Alex Zarfati hoped being on YouTube would help him convince studios to greenlight his projects. Now he’s doing things himself–with AI.

Alex Zarfati‘s first YouTube video has 768 views.

He originally got into filmmaking as a composer, scoring other people’s documentaries. Music was his first love, but after getting a behind-the-scenes glimpse of the film and TV production process, “I realized there were so many things in the space that I wanted to do and get my hands into,” he tells Tubefilter.

He got into editing first, then bought a camera and started directing. Just before COVID, he got involved in making a docuseries called Law of the Goat, about a “young and hungry” MMA team.

“I poured so much money and effort and time into that project, and we were building a lot of traction on social media,” he says. “The idea was, we were going to shoot as much stuff as possible and build a pitch package to go to all the major streaming platforms–Netflix, Amazon, Hulu. We got with a couple producers and they felt really, really great about the project.”

But when Zarfati and his team went to pitch Law of the Goat, “one by one, we got the door slammed in our face.” He says streamers and other entertainment entities kept asking one key question: “Do you have any major influencers involved?”

“We had an affiliation with Logan Paul, he was with the gym we were working with, and they were like, ‘Can you get Logan Paul in on this? Can you get that person in on this?'” Zarfati explains. “I just remember asking myself, ‘Man, they care so much about these influencers. Why don’t I just become an influencer myself?'”

He figured if he built the kind of digital presence the entertainment industry was looking for, he could reopen those slammed doors himself, without having to rely on outside influencers.

But building that presence was a lot harder than he expected. He started posting content in 2022, and after a year of diligently posting videos, “I was getting no views and nobody cared,” he says. “It was so tough!”

Finally Zarfati hit a point where he decided he was going to stop thinking about what his potential audience might want, and post something that was for him and him alone.

“It was a behind-the-scenes video of one of my projects, and I was like, ‘You know what? I’m going to make this video the way I want to make it. I’m not going to make it for viewership, I’m not going to make it for retention. I’m not going to try to be anything that I’m not. I’m just going to do what I want to do,'” he says.

That video was the one that popped off. His views climbed into the tens of thousands per upload, and he started to build a community of subscribers who were similarly interested in filmmaking. Now, he has 140,000 subscribers and brings around 150,000 views per month–and he just signed with Viral Nation off the back of completing feature short film Fail Safe.

Just as his YouTube presence has evolved, so has his filmmaking process. His recent uploads proclaim generative AI has made him “dangerously creative,” and explain how generative models do the “grunt work” for his films.

Zarfati acknowledges using generative AI is controversial, but says he sees it as a “very very big gray area.”

“I could totally see how people could be 100% against it,” he says. “On the other hand, I think there is something that is being unlocked for independent filmmakers that is a huge opportunity to make your small production feel a lot larger with the use of AI. These tools are given to us, and if you use them in a responsible way, it gives you limitless opportunity.”

He says one line he won’t cross is replacing speaking actors with AI.

“I use AI to expand sets. I use AI to fill in some of the gaps that we just couldn’t afford to shoot, whether it was that we couldn’t get a permit or we don’t have the budget for an aerial shot with all these different cop cars and things,” he explains. “I use it to make the world feel bigger than it actually is, and I think that is a great place to inject AI into your independent filmmaking.”

He also clarifies that if he had a Christopher Nolan-level production funding, “then absolutely I would love nothing more than to go and shoot scenes on location with real environments and real structures and explosions, if budget wasn’t a major limitation.”

“What I think AI has given me is the opportunity to say, ‘This is the film I want to make, and I’m going to spend all my time and all my money on capturing the actors’ performances, and not spend $10,000 of our budget to get an aerial shot with some cop cars,'” he says.

When it comes to Fail Safe, a tense FBI thriller Zarfati is currently shopping to film festivals, he knew he had one heck of a cast to spend his money on.

“When we cast Nikolas Kolasinski [as the antagonist], we went through tons and tons of people, but there was just something about the way he said the lines,” Zarfati says. “It’s not even that he said the lines convincingly, it was the way his presence was so intimidating. It was big. His eyes were scary, his face was scary. It was his presence.”

He felt similarly pulled to Nicoletta Hanssen, who plays Agent Morales.

“You could feel her sincerity,” Zarfati says. “Immediately it felt like, I believe that girl. I believe her. In a sea of actors, you’re listening to them all day long, and you’re like, ‘I don’t believe you.’ It’s so refreshing to watch someone’s reel and be like, ‘Oh, no, I believe that person. I totally see a single mom in her early 30s trying to be an agent and juggle two things.”

Zarfati spent over a year filming Fail Safe, and now is working on The Divide, a project he’s not only writing and directing, but starring in.

“That’s probably the dumbest thing you could do early on in your career,” he laughs, “but it’s a passion project of mine and is something that I think can showcase my skills as a director and lets people know, ‘Hey, this dude knows what he’s doing.'”

With Viral Nation, Zarfati and his projects have backing from Covering Agent Alonso Benavente and Head of Programming Paul Telner.

Telner has been developing creator IPs at Viral Nation for years, and says now is the time for creators to “greenlight themselves” and push for their projects to get attention from a Hollywood whose appetite has been thoroughly whetted by creator films like Iron Lung, Backrooms, and Obsession.

For Zarfati, YouTube has become more than a place to keep potential production partners from asking him to get Logan Paul on the horn. It’s a crucial creative outlet for him–one where he shows not just his finished work, but behind-the-scenes processes.

He also uses it to funnel students to his filmmaking course, where he says he can guide others into opening doors themselves.

Viral Nation is a Tubefilter partner.