Filmmaker refused a $100,000 deal over AI-generated faces

Trevor Rappleye runs Franchise Filming, a video production company he started in 2020. Its business is filming franchisees telling their own stories.

A franchise brand had spent weeks working towards a deal Rappleye puts at roughly $100,000. Then, he writes, its board met and changed the brief at the last moment.

The board had decided its franchisees and customers would not want to make time to be filmed. It asked for actors and AI-generated faces instead.

Rappleye says his company was low on revenue and had bills due. He signed nothing.

He called the brand back and said that if it needed actors and fake people, his firm was not the right partner. The line went quiet and the board was consulted.

Then, on his account, came three hours of doubt. The phone rang and the brand signed, having been told he was the only vendor who held the line on its stated values.

The refusal rested on a written rule, not a mood. One of the company's values is to use AI to be more productive, never to fake the story.

Rappleye is explicit that this is not an anti-AI position. He says the firm uses AI to move faster, organise footage, draft and plan, and has not used it to fabricate a video since 2020.

The line he draws is between how the work is made and who is at the centre of it. An actor reading lines about a franchisee's first location, he argues, is a commercial pretending to be a testimonial.

He cites numbers to argue the commercial case rather than only the moral one. A University of Melbourne study with KPMG, covering more than 48,000 people in 47 countries, found 66% of people use AI regularly while fewer than half are willing to trust it.

A 2025 consumer survey reported by Search Engine Land found more than 80% of consumers want AI-generated content labelled, rising to 91% for video. Gartner has found 53% of consumers distrust AI-powered search results.

The practice worth stealing is narrow and cheap. Decide in advance which parts of your process AI may touch and which it may not, write that line down, and do it before a client offers money to cross it.

Rappleye is careful about the ending. He notes that sometimes you walk away and the deal is simply gone.

For a founder with a thin month and a proposal on the desk, the useful part is not that the client came back. It is that the answer took a phone call rather than a week, because the rule already existed.