Rory Flynn

A designer who got replaced by Fiverr

Rory Flynn came to AI from marketing, not art school. He worked in brand licensing, brand IP and e-commerce marketing, and calls himself a former and fairly mediocre graphic designer with no formal design training^[1][14]. He led client acquisition at Commerce12, a direct-to-consumer email and SMS agency, and AdWorld's speaker page credits him with helping more than 100 clients to over $100M in email and SMS sales^[16][18]. In September 2023 he described running about 90 clients with five designers^[19].

I was a graphic designer who got replaced by Fiverr.

Rory Flynn^[13]

Midjourney on Discord

Late in 2022 he saw AI art going viral on Twitter, joined Midjourney on Discord and started using it for the agency's email design work^[14][12]. He was not trying to become an artist. He wanted to make the design side of the business faster, and on Affiliate World stages he would later pitch Midjourney as a way to scale ad creative^[21].

His first viral LinkedIn post was a Midjourney campaign for a dog-collar brand that did not exist: about 800 likes and 500,000 impressions^[12]. He kept going, turning what he learned into free cheat sheets and guides on Gumroad. His Midjourney V7 Power User Cheat Sheet has 7,653 downloads, and his product copy says the guide library has generated more than 25 million LinkedIn impressions^[9][11]. He now sells and gives away 18 products there, with 589 ratings averaging about 4.9, including Midjourney Mastery, a $187 video course with 404 sales, and a $97 PRO Creator Kit with 430^[8][10][11]. LinkedIn is still his main platform, where the Fast Hours hosts page put him at about 149,000 followers in September 2026^[1].

Systematiq

Alongside the guides he built Systematiq AI, an operational AI consultancy with a newsletter of the same name^[15][24]. Most bios, and the slide he opened his Config 2026 talk with, call him its founder; Foreplay and Weavy list him as co-founder^{[15][32][16][17]}.

We dive into people's businesses, identify operational gaps, and then fill those gaps with AI.

Rory Flynn, on Systematiq^[15]

That work put him on the marketing circuit. He was a guest on Leveraging AI in September 2023, ran Foreplay's Fireside webinar "1 Prompt = 1000 Ads" in January 2024, taught an AI ad creative masterclass for AdWorld Prime and spoke at Affiliate World Europe in Budapest in September 2024 on scaling ad creative systems^{[19][55][18][21]}. He is a professor at Ad Creative Academy, where he teaches courses 802 and 803, on taking AI image and video ads from prompt to production and on building your own AI ad engine^[20].

The Motion Brush moment

In November 2023 Runway added Motion Brush to Gen-2, letting you paint over the part of an image you want to move. Rory posted a 45-second hiking film on 23 November, made with Midjourney, Photoshop Beta, Runway and Soundraw, and wrote that the tool had brought him right back to the platform^[4]. The next day he posted the demo that made his name: each Midjourney still above its Runway version, with his purple brush strokes painted over a bird, a truck's dust trail and a branch of autumn leaves, then the clips moving^[3].

It was watched 3.55 million times on X, with 7,386 likes and 1,195 reposts, and news sites in Spain and the Netherlands ran it^[3][6][7]. It spread well beyond his own account: quote posts by other accounts added at least 3.6 million views more, led by @AkinOzcan85 in Turkey at 2.32 million and @masahirochaen in Japan at 958,000, taking the demo past 7 million views on X^[61][62]. On AI LIVE it is still the example of how one demo can set an industry's agenda: after Rory's Motion Brush, the hosts say, every AI video company had to add a motion brush of its own^[43][44].

Motion brush in runway...damn good. Much better control. This was very needed.

Rory Flynn, X, 24 November 2023^[3]

Fast Hours

On 2 July 2024 he and Drew Brucker launched Midjourney Fast Hours, a podcast that opened with the episode "We Accidentally Became Midjourney Experts"^[1][60]. Their first guest, on Ep 11 in September 2024, was AI LIVE's Chris Branch^[48]. The show grew past Midjourney: it dropped the word from its name at Ep 67 in April 2026, became simply Fast Hours, and in October 2026 passed 100,000 YouTube subscribers^[1][46][47]. Its most watched episodes with him include a Midjourney Q&A with 41K views and a deep dive on style references with 32K^[47].

