Atanas Dimov
AI Filmmaker
Everyone has an opinion on AI in film. Here's mine: it's a tool. A tool doesn't know what the story is, or where the frame should go. That part still takes a person. I know how to make a story land, and how to frame it so it's worth a second look.
Selected work
Ni tatko ni brat
A red-haired heroine settles accounts with entitled men, Tarantino in mind, one still frame at a time.
Fred Who – Part 2
The first openly gay candidate for a major-party nomination, as a superhero, back on the 2012 trail.
Deep (Like the Ocean)
Seven minutes, a chorus that keeps coming back, and symbols from the Andes, the Bible, the Vedas and the night sky, made to sit in one frame.
Who
Seven years of graphic design, then a history degree, then the "camera". The order matters. I learned how to frame a picture first, then where stories come from, then how to make one move.
What I make
The list keeps growing. This is where it stands.
Commercials and brand films
Your brand already has a voice. A palette, a tone, a way it wants to be seen. The film has to speak in that voice or it isn't yours, so I start with your brand book, your last campaign and the ads you can't stand, and build the visuals for you and nobody else. Fifteen seconds to three minutes, depending on what it has to do.
Music videos
See: ALEKSSend the song and tell me how much of the story you want to own. Some artists arrive with every shot already in their head, some want me to pitch one, most land somewhere in between and we write it together. Lip-synced or not. Real-looking or stylized. A full narrative video, or a visualizer, the short loop that runs behind the track on Spotify, on YouTube and on the screens behind you at the show. Either way, you stay in the room.
AI inside real footage
The house isn't on the plot yet. The light was wrong the day you flew the drone. There's a kitchen, but the sea view is a wall. The pool is still a rendering. I build the missing shot and match it to your footage and your grade, so the cut doesn't flinch when it gets there. Mostly property, so far, for a cinematographer in Australia. It works on anything you've pointed a camera at.
Narrative
See: Prikazna za RichkoShort films. Long ones, if you have the patience and the budget. Cartoons, anime, live action that never saw a set, whatever the story needs. Written by people, with dialogue a person would actually say out loud, and voiced with real feeling in it. The pictures are the easy part now. The story never was.
How it works
The same five steps, more or less, whatever the film is. Ni tatko ni brat is the example because it's the one I can show.
01The brief
You tell me what you want. Or you tell me you don't know yet and ask me for an idea. We talk about the song or the product, what it's for, what you've seen lately and liked. Nothing gets made here. With ALEKS it was a heroine with red hair, a road, and Tarantino.
02The story
We write it. Sometimes you bring it finished, sometimes I bring one, usually it's the two of us in a shared document until it reads right. What happens, to whom, in what order, and what it means. ALEKS and I wrote Ni tatko ni brat together before a single picture existed.
03Moodboard and references
You make a moodboard, or I do. I turn it into references, the characters, the places, the light, as finished stills. We look at them together, throw out what's wrong, make another set. That goes on until it's right, and nothing moves before it is. ALEKS brought the moodboard; I made the references; we went round until the heroine looked like herself.
04The build
Then the film gets built, shot by shot, in order. Before it's finished you get the whole thing as a low-resolution preview, rough on purpose, and you say what stays and what goes. Nothing leaves here that you haven't seen and signed off. That was true at every step before this one, and it's true at the end.
05The cut, and the delivery
The shots get cut to the music or the voice, graded, mastered, and sent in whatever formats you need. Cutdowns, verticals, a poster, a cover, if you asked for them at the start.
I work alone, remotely, from Macedonia.
One shot, start to finish · Ni tatko ni brat
The pictures on this board are the work of their artists. I make no claim on any of them.
Design
Seven years of it before the first film.
It's where the eye comes from. I still do it. Posters, covers, thumbnails, the deck for the pitch, the sleeve for the record.
Clients
Some of the people I've made things for.
- Fred Karger
