Vertical Video Broke My Brain — Here's How I Made Peace With It (Twice)
It happened with vertical. It's happening again. I should probably stop being surprised.
I spent years learning how to see in rectangles.
Not just technically — compositionally. The rule of thirds, leading lines, negative space, the way a wide shot earns its place before you cut to a close-up. I studied it. I practiced it. I eventually got paid well for it by brands like Adidas and Hilton and Walmart. The rectangle was the language, and I got fluent.
Then someone rotated the canvas 90 degrees and told me that’s where the audience lives now.
I resisted it longer than I should have. I told myself it was a fad. I called it lazy. I watched other creators rack up millions of views on footage that looked like it was shot through a mail slot and I felt something I’m not proud of — a mix of contempt and envy that, if I’m being honest, was mostly just fear dressed up as taste.
Vertical video didn’t break my brain because it was hard to learn. It broke my brain because it forced me to ask a question I wasn’t ready to answer: does craft still matter if the audience doesn’t notice it?
The format was never the problem.
Here’s what I eventually had to admit: the rectangle was never sacred. It was just the constraint I grew up with. Filmmakers before me had to make peace with the transition from 4:3 to 16:9. Before that, from silent to sound. The format always changes. The storytelling doesn’t have to.
What vertical video actually demanded wasn’t that I abandon craft — it demanded that I apply craft differently. Faster. Tighter. With the hook in the first two seconds instead of the first two minutes. That’s not the death of filmmaking. That’s just a different set of rules.
Once I stopped mourning the rectangle, I started getting curious. And curiosity, for a filmmaker, is everything.
That curiosity eventually became Momentum — a done-for-you content service built on the premise that local businesses deserve the same quality of content as the biggest brands in the world, without ever picking up a camera. Vertical video wasn’t the enemy. It was the opportunity I almost missed because I was too busy being precious about aspect ratios.
I’m not making that mistake again.
Then AI video showed up and broke it all over again.
Just when I’d made my peace with vertical, the tools started changing underneath me.
Runway. Kling. Sora — which OpenAI is now quietly sunsetting, by the way, which tells you everything about how fast this space moves. Veo 3 dropped and suddenly AI-generated video had audio. Native, synced, generated audio. Not slapped on after the fact — baked in. That was the moment I stopped treating this as a curiosity and started treating it as infrastructure.
I’ll be straight with you: this one hit differently than vertical video did.
Vertical video asked me to adapt my craft. AI video is asking me to redefine what craft even means when the camera doesn’t have to exist. When I built Momentum, part of the pitch is that we create video content — including short-form video with a custom AI character — without the client ever appearing on screen. We generate visuals. We build brand personas from scratch. It works. Clients are getting results.
And yet there’s a part of me that still flinches when I watch a generated clip that looks almost real. Not because it’s bad. Because it’s good enough. And “good enough” has always been the thing that puts craftspeople out of business.
Here’s the shift I’m making — and why I’m telling you.
I’ve decided to stop flinching and start documenting.
AI content creation is now a real part of my daily workflow. Not as a replacement for filmmaking — as an extension of it. I’m using these tools on actual client work. I’m building systems around them. I’m figuring out, in real time, what they’re good at, what they’re terrible at, and where a human eye still makes the difference.
And starting now, this newsletter is going to reflect that.
The Creative Economist has always been about the art and the business of making content. That’s not changing. But the tools are changing fast enough that ignoring them would be like me still refusing to shoot vertical in 2026. I’d just be standing on the sidewalk watching everyone else get the work.
So here’s what you can expect going forward: practical stuff. Specific tools. Real workflows. What I’m actually using, what I’m actually building, and what I’m actually learning — including the parts where it doesn’t work. No hype. No doom. Just a filmmaker who’s been doing this long enough to know that the craft survives every format shift, as long as you’re willing to move with it.
The canvas rotated again. I’m still painting. I’m just using some new brushes.
Next issue: I’m breaking down exactly how we build AI video characters for local businesses at Momentum — the process, the tools, and what clients actually respond to. If that’s useful to you, make sure you’re subscribed.
— Alex