Commercial production company Cap Gun Collective, with shops in Chicago and London, has opened a Los Angeles office with the hiring of executive producer Jason Botkin and an expanded U.S. directorial roster that includes founder Alex Fendrich, Docter Twins, Jeppe Ronde, Jonathan Doe, Michael Sewandono, Spooner Bonde, Tomas Mankovsky, and Tom Haines.
The company has also launched an original content offering, Cap Gun TV (CGTV), a hybrid production studio that develops, produces, and markets original content for broadcast, film, digital and video on demand, incubating micro-content into larger, fully realized properties and finding new ways of funding and distribution within the landscapes of traditional and new media.
Botkin hails from an extensive production background, most recently as EP for commercial production stalwart Furlined. Prior to Furlined, Botkin was the founder and managing director of Streetgang Films, a music video company that helped launch the careers of assorted prominent directors.
Cap Gun Collective was originally founded in Chicago in 2009 by executive producer Matt Abramson, director Fendrich, and producer Kaitlyn Parks. In 2011, the company opened an office in London with exec producer Oliver Allgrove. Cap Gun Collective is part of the grouping of Whitehouse Post “one roof” partner companies that includes Gentleman Scholar and Carbon VFX.
Since its 2009 inception Cap Gun Collective has developed and produced a number of original content properties, including The Venue, which won the Comedy Central Pilot Competition in 2012. Cap Gun also produced the web series Teachers with director Matt Miller and improv comedy troupe The Katydids. The series is showcased on The Onion website and is also being developed into a longer format series.
Cap Gun will continue its successful foray into original content with CGTV.
Cap Gun Collective is represented on the West Coast by Brooke Covington and Rebecca Reber, Jimmy Waldron for the Mid-West and Meredith Bergman for the East Coast.
AI-Assisted Works Can Get Copyright With Enough Human Creativity, According To U.S. Copyright Office
Artists can copyright works they made with the help of artificial intelligence, according to a new report by the U.S. Copyright Office that could further clear the way for the use of AI tools in Hollywood, the music industry and other creative fields.
The nation's copyright office, which sits in the Library of Congress and is not part of the executive branch, receives about half a million copyright applications per year covering millions of individual works. It has increasingly been asked to register works that are AI-generated.
And while many of those decisions are made on a case-by-case basis, the report issued Wednesday clarifies the office's approach as one based on what the top U.S. copyright official describes as the "centrality of human creativity" in authoring a work that warrants copyright protections.
"Where that creativity is expressed through the use of AI systems, it continues to enjoy protection," said a statement from Register of Copyrights Shira Perlmutter, who directs the office.
An AI-assisted work could be copyrightable if an artist's handiwork is perceptible. A human adapting an AI-generated output with "creative arrangements or modifications" could also make it fall under copyright protections.
The report follows a review that began in 2023 and fielded opinions from thousands of people that ranged from AI developers, to actors and country singers.
It shows the copyright office will continue to reject copyright claims for fully machine-generated content. A person simply prompting a chatbot or AI image generator to produce a work doesn't give that person the ability to copyright that work, according to the report. "Extending protection to material whose expressive elements are determined by a machine ...... Read More