The middle isn't coming back. The question is which way we move

Open your calendar. I bet you can feel it before you even look closely.

Some weeks are anchored by projects that were properly designed with real pre-production on the front end, timelines built around human energy rather than optimistic math, budgets that match the actual weight of the ask. On those weeks you have room to think. You scout before you call the crew. You can sit with a rough cut before you have to tidy it up and deliver it.

Other weeks fill differently. Big expectations compressed into tight windows. Prep folded into shoot days (gross). Deliverables multiplying in the margins of an email thread until the math that looked reasonable in the kickoff call looks nothing like the hours you’re actually working.

Creative work obeys certain physics, and those physics do not care about your brief.

You can’t schedule twelve interviews in a single day and expect nuance to survive. You can’t skip the scout and be surprised when the room works against you. You can’t ask a video to carry emotional weight if no one ever sat down and agreed what it was supposed to make someone feel. Time doesn’t stretch because the client is excited. Money doesn’t multiply because the timeline is tight. And clarity doesn’t emerge from a pre-shoot Zoom where everyone nodded, and no one asked any hard questions.

You can borrow against those laws for a while – we all do. You fold the scout into travel day because the flights are expensive. You let five stakeholders weigh in because it feels more collaborative than it actually is. You assume that ambition will compensate for the hours. And sometimes you get away with it.

But eventually the work tells on all of us.

For a long stretch, most of the projects I worked on felt calibrated to those realities. Not extravagant, but just structured enough to keep up with what they were asking. If scope expanded, the timeline moved. If the creative vision grew, the prep grew with it. Pre-production wasn’t glamorous, but it existed with enough margin to think.

It wasn’t a golden age. It was simply stable.

What’s shifting now isn’t the laws of (creative) physics, but how often we choose, or are able, to respect them.

The Market is Splitting

Economists started using the phrase “K-shaped recovery” in the months after the pandemic. The idea was straightforward: the economy didn’t rise or fall in unison. Certain sectors like technology, asset-heavy industries, high-income earners, accelerated sharply upward, while others stagnated or fell. The line on the graph forked, and the two arms moved in opposite directions at the same time.

That divergence has only intensified since. AI-driven productivity gains are concentrating advantage among firms with capital and infrastructure. Large companies consolidate while media organizations restructure. Mid-tier roles thin out as capital flows toward either scale or specialization, leaving less and less in between.

The creative industry is not exempt. Los Angeles employment in motion picture and sound recording fell 27% between 2022 and 2024, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics: the reliable staff roles, the recurring contractor relationships, the steady mid-budget project pipelines that didn’t require anyone to reinvent the wheel every six weeks.

I think photography and video production are tracing the same arc.

The Creative Parallel

On one end of the K, efficiency dominates. Skeleton crews. Faster turnarounds. AI-assisted editing, and in-house capture on repeatable social formats. The goal is output: consistent, scalable, and well… sufficient. There’s nothing inherently wrong with this work; it serves real clients with real constraints, and 56% of marketers now direct the majority of their visual content budget toward tools and platforms rather than production talent. The content machine runs faster and cheaper than it ever has. 

On the other end, the work where something is actually at stake has gotten more deliberate, not less. Regulated industries where a misrepresentation triggers a compliance review. Politically sensitive assignments where a single framing error creates lasting damage. Brand and lifestyle campaigns where the cost of getting it wrong exceeds the cost of the production several times over. Healthcare, financial services, and documentary work built on access that took months to earn; these projects don't just compress down to the lower arm of the K. 

What’s thinning is the middle that didn’t require either the speed of the bottom arm or the rigor of the top, but existed in a stable band between them and sustained a broad layer of working professionals. That band is compressing.

The Misdiagnosis

The easy explanations are everywhere. AI is replacing creatives. Budgets are shrinking. Nobody has an attention span anymore. These framings get repeated because they’re partially true and because they let everyone off the hook — it’s the technology, it’s the economy, it’s the audience.

But they don’t explain why premium storytelling continues to command serious investment. The commercial photography and videography market is valued at $7.1 billion in 2025 and projected to grow at 8.8% annually through 2033 with a vast majority of marketers planning to maintain or increase video budgets in 2026. The money hasn’t left. It’s just stopped distributing evenly.

The human element is also proving more durable than expected. Turns out people still want work that feels like a human made it. When OpenAI’s Sora arrived and the creative industry braced for mass displacement… clients presented with AI-generated footage alongside real produced work kept choosing the latter (Anecdotally last week, I asked U of M students I was giving a talk to whether they use Sora to generate images/video. Only three out of 20+ had even tried once. The kids are all right.)

