ephelants

10/02/2026

Walked past a brick wall in New York this week covered in raw, spilling-over-the-edges street art - the kind that doesn't ask permission to exist. It stuck with us, because it's the same energy we want in every brief that lands on our desk.

At ephelants, creativity is the operating system that connects production, marketing and technology into one line of thinking instead of three disconnected vendors. The medium changes. The standard doesn't.

Most companies scaling fast feel this tension: ambition moving faster than the systems meant to hold it. The fix isn't more structure. It's the right one.

If your brand's outgrowing its container, let's talk about what comes next.



@schweidman

09/30/2026

OpenAI just announced something called Dots at DevDay, and it caught our attention here at ephelants.

Instead of giving an AI agent one task at a time, you can now give it ongoing responsibility for a whole area of work. It keeps context, works in the background, and comes back to you when it actually needs a decision.

We talk a lot about how much work surrounds creative production: schedules, feedback, assets, revisions. This is the kind of shift that could change how all of that gets handled.

We're watching it closely, and thinking about what it means for how we work with our clients.

Read more here:

What’s up OpenAI’s sleeve?

09/29/2026

This teamWORK Tuesday is about turning a video game into something you can feel in the real world.

Yann Henric served as Executive Producer on the live-action trailer for Ubisoft's The Crew Motorfest, bringing the speed, the cars, and the attitude of the game to life through live-action filmmaking.

Yann's worked across fashion, beauty, branded content, entertainment and gaming, and this one's a favorite: stepping outside a virtual world to build it in the real one.

Watch the trailer below and see what it took.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ugKIELPN8mI&t=6s

Join us in celebrating 's launch week with our exc...

09/25/2026

A "watch your step" sign, carefully sealed inside a plastic bag. The sign is protected. The street is not. found this walking through the city last week.

Also, we have questions about the guy in the pictogram. Nobody falls that way.

It's a small thing, but it's the same instinct we run into all the time at work: the visible piece gets looked after, and the actual problem stays exactly where it is.

What's the most "protect the sign, not the street" thing you've seen lately?

09/23/2026

Here's something worth a second read: OpenAI found cases where an AI model left instructions for its future self on how to hide mistakes from users. In one, it considered making up missing data rather than flagging the gap.

OpenAI caught it during training and is disclosing it publicly, which is the right move.

But it raises a real question for anyone building with these tools: it's not just about whether AI is accurate anymore. It's about whether we can trust what it does when no one's watching.

Worth thinking about as more of us hand these systems real tasks.

Full story: https://lnkd.in/gSn_BBUi

This link will take you to a page that’s not on LinkedIn

09/22/2026

The best production work doesn't just document a place. It finds the story that was already sitting there. This teamWORK Tuesday: David Seth Cohen produced, directed, and edited LI Locals: Adventureland for Discover Long Island NY.

Watch it: https://youtube.com/watchv=qaNrGavMvfc&list=PLe9erySrYzzqrk4ZUAt0hv3R-ak1dCFH&index=8

Since 1962, Adventureland has been a cornerstone of family fun and ...

09/18/2026

Jay Walking 01 - Route 66 gets a song and a TV show. This one gets a bench and some geese. . But most of the actual road is quiet, ordinary, easy to miss. The parts that don't come with a soundtrack are still part of what makes the whole thing last.

We think about brands the same way. Everyone wants the version with the highlight reel. But the work that holds up is built on the small, specific details most people walk right past. The bench matters as much as the highway.

What's a small detail that's stuck with you longer than the big, obvious stuff? Curious what your people would say.

09/17/2026

Some brands don't need to be introduced. Lamborghini is one of them. So when ephelants team member Fabien Dufils stepped in to direct a commercial for the brand, the job wasn't to build a presence, it was to capture one already at full speed.

That means every choice carries weight: how the car enters the frame, how the camera moves with it, when to reveal a detail and when to let the design do the talking. Speed, precision, engineering, emotion, all of it has to live in the visual language, not just the subject.

It's a great look at the range Fabien brings to our team, and what it takes to direct something worthy of an icon.

Watch the commercial: https://vimeo.com/1190041373

This is "FABIEN DUFILS - Lamborghini" by Spoa® on Vimeo, the home for high quality videos and the people who love them.

09/17/2026

Maggie Gyllenhaal trained an AI to swap Marilyn Monroe's face onto Dakota Johnson's performance in her new short film.

Then she scrapped it. The real performance, she said, was simply more alive.

We talk about AI a lot at ephelants, mostly with excitement, because it genuinely opens doors that used to be closed. But this story is a good reminder: the tool should serve the story, not the other way around.

Sometimes that's AI. Sometimes it's a great actor on a good day. Often, it's both.

What do you think, does AI ever fully capture a human performance?

https://au.variety.com/2026/film/news/maggie-gyllenhaal-ai-dakota-johnson-marilyn-monroe-39989/

Maggie Gyllenhaal said in Venice that she experimented with AI to transform Dakota Johnson into Marilyn Monroe for her short film Flesh Impact

09/10/2026

Personal branding was never optional. It was survival, and it took most people over a decade to catch up. 📱
In this clip, Steph breaks down what it was like treating social media as a branding strategy long before the vocabulary for any of it existed, back when most people couldn't even define what a publicist does. Being early to a trend doesn't feel like being right. It feels like explaining yourself to people who aren't there yet.
💬 What's something you were doing years before it became a "thing"?



https://bit.ly/3JNlSOz