel of everything. When I started genning in Midjourney, there was one out of, you know, hundreds of images. And there was one from my references was slightly different. It was a little more animated. It was a little more exaggerated. And it just, it just popped out to me. And so I started making all the other ones like that one. And so now it's like, it changed from being like this completely like rotoscoped, you know, old school style to a little more, a little more almost like anime. But it's like a cross between the two.

• 25:00Speaker 00

  That is something that I would have never found on my own. I would have never stumbled on that. Even if I was drawing it myself, I would have never gone down that avenue. And so like, that's to me where that sort of curation arises and, and that interaction between like the amount that we can produce and the, the access to these ideas. And I think that, that combo is, I would have never found that without, without genning those. So, yeah.

• 25:31Speaker 01

  Oh, man. That's so exciting. Well, Jonathan, I'm so glad we could have you on. I'm so grateful to have you in on this journey with us and seeing what you're creating. Thanks for joining us today. But before we leave, I'm wondering, you might, if you have a question you'd like to pose either Reid or myself?

• 25:50Speaker 00

  Sure. Yeah, I do have a question. My question is, there was a part in your book, Super Agency, where it says that true super agency is designed, I mean, is defined by allowing humans to tackle higher order challenges. So my question is, are there some critical higher order challenges that you believe we are currently not addressing? And what are they?

• 26:19Speaker 02

  Great question. There's a set of different things. I mean, part of, as you know, the, the writing of Super Agency was to try to show people that even though they feel that maybe their agency is diminishing because the world is changing around them, technology is being developed that changes the landscape, they can still grasp agency, they can still do things. And so even though, for example, like Apple builds an iPhone, which you may think reduces your agency, you can use the iPhone and, and gain a lot of agency and so do that. And that's kind of the parallel for the kind of the, the call to agency that Super Agency is. Now, I do think there are some really important, more subtle questions here.

• 27:01Speaker 02

  So for example, one of the things is to say, all right, well, even though there's this kind of technological, you know, tidal wave coming in and, you know, you can't choose the tidal wave or not, you can't choose the, the time or what it is, there's still ways of gaining it. But how do you gain it partially, not just by individual assigning tools, but collectively? Like, what is this change in terms of our landscape of the social environment we're in? And part of the reason I use the iPhone as a parallel is, well, sure, it enables you, you can take pictures and do stuff and have, you know, maps everywhere where you're going. But of course, it also has everyone else taking pictures.

• 27:44Speaker 02

  And then what does that mean in terms of, of the, the universe that you're, that you're now playing in? And what does this mean for our kind of collective knowledge, our collective epistemology, how we parse the world? And some of that obviously gets to, you know, how do we discern, you know, kind of truths about ourselves, truths about the world that we're in, you know, kind of collectively together? How does that play in to how we gain agency, not just individually, but together? Now, one of my hopes, I think, for AI is this notion where if it's, if we've got a

• 28:26Speaker 02

  good sense of how it amplifies our knowledge of ourselves in the world, like what is true, that then helps us learn collectively better. Like, you know, AI is one of the best learning tools developed in human history to date because it builds upon books, it builds upon the printing press, it builds upon the internet. And I think that kind of sense of collective learning, learning together and learning truth and what is truth and what is the, the epistemology of it, not just outsourcing it to AI, but us learning together is, I think, one of the key elements of that kind of collective agency.

• 29:09Speaker 00

  Yeah, I, I think, you know, that's kind of part of the book too, that kind of resonated me a little bit. I mean, is that, is that the bloomer, the bloomer ethos?

• 29:20Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 29:21Speaker 00

  Yeah. Yeah. So, yeah, definitely. I felt like I was a part, I mean, I'm definitely part bloomer in the book, but I'm also a pessimist in a lot of things. So like, I have like a doomer aspect to some of the things I think about. But, you know, it's, you know, we're all conflicted because I'm using these tools every day and I'm, you know, creating wild things with them. And so, yeah, when I, when I would read the description of bloomer, I'm like, well, that's definitely what I'm doing.

• 29:54Speaker 02

  Jonathan, I actually, and by the way, I completely agree on the super agency, that there is kind of bloomer, doomer, gloomer combinations. And it's kind of, it's a more complex thing. So thank you for joining us and I look forward to seeing some of your creative outputs in the future.

• 30:12Speaker 00

  It's going to be awesome. I will 100% send you what I finish.

• 30:15Speaker 02

  Possible is produced by Palette Media. It's hosted by Ari Finger and me, Reid Hoffman. Our showrunner is Sean Young. Possible is produced by Tenasi Delos, Katie Sanders, Spencer Strasmore, Imo Zoo, Aman Suri, Danny Garrison, Trent Barboza, and Tafadzwa Nima Rundwe.

• 30:33Speaker 03

  Special thanks to Surya Yalimanchili, Sayida Sabieva, Ian Alice, Greg Beato, Parth Patil, and Ben Ralas.