Brandon Thomas

Brandon Thomas is a filmmaker and engineer who founded ArtCraft for himself and the people he makes films with. He wanted directors working with AI-generated images and video to be able to place actors and frame a shot before choosing a model to render it.

By the time Brandon introduced ArtCraft, he had spent more than a decade making films with physical cameras. He describes making over a dozen films and handling the logistics of assistant directing, including call times, location releases and props. During the pandemic, he turned to motion capture so he could keep shooting virtually.

Brandon’s earlier engineering work included building highly available services in which multiple systems handled live traffic at once. He also founded FakeYou and Storyteller.ai. His work in speech synthesis includes a Rust library that uses the Carnegie Mellon Pronouncing Dictionary to look up the sounds that make up a word.

Keeping the shot when the model changes

For Brandon’s filmmaking collaborators, trying a generative tool could mean wiring together a graph of processing steps, managing Python dependencies and finding a suitable GPU. Brandon wanted artists to be able to compose a shot independently of the model they would use to render it.

In ArtCraft, his team gave artists two ways to set up a shot before generation. They can lay out a composition in 2D or stage a scene in 3D. In a 3D scene, a director can move the camera closer for a tighter shot while the actors stay on their marks. Once the framing works, the director can keep it and try another model without describing the scene again in a prompt.

Editing the image and its provenance

The ArtCraft team also develops PhotoCraft, an open-source Rust editor for layered Photoshop documents, currently in early alpha. Its graphical interface, command line, JSON controls and Model Context Protocol server share the same editing commands. An artist can try an edit by hand, repeat it from a script or give an AI assistant access to that operation, then continue working with the individual layers.

Brandon argues that artists should be able to inspect and edit the provenance metadata that documents an image’s origins. In his September 2026 essay Spymarks, not Watermarks, he calls a hidden signal a “spymark” when it lets someone trace the work without its maker’s knowledge or consent.