The Room Is Still the Brief.

I was on set last week. It's a part of my work I have always loved. A day where a meticulously planned idea, which has lived only in concept, plays out and evolves in real time. Though not every shoot day earns that feeling. Last week did.

Everything aligned: the team, the artists, the energy in the room. By the time I got home I realised I’d been reminded of something I already knew but had quietly been taking for granted. Human beings need other human beings. Not as a preference. As a requirement.

There is a particular kind of elevation that happens when a set really works. Not just in the outcomes. In everyone who was part of it. Creative artists who’ve known each other for years. New people meeting and connecting for the first time. A room full of distinct lives, distinct stories. Passionate creatives all pointed in the same direction. The work that comes out of that isn’t just good. It’s alive in a way that no brief could fully anticipate.

I've spent three years working seriously with AI. I love what it does. I love what it's given me. If I'm honest, it brings a genuine sense of wonder. It has expanded possibilities I once thought had a ceiling. As a curious child who asked for encyclopaedias for Christmas because I wanted to know everything, having the most comprehensive knowledge base in human history in my pocket, available any time for anything I want to query or ask, from the obscure to the profound, is genuinely extraordinary. I’m not going to pretend otherwise.

But something happened on a set last week that no model will ever replicate. A room read itself. People responded to each other in real time, adjusted, gave, received. The kind of quiet exchange that only happens when you’re physically present with another human being who is fully, unmistakably there.

Covid gave us a word and a habit. Social distancing. We kept the habit long after we needed it. Now we meet on Zoom with someone one suburb away and call it practical. It is. It’s also a quiet loss we haven’t properly named.

There’s a word I keep returning to lately. Sonder. The realisation that every person you encounter is living a life as vivid, as complex, as interior as your own. A whole world, running parallel, invisible unless you stop and look. You can’t experience sonder through a screen. You experience it in a room. Close enough to catch something unscripted in someone’s face.

The tools we use will keep improving. The automations and generative skills I’ve built will keep running and developing. But the only thing that has ever made the work matter is the human being at the end of it. That’s not sentiment. That’s the brief.

And last Friday, a room reminded me.