Can AI powered filmmaking teach us to rethink business processes?
Today's guest takes us on his journey from traditional video production
to crafting AI powered films.
Along the way, he shares how tools like custom GPTs didn't just
streamline his creative workflows, they reshaped the way he tells stories.
If you're looking for inspiration to automate your own processes and
unlock new possibilities with AI while staying grounded in what works,
this conversation is packed with practical insights you can put to use.
My name is Alexandre Nevski and this is Innovation Tales.
From creating Emmy winning videos to pioneering generative AI tools,
Erich Archer has spent nearly two decades at the intersection
of storytelling and technology.
But a year ago, he took a bold leap, creating his first AI powered short film.
Why?
To explore how tools like custom GPTs, mid journey and runway could revolutionize
creative workflows, making high quality production more accessible than ever.
Today, Erich joins us to share not only how these tools are reshaping
the media industry, but also how they can be applied to transform
business processes across industries.
If you've ever wondered how to turn AI hype into real actionable outcomes,
whether it's automating repetitive tasks, improving creative consistency,
or just scaling innovation without scaling your team, this episode may
challenge the way you think about integrating technology into your work.
Erich's hands on experience proves that AI isn't about replacing jobs.
It's about unlocking new ways to think, create, and connect.
Without further ado, here's my conversation with Erich Archer.
Erich, welcome to the show.
Thanks for having me.
Happy to be here.
Well, I'm super excited about our conversation today.
I expect it to be a little different because you come from the film and TV
industry, but a year ago you made your first film using artificial intelligence.
So what inspired you to explore AI tools for video production?
Well, uh, by day I run a nonprofit TV station and so I was very excited
about ChatGPT for the resource gain that I felt it presented, you know, as
a nonprofit executive director, we're always a little starved for resources.
So it's like, Oh wow, this can help me work better, faster.
You know, uh, output more.
And so that was attractive.
And then mid journey came out the image generation platform.
And because I also work in a visual medium, that was very attractive too.
I mean, you, you're telling me I can generate any image I can think of like,
that's a really big deal when those are assets that I work with day-to-day.
So it was very clear early on that those tools were going to change my industry.
In a big way.
Yeah.
Making projects more accessible, I guess.
Very much.
So, yeah, very much so.
And production workflows are starting to change really quickly.
Just leveraging these tools for little efficiencies and a
little bit of, you know, extra research or rigor here and there.
And then, oh, maybe these.
Image generators can help with storyboarding and things like that
and processing different creative briefs or whatever the case may be.
And, slowly by slowly, but surely sort of starting to understand some of the
different ways these different tools could help me and it started to become
very clear very quickly that generative production was a growing space that
know, these images were just the tip of the iceberg and that it was going
to be moving toward generative video production and just more sophisticated
versions of everything we were seeing.
So I wanted to get in early and start to experiment and learn
it and, and get a feel for it.
And so the first short film you made is about your great, great, great
grandfather, if I'm not mistaken.
And so what's the story behind that?
I had the opportunity to enroll in a month long fellowship program at an
organization called the AI exchange and what was great about that was they said
you have to make a personal AI project.
That gave me the push to put the time and effort into really try to
make something start to finish, that was good, that I may not have taken
otherwise had I not been in that program.
My goal was really, come up with a project that could demonstrate the,
the level of storytelling that the technology was enabling at that time.
So it was sort of a proof of concept more than a short film.
But I had encountered some of my dad's ancestry research about our family
and he had a stack of notes and dates and names and some photos, and one of
like the family trees that you see.
So I started to kind of use that as the creative briefs and, uh, I told the story
about an ancestor that I had the most information about: this guy named Rufus,
who is my great, great, great grandfather.
And I had two pictures of him: one in his volunteer firefighter uniform.
Another of his, like a head shot.
And then I had a picture of his gravestone and I knew what he did for a living.
He made barrels and he had four kids and I knew where he lived and when.
And so I was able to build a timeline of his life and understand this area
and kind of infer, with ChatGPT and Perplexity's help, what his life was like.
And I made a custom GPT to actually be able to interview him and use
the material from that exchange and the narration and stuff.
And I would use the voices from Elevenlabs (the AI audio tool).
And that gave me all the sound effects.
And so I was able to just.
Use a bunch of different tools and generate images that looked a lot like
him, a lot like Salem, in sort of a Ken Burns, very simple documentary style.
That was an example of what I felt at the time was where, where the
tools would allow you to work.
It looks amazing.
And of course we'll provide a link in the description.
There's a number of other videos that are in a different style.
I think some of them are commissions.
Can you talk a bit about them?
Yeah.
So I started to get a little bit more attention for the, that work
and got in touch with an agency that had some clients interested in
early AI pioneering work, you know, let's, let's try to make some stuff.