The technology became more capable. The trust gap didn’t close. What my clients are actually buying in premium work isn’t footage. It’s judgment, and judgment doesn't yet have a convincing synthetic substitute.

So clearly, creativity isn’t losing its inherent value, but as we’ve dug into in January’s newsletter, people are becoming far less comfortable with risk. And the variable underneath risk tolerance is something most industry postmortems don’t name directly.

The Hidden Variable

Every creative project arrives carrying a certain amount of disorder: decision ambiguity, stakeholder sprawl, undefined objectives, legal questions nobody thought to ask, and emotional risk that no one mapped because mapping it would have required an uncomfortable conversation. And if nobody deals with it early, it just gets worse, and the project becomes reactive. The work defaults to safe, to putting out fires instead of starting them.

In thermodynamics, entropy describes the tendency of any system to move toward disorder without energy applied to maintain its structure. Creative production works the same way. Without guardrails imposed before the scout, before the crew call, before the first camera rolls, you end up making decisions on set that should have been made three weeks earlier, and those are always the worst conditions to make them in. The chaos isn’t an accident or a failure of talent. It’s just what happens when structure isn’t treated as load-bearing. Better to have those answers before we're standing in someone's lobby trying to figure it out in real time.

The premium arm of the K isn’t simply better-funded work. It’s lower-entropy work where someone imposed structure before the shoot rather than scrambling to recover it during. Where the brief was interrogated rather than inherited. Where the question of who actually gets to say ‘yes’ is answered in advance.

You can’t control the macro forces shaping the market. But entropy is a system condition, not a market condition, which means it’s something you can actually influence.

Anxiety Hates a Moving Target

Underneath the structural argument, there’s a human one.

Anxiety expands in the space between what was asked and what was actually agreed upon. It feeds on moving targets — on approvals that might come from three different people depending on the day, on narrative goals that shift between pre-production and the edit, on subjects who weren’t told what kind of conversation they were walking into. It shrinks, and teams perform better, when there is forward motion on the right questions: a locked narrative direction before cameras roll, a single named decision-maker on set, getting sign-off in writing before anyone touches the edit, not after.

The Gartner CMO Spend Survey has documented what most people working in production already sense: marketing teams are caught in a cycle of more, expectations that outpace what the budget can actually support, and the teams that consistently produce quality work under those conditions aren’t the ones with the most resources. They’re the ones with the clearest process. Ambiguity is expensive, even when it doesn’t show up as a line item.

Momentum creates confidence, and confidence is what allows a team to take the kind of risk that produces something worth watching. Even imperfect momentum like a rough cut that’s directionally right or a prep call that actually surfaces the hard disagreements instead of deferring them, gives people permission to actually try something bold. Structure doesn’t guarantee good work, but rather creates the conditions in which great work becomes possible.

Small Acts Against Chaos

You cannot control the macro K-shaped market. You can reverse entropy locally, and it starts well before the shoot.

Clarify success metrics before pre-production begins. Not at the level of “we want it to feel authentic,” but specifically: what does this video have to make someone feel, decide, or do, and how will you know if it worked?

Limit revision cycles in the contract, not as a power move, but as a structural commitment to the idea that decisions made early are worth more than decisions made under deadline.

And align subject expectations before you’re in the room and have real conversations about the emotional terrain of what you’re asking someone to walk through on camera, so that the interview itself can go somewhere instead of just awkwardly covering bases.

These are three. There are seven practices I believe are worth building into your process as small bets against chaos, each one shifting the probability that the work you’re creating ends up in the top half of the K.

➡️ Read the full list on Medium: https://medium.com/@BBrewerPhoto

A Matter of Distinction

I want to be careful not to make this a story about one arm of the K being more worthy than the other. Efficient work is legitimate. It serves real clients navigating real constraints, and doing it well (hitting a fast turnaround without the wheels coming off, building repeatable systems that hold up under volume) takes genuine skill. The lower arm isn’t failure. It’s a different optimization, and there’s a version of it that’s done with craft and intention.

The upper arm of the K is different in kind, not just degree. This work is relational. It runs on access earned through a track record of not flinching when things get hard and a tolerance for the ambiguity that accompanies high-stakes feature projects with real people. 

The creatives growing right now, in this environment, are largely the ones who have learned to impose clarity on situations where the cost of getting it wrong is real and visible. Not the fastest. Not the most prolific. Not the ones using AI most prodigiously. The ones who show up having done the structural work, who understand that the edit begins in the brief, and who can hold a room through a difficult production.

What separates work that lasts from work that disappears into the content machine is the same thing it has always been: deliberate, early decisions on why the work matters and who it was supposed to serve. That decision is available on any budget. 

Clarity is still a choice. Entropy is the default. Structure is the practice.