Sky Bloom makes short videos for small businesses. Not the glossy sort with a crew and a catering van — the other kind. A florist who needs something for Instagram by Friday. A bakery in Stockport showing off a new sourdough. A personal trainer who wants fifteen seconds of himself looking like he knows what he's doing.
For years the work had a shape she could set her watch by: shoot on Tuesday, realise on Wednesday she was missing a cutaway, lose Sunday to re-editing the same forty seconds for the third time. The filming was never the hard part. The middle was. The client who says, "Can I see it a bit warmer? And maybe one without the voiceover, and a square one for TikTok?" All reasonable requests. Each one an afternoon.
So when AI video tools started appearing, she left them alone for a good while. The first ones were fairground tricks: seven seconds of a melting labrador, people whose teeth kept changing their minds. Good for a laugh, no use to a paying client. She decided it was a bubble and went back to her tripod.
What changed her mind wasn't a slick demo. It was a slow Thursday and a hummus brand. They wanted a launch clip and had the budget of a sandwich. Normally she'd have said no. Instead she spent an hour with one of the newer generators, describing the shots she couldn't afford to stage: a jar turning slowly in warm light, a hand tearing flatbread, steam she'd never have caught on the day. Rough, but close enough to show the client what she meant. They approved in ten minutes instead of two meetings. Then she shot the hero moments for real and let the machine handle the bits nobody would ever inspect frame by frame.
That's the honest version of what changed. Not "AI replaced my job." It took the boring part off her plate and left her the part she's actually paid for.
The wins are unglamorous, which is why she trusts them. Versioning, mostly. A client wants the same idea in three moods, and she can rough all three before lunch. Concept mockups for nervous shop owners. Filler shots — the establishing shot, the abstract texture behind a title card, the two seconds of nothing that a video needs so it can breathe. She used to buy that from stock libraries and it always looked like everyone else's, because it was.
The tools still fall over in predictable ways. Hands are still a lottery. Anything with readable text will betray you sooner or later. Continuity drifts. And there's a stubborn five per cent, the uncanny remainder, where a clip is technically flawless and somehow lifeless, like a room tidied by someone who has never lived in it.
So the real footage has not gone anywhere. The face of the business, the actual product in the actual hands of the owner, the moment that has to feel true — she still shoots that on a Tuesday, still missing a cutaway, same as ever. What has gone is the dread around it. She no longer prices a job assuming three lost weekends. She no longer turns down the hummus brand.
"Mostly, though, I would tell them the thing I had to learn slowly, and it has nothing to do with kit," she writes. "The expensive camera and the clever software were never really the point of any of it. The point was working out what a client needed before they could put it into words, and then getting out of the way of it. The tools got faster this year. The job, the real one, is sitting exactly where it always did. I just get more of my Sundays back."