It was a lot of um, cryptocurrency companies.
They seem to be, interested in pushing the envelope.
They don't have a lot of visuals to begin with.
They're, I don't know, adventurous, I guess.
So, there were a few of those.
And what's so interesting about the tools is they make you so versatile
as a creator, because you can pull in any inspiration directly into the
process, whether it's black and white photographs from the 1800s or graffiti
skateboarding images from today, or in another piece I made, 35, 000
years in the past, it doesn't matter.
You can now generate these assets and work with them.
So I've made, I don't know, five or six AI videos now, and they're all
very different aesthetically, which is exciting, you know, it really makes
you feel like anything's possible.
How did you initially start integrating these various tools into the
workflows that you're familiar with?
Was that particularly easy?
Straightforward?
Not so much?
One of the earliest things that I discovered was that I could take a
transcription from an interview that I would do like this, but with video,
video cameras going out and shooting interviews, coming back with a day's full
of transcriptions, being able to run those through Claude and say something like
"I need a soundbite that is emotionally engaging, and then I need the who, what,
when, where, why information soundbites, and then I need an emotional closer," and
it'll give you that paper edit with time codes, and that, that process of going
from the raw material of an interview or a transcription down to what you
want to use can be a very long process.
I mean, we'll come back with hours and hours of interviews.
So something like that.
All of a sudden, you're you're going from something that might have taken 3,
4 rounds of editing down, you do almost instantly and it might not be 100 percent
what you want, but it's way closer.
Or if you need a B-roll, now you can generate it instead of buy it or shoot it.
It's getting harder and harder to kind of figure out what we would need to shoot
with cameras, as opposed to generate.
There's some obvious ones, like if you're going to go shoot something, a live event
or a sports game or something like that.
But I can make a spice commercial using spice B-roll from all around
the world without flying any camera operators all around the world.
It's just amazing.
Yeah, there is an immediacy where you can turn an idea into something
usable with much less process, let's say, you don't need as big of a team
in some cases, that's my experience, which enables you to also run with
ideas a bit further on your own.
But I know that you've also had to use image-to-video rather
than directly text-to-video.
But with the announcement of Sora, or others, everyone's talking about it.
An example is just like I get a creative brief from a brand and the
brand says "we we have an aesthetic we need you to create that is, ancient
Greece, 300 years in the future.
And our brand is purple and we need these magical orbs.
How am I going to get that once, let alone in every single shot in a sequence
that's maybe 25 different shots.
So that's that's the challenge you start with.
Okay, I've got to make this look and it's got to be brand exact.
We're making a commercial.
This can't be close.
It has to be exact.
It has to really be consistent.
So that's the bar.
You know what I mean?
You can't have anyone watch it and go what the, what, you know, what was that?
There's a couple of ways you can approach it basically, which is you can
go to a platform like Sora and you can just give it a text prompt, you know,
I'm looking for ancient Greece with a futuristic vibe and a magical purple
orb and try to prompt out a video of that idea and you'll see what you get.
So that's, that's the difference.
It's like, in Midjourney, you can upload a picture, or multiple pictures, and
try to craft the image, out of pictures, which is more typically how I will work.
I'm, probably for every 1000 images I generate, using 50 of them.
Yeah, there is a lot of trial and error.
How much difference is there between what's on the package,
what's promised and reality?
I think that that's really one of the biggest takeaways that I could share
is that it's a very big difference between the highly cherry picked
outputs you see in the promotional pieces and the real outputs you get
in platform when you go to use it.
They're all pretty wonky still.
They just give you all kinds of weird stuff and errors.
And sometimes it's great.
I mean, I've used a lot of unexpected outputs in my work.
So there's a real coolness in the unexpectedness of it.
Sometimes that can be useful, but most of the time it's just like, Oh my God, it,
you know, just this absolute battle with the platform to try to give you something.
And sometimes you'll get tantalizingly close.
Like it's exactly the image you want, but it's got six fingers or something.
And you're like, there is no way to undo that one little piece.
Or sometimes there is, with painting and stuff, but like, it all depends on what
platform you're using and everything.
So I think, somebody really smart told me early on not to let all of that hype
stuff that's constantly coming out stress me out because all of those companies
are, uh, cherry picking in a major way.
That's been my experience also that, you know, I go and I, I try all these tools.
Oh, this is great.
New things come out and look what it can do.
And I run over and try it and I'm like, oh, okay, it's, it's, it's still just
as rough to work with as the rest of it.
Um, and hopefully that's freeing for people to hear.
It was for me.
It's like, okay, I'm not doing anything wrong.
Like this is hard.
It's hard.
And I'm, I've been doing this work a long time.
