A turn-of-the-century Salem barrel maker. Four kids. Volunteer firefighter. He is my great-great-great grandfather. This is his story, rebuilt from one fuzzy photo.
I was in an AI fellowship a couple of years ago. They asked everyone to bring a personal AI project. I called my dad. He had been deep in ancestry research and had a stack of family org charts, gravestone photos, fragile records he had taken on his own trips to cemeteries.
One name jumped off the page. Rufus. Salem, turn of the century. Barrel maker. Volunteer firefighter. Four kids, same as me. There was one photo of him. Fuzzy, faded, you could barely make out the shape of his face. I fed it to the models. What came back was a cinematic black-and-white portrait. That was the moment I knew I could make a Ken Burns documentary entirely from AI-generated material.
Rufus opened doors. The MIT AI Film Festival. Boston AI Week. Tech Week Boston. Harvard. Northeastern. The film is also why I started CGA. The day I finished Rufus, I knew the production system I had built around it was the real artifact. The film was the proof. The system was the product.