MetaPuppet

Twenty years of almost

MetaPuppet went to film school and then spent about two decades on other people's productions: camera operator, boom operator, story producer, screenwriter, actor and editor^[10][28]. His own site calls him an award-winning writer, director and editor with 20 years in film and music^[27]. He also played in rock and metal bands for about ten years^[4][2]. He wrote feature scripts that were never made and songs that were never properly recorded, and on AI LIVE he described how much of that work had felt like failure at the time^[2].

He has kept his name out of all of it. Professionally he is only MetaPuppet, or Meta Puppet, and an AI-illustrated avatar with spiky, flame-streaked hair stands in for his face on his channel, his site and his social accounts^[1][27]. On AI LIVE, Chris Branch called the alter ego great branding^[2].

Since I was a kid, I dreamt of making movies.

MetaPuppet^[10]

From the metaverse to Stable Diffusion

The MetaPuppet YouTube channel began with virtual reality, the metaverse and blockchain games^[10][1]. In September 2022 he found Stable Diffusion and turned to generative filmmaking^[10]. Within a year he was releasing narrative shorts: Open Source, from September 2023, follows a man who learns he lives in a simulation that will shut down in 72 hours^[24]. A month later he published The 10 Essential Steps of Making An AI Film, a 27-minute tutorial that walks through a 2023 stack of ChatGPT, Midjourney, ElevenLabs, Runway, Pika, Wav2Lip, D-ID and Topaz^[25].

He also made Scene 31 of Our T2 Remake, the crowd-made AI parody of Terminator 2 that Nem Perez and Sway Molina led with about 50 AI artists, which premiered at the NuArt Theatre in Los Angeles in March 2024^[27][30].

Parodies, a horror short and a spec ad

In May 2024 he released Before They Were Famous, billed as the first sitcom made with AI: a parody that imagines He-Man and Skeletor as roommates in 1979 Hollywood, shot in a saturated 1950s Super Panavision 70 look, over three episodes^[22][35][36]. A dark parody, What if The Smurfs Were A Cult?, followed in the same style^[23]. In June came Mother, a horror short taken from a feature script he had written, made with Luma Dream Machine, Udio and ElevenLabs alongside live-action dialogue^[21].

In July 2024 he posted McDonald's AI Commercial: A Taste of Tomorrow, an unofficial spec ad, not a McDonald's commission, made with Midjourney, Magnific, Luma, Runway, ElevenLabs, Suno and Udio. Its credits read "Written and Edited by: A human (me)"^[17]. With about 363,000 views it is still his most watched video^[1][17].

Mnemonade and the Culver Cup

Mnemonade, released on 28 October 2024, is about a woman with dementia who finds that each dish at a mysterious diner returns a fragment of her forgotten life, before the last dish is served^[15]. It is a tribute to his grandmother, and it was produced with Secret Level and made with Luma Dream Machine and Playbook3D^[12][15][11].

On 14 October 2024 it won the first Culver Cup, the AI film competition FBRC.ai and AWS Startups ran at the Culver Theatre during LA Tech Week^[11][14]. Eight finalists screened and the audience chose the winner; the judges included the director David Slade, Promise co-founder Dave Clark and Luma's chief executive Amit Jain^[11][12]. Speaking to Forbes, he said that in AI filmmaking's infancy the tech had outshone the story, and that he wanted the story to speak louder than the tools^[12][13].

His site also lists motion and edit work on Secret Level's AI remake of Coca-Cola's Holidays Are Coming in 2024, AI motion and edit on The 3008 Space Odyssey, a trailer for The Black Eyed Peas' Las Vegas residency, and directing the launch film for Luma's Creative Agents^[27][26]. These credits are self-reported and are given here only as his site lists them.

Promise

On 11 February 2025, Promise, the generative AI film and TV studio co-founded by George Strompolos, Jamie Byrne and Dave Clark, announced him as a full-time hire: Head of Genre Creative and Story Development, leading the studio's genre IP^[9]. He joined alongside Junie Lau, The Reel Robot, Guillaume Hurbault and Uncanny Harry^[9]. His YouTube channel now describes him as Director, Head of Genre at Promise Studios^[1].

