Aumen Film Co

Aumen Film Co is a film and video production company led by director Chris Aumen.

They work with clients to take branded content, commercial, and documentary projects from ideas to final products ready for theater, broadcast, and online release. An award-winning film and video production company, Aumen Film Co partners with agencies and clients to create content that engages their target audience.

06/23/2025

Stop using CapCut (if you care about your content)

Most marketers didn’t read the new Terms of Service.
Here’s what ByteDance is doing with every single file you upload (even the ones you don’t export/publish).

CapCut, owned by the same company behind TikTok, is now using your uploaded media to train their video AI model. That includes drafts, unused takes, cut material… all of it.

Their new model, “Seedance 1.0”, is already outperforming Google's Veo 3 and all the others in public benchmarks...because they’ve been feeding it your brand content, your test edits, your in-progress drafts.

If you’re just messing around on your phone it probably doesn’t matter.

But if you work in social for a big brand, or handle internal, proprietary, or unreleased media, (or edit videos of your kids) this should be on your radar.

Better alternatives:
• DaVinci Resolve (desktop + iPad)
• Instagram or other platforms' built-in editing tools

I’ll break down more options in another video, what are your go-to mobile editors?

06/20/2025

I built a "Voice-of-Customer Intelligence Engine" that sources reviews and turns them into advertising advice. Here's how it works for Hospitality:

✅ Source reviews from Google, TripAdvisor, Booking, etc for you and your two closest competitors
✅ Use NLP to identify competitor weaknesses vs your strengths
✅ Extract authentic customer language for your copy
✅ Ask questions like: "What are guests complaining about at competitors that we excel at?"

Instead of burning budget on 15-20 shots hoping something sticks, you get data-driven insights on exactly what to highlight.
This works for hospitality, e-commerce, any industry with reviews. When you have limited attention spans, every frame needs to count.

The tools exist. The data is there. Get out there and connect the dots 🤙

06/18/2025

Like most new technologies, AI in content creation can be a tool, a crutch, or, in some unfortunate cases, an indictment of someones taste and critical thinking skills.

Here's an example of how we used a custom-built model to solve a very specific problem in post to save a client's budget and allow the work to stay ambitious and punch above it's weight class.

06/13/2025

Getting a jump on Father's Day weekend and working from the today but still wanted to get this thought out.

The idea of the purple cow is now old enough to be a college graduate (yikes).

BUT with the incoming tsunami of AI content to your feeds, its core message is more relevant than ever.

The number of uploads competing for the average consumer's attention was already staggering before, when agentic content creators are spun up en mass, it's going to be an unindexable slopfest.

I've seen what these agents can do at scale, I've built and deployed them and, ultimately, shut most of them down. It's just not the footprint I want to leave behind.

I'm not a doomer by any stretch, I'm still very excited about most use cases for AI and still use it in workflows all over the place.

My maybe not so hot take: in the next year consumers will start to consider (subconsciously at first) HOW brands use AI. It won't be about whether they use it, they all will. Winners will be made in the 'how'. Is it a light touch like a chatbot that actually knows how to triage and help users? Or an unindexable slopfest of paid ads with tacky taglines?

Alright, enough for now. Happy Father's Day to those who celebrate, I'm headed out to touch (mow) grass.

06/12/2025

Marriot Bonvoy learned this the hard way last year and now Crumbl is up. If you're using influencers or inexperienced content creators - give them a heads up. Just because that trending audio is available in the app or the post is organic doesn't make it legal. I want to think usually these are innocent mistakes, but when you see brands ignoring cease and desists...it's tough to give the benefit of the doubt.

05/20/2025

Feeling grateful this morning that this film for Rite Aid Healthy Futures is getting the recognition it deserves!

🥈 Best Non-Profit Brand Film
🥉 Best CSR Film

The biggest shoutout to Andrew Staub for always championing the power of storytelling to make an impact, and the cast and crew who brought another ambitious script full of movie magic to life.

Check out the full film and behind the scenes in our other posts, or at https://www.aumenfilm.co/projects/rite-aid-healthy-futures.

03/12/2025

When content quality matches your premium positioning, value perception aligns with pricing.

Cadillac's F1 announcement is a great example of what not to do if you want your brand to be perceived as high-end or luxury.

11/21/2024

Volvo posted an almost 4-minute ad to Instagram shot by one of the greatest living cinematographers. That was a weird sentence, but here are some thoughts:

• Don't overcomplicate your marketing, tell human stories.
• Know your audience and meet there where (in life) they are
• Your content should feel cohesive with your brand positioning. If you don't cut corners on product, don't cut them anywhere.
• Despite breaking conventional social media "rules" with its length, the emotional resonance drove overwhelming engagement and brand consideration (pulling heart-strings wins)

11/20/2024

When I first saw this ad a few days ago I thought it was a joke. Will Coke lose market share over this? Probably not. But here's what could happen:

(Disclaimer - as a filmmaker I'm probably too close to this, so please someone tell me I'm wrong here)

For some audiences - this will be fine. (Think your great-aunt on facebook who constantly shares AI-generated memes and thinks the polar bears in this ad are real.) Christmas ads, or anything a brand puts out really, represent more than the sum of it's parts. It's an opportunity to put story over that hard sell, to give a feeling, and, by entertaining the audience, show that to them the relationship with their customers is more than simply transactional. This ad is none of that. It's checking a box, and arguably disrespectful to the previous generations of the "Holidays are Coming" campaign creators who wanted to make something truly special. And as we're seeing in the headlines, it's already eroding (if ever so slightly) trust in the brand. Even if they didn't do it as a cost-saving measure, it's perceived that way by many. All these factors, combined with the fact that it's objectively not a touching or engaging ad, leave a bad taste for me.

Here's where it gets sticky. I started as a VFX artist. I genuinely believe in and have seen the great things AI can do behind the scenes in business operations, medicine, and yes, even as a tool used by filmmakers. But in 2024, its respectable uses start and end in non-customer-facing applications. The risks are evident in the comment sections of Coke's socials, the litigation of companies that deploy chatbots that hallucinate, and so on.

This feels like using AI to write a birthday card. Does it work? Sure, but it's pretty gross.

07/18/2024

Long overdue studio build update:

For those new to this page or journey, after a decade and a half of working in basement offices, spare rooms, and paying too much in commercial rent, Aumen Film Co's first office/studio is being built, taking on much of the work myself to make it happen.

To keep the promise of building in public, I'm sitting on terabytes of footage that will be edited into a longer form series, but for now, here's a quick reel now that we're in the door.

06/25/2024

I had a wonderful time speaking at The Platform last week and meeting such a passionate group of A-Players in the hospitality world.

Here's a clip from the recorded version of my presentation (sadly missing the cowboy hat from the live version, stay tuned for photos of that 🤠). If you'd like to see the full 40-minute version shoot me a message, happy to share.

01/22/2024

Sometimes it's a digitized robotic arm, sometimes it's a good old-fashioned low-tech, choreographed team shot.

Address

York Springs, PA

Website

http://aumenfilm.co/

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