The Evolution of Video Models — with Dino.

Rutger Dino. Welcome. And Saar — thank you for coming in.

Dino Hm.

Saar Of course. I love the radio. The little — what's it, the microphone with the sock on it. Very flattering, the sock. Hides everything.

Rutger Coffee, either of you?

Dino Espresso. Single. From a machine, which is already a compromise.

Saar Hot water, lemon. For the voice.

Rutger So — I wrote a piece called The Evolution of Video Models. It's about Veo, the generative video tool from Google. The argument is a lineage: you can line up four model generations and watch the same eight-second brief get better, step by step, until the last one is hard to tell from a real shoot.

Saar Vivo.

Rutger Veo.

Saar That's what I said. Vivo. I fronted a fragrance once with a name like that. Or it was a man named Vito. [chuckles] Anyway. Go on.

Dino [flatly] It's a fad.

Rutger You haven't read it yet.

Dino I don't have to read it. I can smell it. Every few years a new little machine arrives, and a man with a microphone tells me it changes everything. The fax. The website. The dancing app. They all changed everything, and yet here I am, still the only one in the building who knows what a baseline grid is.

Rutger [chuckles] The dancing app being —

Dino TikTok. I call it what it is. People dancing. Don't put a hashtag on me, Rutger, I've never touched one and I'm not starting on the radio.

Saar I have nine million on the dancing app.

Dino I rest my case. I don't know which case. But I rest it.

Rutger Let me actually walk you through the lineage, Dino, because that's the part I think is real. Four steps. First one — Veo 2. It made a clean eight-second clip. Looked nice. Silent. No sound at all. You had to lay audio over it like a silent film.

Dino A silent film. So — a step backward into nineteen twenty. Marvellous. Progress.

Rutger Hold that thought. Step two — Veo 3. Same idea, but now the sound comes out of the model with the picture. Footsteps land on the footstep. Lips move on the word. The audio's baked in, not bolted on.

Dino Hm.

Rutger That "hm" was lower than the last one.

Dino It was the same hm. Acoustics in here are poor. You have no soft furnishings. A man who plays sound for a living should own a rug.

Saar I have a rug from a film. Sheepskin. They let me keep it because I cried on it. Method.

Rutger Step three — and this is the practical one — Veo 3.1, in two flavours. A Fast version, cheaper and quicker, for when you need forty options by lunch. And a Lite version, lighter still, for roughing things out. Same family, different gears. You stop paying for the Rolls when you're just popping to the shop.

Dino [grudging] That part is not stupid.

Rutger Sorry — say again, for the recording.

Dino I said the gears are not stupid. A good studio always had the big camera and the cheap one. You don't light a test Polaroid the way you light the cover. That's not new thinking, Rutger. That's nineteen seventy-four. You've reinvented the Polaroid and called it Lite.

Rutger [laughs] Honestly — fair. Step four is the one that got me. Omni. You don't just describe a shot anymore — you can hand it a reference, turn it, extend it, keep a face consistent across cuts. It holds the thread shot to shot instead of forgetting between clips.

Saar A face. It keeps the face. [pause] Whose face?

Dino [sighs] Here we go.

Saar No — listen. If the little machine keeps a face across the cuts … it could keep MY face. Across cuts. In Rotterdam. While I'm in Ibiza. Can it do the eyebrow? The — [does the eyebrow] — critics have written paragraphs about that eyebrow.

Dino She has been awake the whole time and absorbed one word.

Rutger It's a fair worry, Saar — just aimed at the wrong floor of the building. We'll come back to your face, I promise. Dino. Be honest with me. You've been calling it a fad for ten minutes. But you saw the four clips before we sat down. The Veo 2 one, then the last one. Side by side. What did you actually think?

Dino [long pause] I thought the last one read from across the room.

Rutger Meaning.

Dino It's the only test I trust. You pin a thing to the wall, you walk to the far end of the studio, you turn around. If the eye knows where to go — contrast, where the light sits, what's sharp and what's soft — it reads. Most things fail. Students fail it. The first clip, the silent one, I could see the seams from the door. The last one … I walked to the door. I turned around. And the eye went where it should. The hierarchy was correct.

Rutger So the lineage is real.

Dino The lineage is real. I am not pleased about it, but I am not a liar. Each one was better than the one before in a way I can point at, not just feel. That's not a fad. A fad doesn't improve in a straight line. A fad gets louder. This got *better.* Those are different.

Rutger That might be the most you've ever conceded.

Dino I conceded a fact. I have conceded nothing about whether I care. You'll note the difference. The grid is still the grid. Contrast is still contrast. The machine has learned the rules I've known since nineteen ninety-four — it has not learned why they're the rules. It can pass the from-across-the-room test. It cannot tell you why the test exists.

Saar So what you're saying is — the computer learned the recipe but it can't taste the soup.

Rutger …Saar. That's actually it.

Dino [flatly] I find that deeply annoying.

Rutger That's the whole piece, though. It's not "is the video good." It crossed that line — Dino just admitted it from the doorway. It's "what's the thing a person still brings." You can hand the model the reference and the turn and the consistent face, and it'll give you something that reads across the room. What it won't do is know which of the forty options is the one. That's still taste. That's still you, at the far wall, turning around.

Dino I will allow that. Grudgingly. On worse coffee than I was promised.

Saar But my face, though. If it keeps the face — and nobody can tell the kept face from my face — then why do they need the — … what do I DO?

Rutger Okay. Saar — under the vanity of it, you keep landing the real question. It's not "do I stay famous." It's "what does the person bring when the tool can make the picture." And the answer's the same as Dino's wall. The model can make the face. It can't decide it's the right take. The little eyebrow thing — the model can copy it. It can't know it's the one worth keeping. That's a person's job. Probably yours, annoyingly.

Saar So I'm the soup.

Dino [sighs] … You're the soup, Saar. For once. Exactly that.

Saar Beautiful. I'll allow it.

Rutger So — the lineage. Veo 2, the clean silent clip. Veo 3, sound born with the picture. Veo 3.1, Fast and Lite, the gears for cost. Omni, holds the reference and the face across the cuts. Four steps, and each one really was a step. Dino — last word. Fad or not?

Dino Not a fad. I want that on the record, because I'll deny it at the agency. It's a real lineage and it really got better. It still can't taste the soup, it still doesn't know why the grid is the grid, and I still own the only good pencil in Rotterdam. But it improved in a straight line a man can point at. So — not a fad. A tool. I hate that it's a tool. It's still a tool.

Rutger I'll take it. For the record — none of this is a Google position. It's my read, on my site, synthetic voices. Dino's a character with a real opinion about rugs. Saar is —

Saar Saar is available. For the right project. And the soup.

Rutger That's our button. The lineage is real, the picture got good, and the part you can't automate is knowing which one's the one. Goodnight.