A dragon's claw comes down on soft ground, the weight spreads through its toes exactly the way real weight would, and an animator would have spent a week getting that right. AI did it in seconds. That's the moment that stuck with me from this one. Glen Boswell is a digital creative who's worked on everything from Thomas the Tank Engine to Noddy to Starsky and Hutch, and later on Merlin at Pinewood Studios. Now he runs Astral Forge, using AI to help businesses do more with what they've got. He's also the author of Flight of Dragons, Wrath of the King, which is the story he's now trying to bring to life on screen. Glen showed me his process, and it changed how I think about all this. Character sheets. Environment descriptions. Storyboards built before a single frame gets generated. The AI isn't guessing what he wants, it's working from proper reference, the same way a human artist would. That's the bit people miss when they type one lazy sentence into a prompt box and wonder why the output's flat. He also showed me where it breaks. A sword ends up on the wrong side of an attack. A warrior turns away from a threat she should be watching. Small things. Things most of us would never spot unless someone like Glen, who's spent decades animating by hand, pointed them out. That's the real skill now, not making the AI do the work, but knowing enough to see where it's lying to you. There's a line Glen used that I keep coming back to. AI isn't new, it's an evolution. The light moving round a sphere in 3D Studio decades ago was already a form of AI. We just didn't call it that. Which makes the fear a bit less mysterious, and the opportunity a lot clearer. We got into cost too, and sustainability, and the uncomfortable truth that an entire AI-made TV series can be cheaper and lower impact than a traditionally shot one. Not always. It depends what you're doing and how you're doing it. But it's not the story most of us have been told. What struck me most, though, was the emotion in Glen's voice when he talked about seeing his characters move for the first time. Years of imagining them, and then there they were, walking through a forest he'd only ever seen in his head. That's not a story about AI replacing creativity. That's a story about AI finally letting someone finish what they started. Ask. Create. Evaluate. Develop. Glen didn't call it that, but that's what he's doing, and it's a loop worth borrowing whatever you make. Have a listen, and then go and check some of this for yourself. Don't just take our word for it.

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This was made with humans.

Your host - Shaun Phillips

Editor: Glen Boswell
https://astralforgefilm.com
https://www.instagram.com/thebozzyman

Original music composed and produced by Brokli - https://youtube.com/@iambrokli

Original logo illustration and in video podcast graphics by Jesse Rist - https://instagram.com/jesse_rist

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