Nodes

In mid-2025 he moved his public work onto Weavy, a node-based canvas, and started publishing whole workflows rather than single images^[24][25]. One shared canvas turns a single photo into a stylised 3D character, a turnaround sheet, scene plates and a set of video shots, chaining Flux Kontext, Luma Ray 2, Kling, Hailuo 02, Seedance and Runway's Act-Two and Aleph^[25]. Another, for a fictional brand called TERRA, fans one picture of two mushrooms out through 12 prompt categories into four moodboards^[26].

Chris Branch credits him with getting AI LIVE into node tools in the first place, after Rory pointed him at Flora as Weavy launched^[45]. Fast Hours made it the subject of Ep 55, "Nodes Are Eating the Creative World", and Rory taught a Weavy masterclass on Machine Cinema's RoboDojo the same month^[28][29]. In February 2026 he was the first guest of Weavy's live series Flow State, hosted by co-founder Itay Schiff^[17][49]. He is now a member of the Figma Weave Artist Collective, and his X bio reads "Building Ai Workflows w. @figmaweave"^[20][2].

It just became like, what's the easiest way to use every single tool?

Rory Flynn, on why nodes took off^[28]

Machines that brands pay for

His method starts from the output. He deconstructs an image he wants into fixed blocks, shot type, subject and action, environment, colour scheme, lighting, textures, then writes a system prompt that holds those rules, and only then wires the tools together^[13][30]. He builds graphs generically, for "shoes" or "a car", so they can be reused, and turns finished graphs into simple apps that non-technical marketers can run^[33][30].

On 24 June 2026 he took that method to the Maker Stage at Figma Config in San Francisco, in a talk called "Hacking AI for creative operations at scale" that showed real deployment inside a billion-dollar global consumer tech brand^[31][32]. Two months later, on Fast Hours Ep 79, made with Figma Weave, he showed the tools behind it: workflows that retouch and localise product assets for SharkNinja across 35 global markets, and a system that turns BarkBox's flat toy art into studio renders from nine angles^[33][34]. The SharkNinja work, he said, began as a free one-click resizing workflow and grew into a five-figure engagement^[33].

Video as code

In September 2026 he started making video with no video model at all. He gave Claude Opus 5.5 the Fast Hours transcripts, sound tools, YouTube Studio and the show's design system, and it cut, animated and motion-designed a one-minute promo in HTML and JavaScript; by his own post it took 25 minutes and minimal direction^[37]. AI LIVE played it in full on Ep 132^[39].

Four days later he posted The Shire to Bree, the first part of The Fellowship of the Ring retold as a side-scrolling paper-craft film: assets from GPT6-Astra, animation by Opus 5.5 in code, sound and narration from ElevenLabs, 7,042 frames, 23 drafts and no time in After Effects^[38]. It opened AI LIVE Ep 134 and gave the show its theme, whether all future video is just code^[40]. He now says Claude is his project manager, running his CRM, invoicing and daily briefs through Notion^[36][35].

No video generators...just assets + code.

Rory Flynn, X, 29 September 2026^[38]

Why AI LIVE keeps talking about him

Rory has never sat in the AI LIVE studio, but he comes up on the show almost every month, usually from Chris Branch, who talks to him often. Chris calls him "the Dave of Demos" for how fast he tests new models, and on Ep 112 said he is "the best probably ever at building node workflows"^[42][41]. The hosts pair him with Dave Clark as the creators who post something cinematic within days of a model launch, name him with Uncanny Harry among the fastest testers of new models, and count him among the 10 to 20 true one-of-a-kind AI creators^[56][58][57]. Chris has been trying Opus 5.5 on his own music videos since watching Rory's promo, and credits him with helping build AI LIVE's rich creator pages^[59][46].