The Craftsman
2025 · 14m
Directed by Devin Scott
Genres: animation, biography, historical
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, tender
An AI-generated animated biography of Felix Landis, the director's great-grandfather, who kept building violins through the Second World War by salvaging hardwood from discarded doors.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
AI-generated biography sounds like a gimmick until you realize the recursion—a machine narrating a man who refused obsolescence by hand-crafting beauty from rubble. It's genuinely weird in a way that earns itself.
Scott situates this squarely in the lineage of experimental biography and rotoscope-adjacent animation, where formal constraint becomes the vessel for intimacy; the melancholic restraint here recalls a deliberate tradition of restraint-as-reverence.
The decision to let AI handle the animation while keeping the subject matter—a craftsman's defiant handiwork—creates a productive tension that does the emotional work; that single conceptual friction point makes the whole thing resonate.
Reviews
Devin Scott's The Craftsman is an AI generated animation about the patient labour that goes into honing and nurturing a craft. The dark times would not succeed in killing the music.