Vibe Check: Is Astra a Breakthrough for Indie Filmmakers?

Sponsored by: OpenAI

At our Think Week in Panama in January, creative studio Afterimage filmed a series of six short films about Every’s work with AI. We’d seen what cofounders Cyrus Duff and Josh Lee could do with a camera, so we were curious when they began testing Astra on footage from real shoots. Could it handle the visual effects they’d normally make themselves? They put it to work on everything from replacing a dish in a moving pan to adding a building to a Brooklyn street to making a giant parade float appear outside a window in handheld iPhone footage. Some shots worked. Others didn’t. By the end, they were dreaming up effects they’d never have attempted before.—Kate Lee

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We run Afterimage, a creative studio that works with tech companies. This year, we’ve done projects with Cursor, Reve, Pierre Computer Co, Turbopuffer, and several others. We previously led video at the Browser Company of New York. Every was our first client.

When GPT-6 Astra launched, our timelines filled with impressive demos of 3D environments Astra created in Blender, a tool for making digital models and scenes—including a full-scale render of New York City. Astra could build 3D models in Blender and refine them when they looked wrong. We wanted to see whether those skills carried over to footage we’d shot. Could it make a new object look as though it belonged in a real scene? Could it do visual effects?

Visual effects (VFX) involve separating subjects from backgrounds, following and altering objects across frames, and matching new elements to existing photography. We’d tried that work with earlier models. Opus 4.6, for example, could write deterministic Python scripts for basic blemish and object removal but struggled with more complicated changes. Generative tools like Gemini Omni could make impressive changes to footage but didn’t allow for the granular control most of our workflows require.