So there's parts of it that I'm very fast at.
Like editing and I can, I know what elements I need for any given video pretty
quickly and certain things like that.
So I can still go fast and it's still hard.
You know, it's, is my core competency and it's still hard.
So, you know, it can look like this very 1 click and oh, my God, it's
all done for you and beautiful, but it's not like that at all.
You know?
The human in the loop is definitely a must have.
But I know that you've also managed to use some of the tools we've already
mentioned in a more reliable way.
Would you mind talking about this for a bit?
So pretty early on, I found a use case for custom GPTs, that was pretty
powerful, where I was getting these creative brief documents and able to use
ChatGPT to process the language in them.
Basically, these were documents full of insider knowledge
that I wanted to understand.
But it was vague language and sort of difficult to figure out
what they meant all the time.
And I'm like, this is probably something ChatGPT can help me with, you know.
Put this PDF in there and be like, you know, clean up this language and add some
brand guidelines and do some research.
And I had all these ideas of how I could like process this document
really quickly using ChatGPT.
And a lot of it worked.
And then I tried to build this like super custom GPT that
would just do it all the time.
And that didn't work.
And in the process of trying to figure out why it didn't work, I just wound
up making like 10 GPTs out of the one, because what I realized is I was
asking it to do 10 different things.
And if I just asked 10 different custom GPTs to do one thing each, I'd
get a more reliable output each time.
And then I, I didn't mind manually going from one to the next to like clean up
the document and then add some research and then add some brand guidelines
and, you know, make some thumbnails and generate ideas and, you know,
all the stuff that I wanted it to do.
I just had to do one at a time.
And that was effective, but also enlightening.
I was like, Oh, that would work in other areas too.
And so I started to apply that idea of just making these little precision
custom GPTs that did one thing well.
And I've now made a couple hundred of those and kind of map them all out on this
mind map platform online that I found.
So that's become a fun process and something that I just sort of treat, like,
as a hobby, but people are using them now.
And, like, they're available on Gumroad for free.
If anyone would like to try them out, but they're for all
different business frameworks and models and things like that.
That when I took over this business, my day job as an executive director,
I had never been in management before.
So I didn't know a lot of these frameworks and things existed or how to do them.
This is designed to make it very easy to do those things and not have to pay a
consultant to teach you how to do them.
I also, I was a startup founder for a few years, too, and I had
friends and family money invested.
I built an app.
I was trying really hard, but like, there was so much I didn't know.
And I knew I didn't know it because I was the 1st time founder.
And I was like, man, I hope I'm just not, I hope I'm not making
mistakes because I don't know.
The right way to look at this or whatever.
So I just have had that experience where like, I just want to know how to think
about things, you know what I mean?
So I made all these tools to just help with that.
Like, Oh, this is a SWOT analysis.
I just have to click this button.
It'll walk me through it.
It'll do it for me.
Yeah, that's amazing.
Yeah, you don't ask it to do the work for you.
You, you, You really have to be very specific.
But I really am curious, cause I'm a techie, so I know what's behind them, but
when you talk about those custom GPTs and the processes that you are able to
automate partially with them, how do you explain what the custom GPT is, I wonder?
Well, so ChatGPT is a general purpose tool and you can ask it anything
and get an answer, which is amazing.
But custom GPTs offer you a way to make a much smaller version of it.
You basically can control all of the parameters of how you want it to
behave and what you want it to do.
Just through conversation, which is pretty wild.
I don't know how to code, at all.
You can just be like, Hey, I want to make a custom GPT that
helps me do a SWOT analysis.
Okay.
Well, what would a tool need to do in order to do that?
Like it would have to ask you about your business.
What information would it need?
Right?
Like, if it had all of this information, if you could provide all this raw
information, it would be able to tell you with some web searching, also, you'd
be able to help you do a SWOT analysis.
You know what I mean?
It's basically just putting whatever parameters in place that you want, using
the power of this general purpose tool to just look through whatever scope
you want to sort of create for it.
And I love what you were saying about using tools like this when you're like,
in your case, a first time founder and needing to learn to do a whole set of
things that this can be a complement, let's say, where maybe before you'd
have to go and read a book, maybe get a consultant, do a training or something.
We're seeing now the rise of these AI-powered tools as kind
of a learning upskilling tool.
I wonder from your experience, like if you were talking to other business
owners, how would you advise them?
What would you tell them?
Like, how should they be exploring these custom GPTs?
Well, they're certainly welcome to jump in to, uh, to my
ecosystem and try these things.
There's also a number of custom GPTs available within ChatGPT.
You can go in there and search by category and they'll have probably, you know,
if you're in real estate, they'll have a whole bunch of real estate, custom
GPTs, and you can check those out.