His side projects kept coming. Plastic, from May 2025, follows a translucent kid made of water bottles who grows up left out, until a boardroom pitch turns into a shoot-out and a knowingly meta ending^[16]. He typed the dialogue straight into Veo 3's text prompt and switched to Pixverse for the final conversation to keep the character consistent^[16]. It has passed 141,000 views^[16]. For Promise he made Eve and Adam, Episode 1: Genesis, about a part-human, part-machine brother and sister, in a 1970s science fiction look he researched with Gemini from the cameras behind Close Encounters and Escape to Witch Mountain^[18]. He then turned Veo 3's eight seconds of baked-in music into its three-minute score with Suno^[19].

In 2025 the European Broadcasting Union interviewed him at the Scandinavian Creative AI Summit in Copenhagen, and published the case study that August^[28].

Now, with AI, I can finally visualise the ideas I've had in my head for years and share them with the world.

MetaPuppet^[28]

Kyra

Kyra premiered at the first Generative AI Film Festival at Adobe MAX 2025 in Los Angeles, one of five films Adobe commissioned for it, and made with Promise; Promise also posted it on its own channel^[7][8][33]. A street artist follows the woman he loves onto a New York subway train and finds himself riding through his whole life, one carriage per age, towards the last stop^[5]. It is a tribute to the street artists who inspired him early in his career, from the graffiti writers who covered the 5 Pointz building in Queens, such as TooflyNYC, to the subway drummers^[5][6].

He built it from his own archival photographs of 5 Pointz, which has since been demolished, and field recordings from the subway, brought to life with the tools inside Adobe Firefly^[6][7]. He used Firefly Boards for variations, Veo 3 and Luma's Ray3 for motion, and Firefly's Generate Sound Effects, and he played the opening rhythm on a bucket himself^[7][6]. Using real photographs as starting images, he wrote, quickly became his favourite part of the process^[6].

AI LIVE made Kyra its showcase of the week on Episode 98. Chris Branch, back from MAX, said on the show that it was made in under two weeks and that it was the only AI creator's film given its own main-stage showcase; Adobe's posts confirm the festival premiere^[3][7]. Chris called it maybe his top three AI film ever^[3]. A month later Wonder Studios named it among the community favourites in its If the Oscars had an AI category poll^[29].

System Sleep

In 2007 he wrote a song called System Sleep with his bandmates Elias Tannous, Jason D'Amelio and Josh Jaffe. They played it live twice and never recorded it professionally; all that survived was a practice recording^[4]. In 2026 he uploaded that recording to Suno as the input, kept its key and tempo, changed some lyrics and cut six and a half minutes down to about five^[4][2]. He rebuilt nine more of his old solo songs the same way, then designed a four-piece band, System Sleep, and auditioned every member as the singer across all ten tracks^[4]. The album, Timeless, is on Spotify and Apple Music^[32][37].

The music video came out on 22 February 2026. He animated the band and the story in Kling 2.6 and 3.0 and made the angels and car crashes in Seedance 2.0, generating at night on a family holiday^[2][4]. Four days later he joined Chris Branch and Andrew Davis for the first hour of AI LIVE Episode 110, where he premiered his breakdown of how it was made. Chris said he had watched it with goosebumps^[2].

Since 2022 we've been doing this, and this is the first time where I had too many good gens.

MetaPuppet^[2]

What comes next

In January 2026 he released the trailer for Thomas Hate, his reimagining of Dante's Inferno, about a man who believes the nine floors of his apartment building are the nine circles of Hell; he had developed it for years as a manuscript and a feature screenplay^[20]. In April 2026 he joined the Dreamina creator partner programme with early access to Seedance 2.0^[31], and AI Creator Day Zurich lists him among its speakers^[38].

His method has not changed since the McDonald's ad. He writes the script or shot list himself, lets an agent break it into prompts and storyboards, and edits in Premiere or Resolve, because production was the one stage of filmmaking he had no background in^[2]. On AI LIVE he asked what the point would be if AI replaced the part of the work you are passionate about^[2].