THE CURATED LOG XIII
By MITO Universe - @mito.universe
Welcome back to MITO Universe.
This month’s headlines read like fiction, but the shifts are very real. From YouTube giving everyone a multilingual voice to OpenAI aiming for Cannes, we’re watching the early signs of an industry that’s mutating fast. Not just in tools, but in how content gets made, distributed, and owned.
Whether you’re building a brand, directing a short, or rewriting your own mythology — this roundup is for the ones who want to stay ahead without chasing hype. Below, we break down what just happened, and what it might mean for how we work tomorrow.
SELECTED CREATORS
Leilanni Todd is a creative director and digital artist with nearly two decades of experience spanning advertising, fashion, and emerging media. She operates at the intersection of generative AI, 3D media, and world-building.
Her studio Floam World is her surreal cinematic universe — one where humor, absurdity, and aesthetic excess collide. It is both a space of critique and delight, using AI and 3D tools to explore identity, consumerism, beauty standards, and speculative futures.
One high point in her recent work is her short film Everyone Is Chair (2024) — a narrative about obsession and transformation, visualized through the lens of inflatable chairs. This piece was created with generative AI tools, including Runway Gen‑2, and was screened at the 2024 Tribeca Festival in the AI Shorts program.
Recognition followed: in 2025, she was awarded the inaugural Creative AI Pioneer (Individual) Gold Pencil by The One Show for her work. She is also adjunct professor at NYU Tisch, teaching Generative AI for Virtual Production at the Martin Scorsese Virtual Production Center.
Her visual style stands out for its exaggerated textures (inflatable forms, floating objects), vibrant art direction, and playful yet uncanny world-building. Todd uses generative tools not as final crutches, but as collaborators in stretching what visual storytelling can feel like.
Sam Finn is a photographer based in London who works where the real and the digital blur. Represented by Cartel & Co., his campaigns for brands like J.Crew x Vans, Gucci, Prada, and Skims use photographic detail plus AI intervention to unsettle what we expect from “commercial beauty.”
His images don’t just sell products—they question perception. In the J.Crew x Vans work, for example, subtle glitches became part of the story: shadows, proportions, reflections that didn’t align. Viewers didn’t just see shoes—they saw the edges of an image fraying. Sam’s credited with “Digital art by @samfinn.studio” in those posts.
His visual work often blurs the perceptual line between the “real” and the “fabricated.” Photographic detail meets speculative distortions; landscapes or scenes feel familiar yet strange; textures, lighting, and form are manipulated so that nothing feels fully anchored. Finn’s voice asks: what does it mean to believe an image is truthful when its origins are part human, part algorithmic?
WHAT’S NEW
Critterz: OpenAI’s First AI-Driven Animated Film Heads to Cannes
OpenAI is entering the world of cinema with Critterz, an animated feature film largely built with generative tools like GPT‑5, DALL·E, and Sora. The project is co‑produced by Native Foreign and Vertigo Films, with a budget under $30M and a production timeline of less than a year. Human creatives are involved in story development and voice acting, but most of the visual assets and sequences are generated with AI. It’s set to premiere at Cannes 2026.
This marks one of the first attempts to scale a full-length, AI-supported film through traditional film industry channels, not as an experiment, but as a commercial release.
Dalet Unveils “Dalia”: Conversational AI for Media Workflows
At IBC2025, Dalet introduced Dalia, a new AI interface that lets producers operate complex media workflows using natural language. Tasks like ingesting footage, adding metadata, triggering edits, or publishing clips can now be performed by typing simple commands — without needing to navigate traditional production software.
This represents a major shift from “creative AI” to “operational AI”, tools designed not to generate content, but to run the systems that deliver it.
Sweden Introduces the World’s First AI Music License
The Swedish performing rights society STIM has launched a new licensing model that lets AI developers legally train on copyrighted music, but only if they compensate songwriters and track usage. It’s the first initiative of its kind globally, offering transparency and accountability to artists whose work is used in training datasets.
In a context where music creators are fighting back against invisible exploitation by AI models, Sweden is proposing a new kind of relationship between copyright law and machine learning.
KEY VISUAL
Karol Wystalski, known as kvetcch, builds visual moments that linger at the intersection of myth and glitch. His work, rendered in stark black and white, leans into imperfection: blur, grain, movement, they are not flaws but the pulse of each scene.
Animals with impossible shapes, flames in domestic spaces: these aren’t metaphors forced on his work, they emerge naturally. MidJourney and Photoshop aren’t tools to smooth things over, but to expose edges, to let the image breathe its contradictions.
What his videos do is slow the viewer down. They pull you into a frame not to tell, but to make you feel what happens between frames: vulnerability, threshold, awe. In that space, what you’re seeing starts to live, shift, become something more than what you expected.
That’s all for now — we’ll be back in your inbox next week.