I highly recommend just starting with a conversation in ChatGPT.
What is something that you think about on a regular basis
or process on a regular basis?
So we're looking for, like, repetitive tasks and things like that.
Or thought patterns that you nor your things you normally
thinking about, whatever.
And then, what would go into, like, building a machine
to just do that for you?
You know, um, it's it's often not very much.
I'll give you an example of like a really simple one.
For my day job here, all I did, was take our organizational documents,
our handbook, our policies and procedures, our brand guidelines,
you know, things like that.
And I just put them as PDFs in a custom GPT, which is as simple as uploading.
Here you go.
And in the instructions, all I said was something like, you know, you are a
custom GPT designed to answer questions for the staff of 1623 Studios using the
documents that I've uploaded or whatever.
And so the staff, with that little bit of instruction, and those documents can just
say anything from what's the dress code to what's our strategic plan this year?
And it can give you the answer.
I mean, it took zero minutes to make that powerful tool for people
that no longer have to come to me with those questions that are FAQs.
They have answers.
Those answers are now in the GPT and they don't have to ask me.
So that I mean, there's 8 zillion examples like that.
That could not be easier.
You could do it yourself.
And once you see that and experience that, you'd be like, okay, now I kind of get it.
And the more you get it, the more you get it.
Absolutely.
Now, that's a terrific example.
I think there's a lot of evidence that this is one of
the first use cases to deploy.
And if you are not a large enterprise with millions to spend that is a very
effective way for leveraging these tools.
And so what do you think about the role of human expertise in
curating all these AI tools?
Where do we stand?
I think it's critical.
I personally feel really lucky to have a couple decades of experience under
my belt when this technology came out.
Because I think subject matter expertise matters a great deal.
Because so much of the known stuff is available to chat GPT now and
therefore not really valuable to you.
And so where subject matter experts have knowledge that is nuanced
and proprietary and their's alone.
And they connect dots that no one else connects because they've been doing it
for 20-30 years and they have expertise and they get it and they can see the
bigger picture and apply that knowledge or apply today's tools to that knowledge.
That is where the magic is.
That's why I've been having success because I'm applying AI
to my subject matter expertise.
And I'm able to just take everything I've learned over 20 years and, whatever I
can learn with AI and try to smash them together and make something valuable.
I think that's a good position to be in as opposed to like a, you know,
straight out of school and great with technology because good for you.
You're great with technology, but, what expertise can you
inject into it or get out of it?
Absolutely.
No, connecting the dots, I think is the title of this episode.
And so as we are about to, uh, to wrap up, I tend to ask a
couple of questions at the end.
First, what's a book, tool or habit that has made a significant impact
on you in the last 12 months and why?
One of the things that I have found helpful is the simple idea
of just daily reps. I am, I find it to be very helpful to address the
overwhelm of the AI news and the sort of like the fire hose of stuff.
It's just like finding where the daily reps need to come from.
Like.
I need to be learning every day.
I just need to put in some learning reps and keeping a list of the
things I need to learn about.
And then making sure that every day I put in a couple of those reps. Or like,
you know, doing the LinkedIn thing.
Or doing the PodMatch thing.
Or, you know, putting in time with ChatGPT.
Or learning some new tools and just not getting bogged down in the hype and who's
done incredible projects or how busy I am and can't get to it this week or whatever.
Like trying to make a daily habit out of it with some daily reps is helping
me address some of the overwhelm.
I'm sure it's going to be very useful to our listeners.
Absolutely.
Yes.
And then last, what is the one thing that you would expect to
remain constant 10 years from now?
I think there will be a role for people forever.
You know, I think everyone's pretty freaked out that the humans
are going to be less valuable.
I think it's just going to be different.
But in my experience, all the magic from these tools, and this
isn't trying to toot my own horn, but it's coming from the people.
They're just general purpose, dead tools, otherwise.
It takes people to bring the life out of them.
And I see these as people enhancers.
And so with that, I'd like to thank you, Erich.
Thanks so much for having me.
It was a lot of fun.
Erich's journey shows how AI tools become truly powerful when paired
with human creativity and experience.
From using ChatGPT to simplify workflows, to platforms like MidJourney and
Runway for video production, Erich has demonstrated how experimentation
can lead to meaningful results.
His work proves that AI isn't here to replace us, but to help
us create, innovate, and solve problems faster and better.
So here's something to think about.
How can you use AI in your own work to save time, unlock creativity
and achieve bigger goals.
To learn more about Erich's projects and insights, visit his
portfolio at cgacreative.com.
In the meantime, we'll have more exciting topics and guest appearances lined up, so
stay tuned for more tales of innovation that inspire challenge and transform.
Until next time, peace.