WPP, the advertising group, opened a production studio in east London in September that is built around shooting less and generating more. In one space, actors perform in front of a grey backdrop and AI creates the set and the extras. In another, an LED wall shows an AI-made setting behind the actor. WPP's chief executive says clients no longer need to pay for expensive shoots abroad, and an industry insider says some ads come out up to 60% cheaper. Finance directors like that number. The cost it hides is that a shoot was also a classroom.
Commercials gave young directors volume
Directing a film means managing actors, light, a crew, a schedule and someone who keeps changing their mind, all at once. Almost nobody gets enough chances to practise that before they are trusted with a feature. Commercials gave them those chances. A director could shoot dozens of short jobs, get paid for each, and make mistakes on a budget that was small compared with a film.
That is why so many of Britain's best-known directors came out of advertising. Ridley Scott recruited his brother Tony from art college into commercials, and Tony later called the ten years of ads that followed the best training he could have had. Luke Scott, who now runs the group, fears a lost generation, because the learning happens in the doing and a generated ad removes the doing.
The practice ground has moved before
It would be wrong to say directors can only learn in ads. Later, studios were also hiring from music videos, so the training ground has shifted before. It moves to wherever cheap, frequent and paid shooting exists. The difference now is that AI makes the cheap, frequent part easy for everyone, and the paid part harder to find. A young director can make a striking short film alone on a laptop. Whether anyone pays for the next one is a different question.
WPP's production chief argues that jobs are not shrinking because clients need far more content for far more channels, and he may be right about headcount. But the work matters as much as the number of jobs. Someone who spends the day choosing between AI-made versions of a street learns to judge images. Someone who spends it on a set learns to get a nervous actor to give a better take. A film needs both skills, and only the second is being removed.
The same thing happens in your team
This is not only about film. Many trades teach their juniors on routine work that clients pay for: the junior accountant who matches invoices to bank lines, the junior lawyer who checks a hundred contracts for the same clause, the junior designer who resizes one banner into forty formats. For example, a design studio that gives all forty resizes to AI saves its junior perhaps a day a week. Two years later it also has nobody who has seen enough layouts to know quickly why one is wrong.
That is the pattern behind the squeeze on young job seekers too: the routine task goes first, and it was where the beginners were. If you run a team, the saving from automating a routine job is real, but part of it is training you used to get for free. Choose which of those jobs a junior will still do by hand, and put it in the budget as training, because nobody else will.