VP Land is a newsletter & YouTube channel covering the latest updates in creative technology for M&E professionals.
Here's a quick roundup of the most significant developments in media and entertainment technology this week:
🎬 Netflix Acquires Ben Affleck’s AI Filmmaking Studio InterPositive
Netflix has acquired InterPositive, the AI filmmaking company co-founded by Ben Affleck. Affleck started the company in 2022, filming a proprietary dataset on a controlled soundstage to build purpose-built AI tools designed to protect creative choice and human judgment in production. Netflix CPO/CTO Elizabeth Stone and CCO Bela Bajaria both cited the acquisition as central to Netflix’s long-term content strategy.
🎬 Seth MacFarlane Used AI to Play Bill Clinton in Ted Season 2
Seth MacFarlane used AI to transform his own likeness into Bill Clinton for a cameo in Episode 5 of Ted Season 2 on Peacock. MacFarlane said traditional prosthetics and CGI both failed — “everything else just looked terrifying” — before AI produced a convincing result. The scene, in which Clinton visits a Dunkin’ Donuts and throws coffee in a character’s face, has gone viral since the season premiered March 5.
🎨 Google Launches Nano Banana 2 with 4K Output and Multi-Character Consistency
Google released Nano Banana 2 (Gemini 3.1 Flash Image) as the new default image model across Gemini, Google Search, Google Flow, and Google Ads. It generates images up to 4K resolution — up from 1K in the previous version — supports extreme aspect ratios (4:1, 1:4, 8:1, 1:8), and maintains consistency across up to 5 characters and 14 objects in a single workflow. All outputs include SynthID and C2PA watermarking.
▶️ Luma Launches Uni–1: One Model That Reasons and Generates Images Simultaneously
Luma Labs released Uni–1, their first model that combines visual understanding and image generation in a single decoder-only autoregressive transformer. Rather than separating reasoning and rendering into two steps, Uni–1 performs both in the same forward pass. The model powers Luma Agents, a new agentic platform for end-to-end creative work across text, image, video, and audio — already in use by Publicis Groupe, Serviceplan, Adidas, and Mazda. Available now via API.
🎬 VP Land Asked Top VFX Artists What They Actually Think About AI
At the 24th Annual VES Awards, VP Land asked artists, supervisors, producers, and directors one question: how are you actually using AI right now? Responses came from Martin Hill (Weta FX / Stranger Things), Joseph Kosinski (F1: The Movie), Corridor Crew, Adam Savage, Jerry Bruckheimer, Richard Taylor (Weta Workshop), the Wizard of Oz at Sphere team, and the Severance VFX leads. The consensus: AI is a workflow accelerator for tedious tasks, not a creative replacement — and the industry has been through this before.
Want to stay on top of stories like this throughout the week?
Get VP Land, the free newsletter sent twice a week covering the latest trends, projects, and developments in creative technology. Subscribe here.
