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Directors Guild Helsinki acquires Lokakuu Studio
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The production company acquires the AI and moving image studio as part of its growing commercial content house.
Production Company Directors Guild Helsinki has acquired Lokakuu Studio, a company operating at the intersection of AI and moving image.
The acquisition expands the Directors Guild group into a three-company content house. Lokakuu Studio founder Tomi Paajanen joins Directors Guild and becomes a partner in the company.
Paajanen brings extensive experience in leading, growing and developing businesses in the audiovisual industry, as well as hands-on expertise in emerging technologies. Before founding Lokakuu Studio, he built a long career at Yellow Film & TV, where he served, among other roles, as COO during the company’s years of rapid growth.
“We didn’t acquire technology. We acquired a point of view. Tomi is one of the few people in this industry who has both led the growth of an audiovisual company and built practical AI solutions. That combination is exactly what the next phase of Directors Guild needs. And that’s why we made this deal now, not two years from now,” says Juha-Matti Nieminen, CEO of Directors Guild.
“I founded Lokakuu Studio because I wanted to prove that AI can be used to improve the quality of content, not just increase the amount of it. The projects proved that it can. But they also showed that the next step requires a bigger platform. Directors Guild has that: strong creative expertise with technology built alongside it. Our shared view of where the industry is heading made the decision easy,” says Paajanen.
Last year, Paajanen completed the Executive MBA programme at the University of Jyväskylä. The title of his final thesis on the AI transformation also sums up Directors Guild’s attitude towards the change currently reshaping the industry: “The world is drowning in AI shit. Could we be a counterforce?”
Paajanen is not joining Directors Guild to build a separate AI department. His responsibility will be the group’s growth and strategic development, including the integration of technology and AI solutions throughout the group’s production processes.
The aim is to continue Directors Guild’s transformation from a traditional production company into a content house capable of serving its clients more broadly, efficiently and effectively.
“There is an enormous amount of hype, fear and pure noise around AI. We’re interested in the substance: where does technology actually make the process better, free up more time for thinking and help us create more impactful work for our clients?” Nieminen says.
According to Nieminen, the conversation around AI is still too often reduced to generative image-making and the question of which technique was used to create an individual image.
“From the perspective of a commercial content house, the discussion about whether one part of an image was created with AI assistance or through traditional methods is ultimately about as interesting as whether something was drawn with a pencil or charcoal. The technique matters enormously to us as makers, but from the client’s and the audience’s point of view, the work should be judged by completely different things.”
The Directors Guild group now consists of Directors Guild, CIDLLC and Lokakuu Studio, and continues its growth towards a content house bringing together creativity, production and technology.
