Chao Thao ✉️ Email · 🔗 LinkedIn · 💻 Portfolio
The skill isn’t using AI. It’s knowing why you did.
I’m Chao Thao, a director and producer. This is a practical kit I made for making AI decisions on a film production and being able to explain them. It came out of my own work.
AI can show up almost anywhere on a production now. Concept art, sound, voice, editing. The hard part was never finding the buttons. It’s deciding well and being able to say why. That’s what this practice is for.
In about a year, AI disclosure went from optional to expected. Festivals now ask at submission how AI was used, and whether every asset and likeness is cleared. The Academy is weighing whether to make disclosure mandatory. The question is coming for every producer, and most have never had to answer it.
So the thing to build now isn’t a rulebook. It’s a practice. A way to make these calls out in the open, keep the crew aligned, and leave a record you can stand behind. It was never about whether to use AI. It’s about deciding well, and being able to explain it.
I was prototyping a character who needed a voice. For time and budget, I tried AI before hiring anyone. I trained a model and generated the lines. It gave me something usable on the surface, but the pacing was off and the warmth wasn’t there.
It had the sound, but not the performance.
So I recorded the voice myself and shaped it in Premiere. Even on a quick prototype, the gap was obvious. The tool could reproduce the sound but not the intention behind it, the part that actually makes a voice land. That gap, between what a tool gives you and what the work needs, is the reason I started writing my decisions down.
Four simple tools, used at four points in a production. Align before you start, log the decisions as you make them, disclose cleanly when asked, and when one decision is worth telling in full, write it up. It keeps your crew aligned, your decisions defensible, and your record ready before a festival or funder ever asks.
BEFORE THE PRODUCTION
Producer and director set their AI intent together, then carry it through department heads and into hiring, so nobody comes onto the film or project surprised by terms or tools they never heard.