Tim Simmons aka Theoretically Media

Seventeen years behind the camera

Tim Simmons came to AI from the film business. His site says he spent 17 years in professional film production and Hollywood studios before he started Theoretically Media^[1]. On the Curious Refuge Podcast he put his time in Hollywood at about 12 to 14 years, living in Los Angeles and then Glendale, and said he eventually left, worn out by the hours and the instability, and moved back east^[26]. World Labs describes him as a former Hollywood documentarian^[30]. He has not named the studios or credits from those years in public, so this page does not either.

A music channel that changed course

Theoretically Media did not start as an AI channel. Its oldest uploads are Ableton tutorials for guitar players, and he describes it as a music channel at first^[26][3]. The biggest Short on the channel is still a music one: How to Fake Piano in 6 Easy Steps, posted in September 2022, has 627,110 views^[25].

In November 2022 he saw AI arriving in music and turned the channel towards creative AI; he was already using Midjourney v3^[26]. When interest in AI exploded in March 2023, he says that early start had prepared him for it. He joined X as @TheoMediaAI that same month^[26][34].

Those limitations can be opportunities.

Tim Simmons^[26]

The tool reviewer

The channel's line is "Use AI. Make Something Good."^[5]. By 31 October 2026 it held 394 long-form videos and 24 Shorts, with about 21.8 million views between them^[3][4]. His most watched video is AI Doom Changes Games Forever, from August 2024, at 843,414 views^[24]. Close behind are a free AI comic book creator, an AI upscaler run over GTA 6 footage and I Paid For Veo-3. Is It Worth It?, all well over 300,000 views^[3].

The rest of the AI video world treats him as a reference point. Curious Refuge introduced him as one of the foremost curators of AI news and tools^[26]. Gavin Purcell brought him on AI for Humans as a guest co-host and called it one of the show's favourite AI channels on YouTube^[28]. Film Threat put it on a list of free film schools on YouTube^[29]. In December 2024 he was the guest on Fast Hours Ep. 22 with Rory Flynn and Drew Brucker, billed as a "130k YouTuber" spilling tea on the state of gen AI tools^[27].

From reviewer to filmmaker

In 2024 he started making films of his own. Dead Sea, his first narrative AI short, follows a doomed pirate captain, and he built it from Midjourney, Kling, Luma Dream Machine, Runway Gen-3, ElevenLabs, Topaz, Suno and Udio, each used for what it did best at the time^[20]. The same year he presented the walkthrough of Below Bonghwa, a Korean horror trailer directed by Dave Clark about two trapped zinc miners and a metal-eating bulgasari. His site says it premiered at BIFAN 2024^[22][23].

The Bridge followed in 2025: a warrior, a bridge and a toll keeper, with every shot generated in Google Veo-2 with Flow, voices from ElevenLabs and Hume, and lip sync in Hedra. His site says it reached almost 400,000 views across platforms^[8]. That October he made CAMEO, a comedy about an AI that ends up living a better life than its owner, mixing Sora 2's Cameo feature with live action he shot himself; The Visual History of AI Film & Video logs it on 6 October 2025^[18][31]. Two weeks later came the Planet Hell trailer, made with Veo 3.1 and Sora 2^[16][17]. In November World Labs published a case study on Alarm, a 48-second micro-short he shot inside a Marble space-station world used as a locked virtual set^[30].

Once the set was locked, I could experiment freely with movement and emotion.

Tim Simmons^[30]

2026: the Seedance year

Dragon Blue arrived on 25 March 2026: a stylised revenge thriller in the spirit of Kill Bill, with katanas, silhouette fights and Japanese dialogue. Every shot came from Seedance 2.0, and his site puts the total production cost at $187^[14][15]. Paperclip Heart imagines an AI takeover that arrives as comfort rather than war, through Solace, an ambient AI companion built to cure loneliness. He ran it through Seedance 2.0, used Claude via MCP and Martini.film as his production office, scored it with Suno and cut it in Premiere Pro^[12]. It was reviewed on AI LIVE Ep. 122, where Chris Branch called the storytelling awesome^[38].

Death Walks Into A Bar, released on 3 August 2026, is a neo-noir about a hitman whose last contract is Death himself. He made it in Dreamina's Seedance 2.5 from three Midjourney character stills in about 15 generations, fixed bad takes with a screenshot technique rather than re-rolling, and upscaled it in Topaz. His film page sets it against an estimated $55,000 to $85,000 for a conventional shoot^[10][11]. The same day he taught a Teachable live event, Build Your Own AI Film Studio: The Production Company On Your Desktop^[32].

This is the first time I stopped scanning for glitches and just watched the performances.

Tim Simmons^[10]

Then he went back to The Bridge. The 2026 remake, released on 14 September, tells the same story again: a warrior reaches a fortified bridge, and the ghoul who guards it asks for a story, not gold, as the toll^[6]. This time he gave spoken directions that GPT-6 Astra turned into Runway prompts through MCP. He cut the film by hand in Premiere, then Astra graded it, added grain, titled it and mixed it in DaVinci Resolve without him touching the mouse. It took about a day and a half, against about a week for the original^[6]. The end credits list Seedance 2.5, GPT-6 (Astra), GPT-Image 2, Adobe Premiere, DaVinci Resolve, Suno and Dehancer, and the film is marked "Created on Runway"^[7]. With 303,771 YouTube views it is his most watched film^[7].

Every film gets a companion breakdown on the channel, with the tools, the prompts and the cost, so the films and the tutorials feed each other^[2][10]. His site also lists talks at the HPA Tech Retreat, Philly Ad Club and Curious Refuge, and coverage in Forbes, Decrypt, ICG Magazine, TV Tech and CineD; those are his own claims, and we have not seen the articles^[1].

Around AI LIVE

Tim is a regular in the AI LIVE orbit rather than a guest so far. He dropped into the live chat on Ep. 108, and on Ep. 109 Chris passed on his tip that ByteDance's Seed 2.0 language model matches GPT-5 at a hundredth of the cost^[35][36]. On Ep. 115 he got the credit for talking Andrew Davis into running LTX locally^[37]. On Ep. 127 he turned up in the chat just as a new Chronicles of Bone chapter landed, and Chris invited him onto Creator Sessions^[39].

He shows up in the sessions too. During BLVCKL!GHT's Creator Session he summed up the chat's reaction to Voidspire: his 13-year-old self would love it as much as he does now^[40]. Chris credited him on Creator Sessions #8 with the tip that Bilibili now accepts Western creators^[41], and on #11 Phil Langer said he learned Midjourney by following Theoretically Media, while Chris called Tim's seven-fingered Midjourney V7 thumbnail the best YouTube thumbnail of all time^[42].