The Return to Real

You know, I was thinking… AI and social media are about to create a massive appetite for things that are real.

Every time technology makes something easier to fake, the authentic version of that thing becomes more valuable. Autotune made real singers more desirable. Photoshop made real photography precious. Social media made real friendships a luxury.

AI is about to do that to everything.

When anyone can generate a beautiful image, a polished essay, a synthetic video of grandma reading a bedtime story in her own voice, the things that are verifiably real will command a premium that didn’t exist previously. Soon it will look like we took reality for granted.

A handwritten letter. A vinyl record. Oh God, are we all turning into hipsters? A face-to-face conversation. A documentary film made by a human who sat in a room with your father and asked him questions for three hours while a real camera rolled. A digital camera, sure, but a digital camera capturing reality.

That’s where Heritage Films lives. Right at that intersection.

I didn’t plan it this way. When we started this company, AI wasn’t even part of the conversation. Well, that’s sorta a lie. I remember when Adobe started talking about machine learning and AI with Sensei. It sounded like garbage. But they were all in on it. This was like 2016 or so. It was nerdy Star Trek stuff and I didn’t realize it was the seed of something that would matter enormously in the making of documentary films. I just knew that families wanted their stories preserved, and I knew that for many, film was the best medium for doing it. But now, as the world gets flooded with synthetic content, what we do becomes rarer. More valuable. More necessary.

We use AI in our workflow. I’m not a Luddite. We use it for transcription, for research, for operational efficiency. And in post we use it to help make the films more authentic, ironically. But the core product, a real person sitting across from your real family telling their real story on camera, that part is untouchable. That’s the part no algorithm can replicate.

The return to real is coming. It’s already here in pockets. US vinyl sales passed a billion dollars last year, the nineteenth straight year of growth. Farmers markets are booming. People are craving the tangible.

Heritage Films was built for this moment. We just didn’t know it.

Heritage Films produces personal documentary films for families across the United States and the world. Real stories, real cameras, real conversations. That’s what we do.