When Asher sent over the first clip from his new fictional Apple March 2026 event, the reaction was predictable. People, myself included, were all asking one thing: How did you film this at Apple Park? The answer was, to be expected, not that Apple had granted him special permission to enter its spaceship.

“I didn’t take footage of anywhere but common areas,” he said when I interviewed him before the video’s release on November 21. The filming took place entirely at the Apple Park Visitor Center, which is a common area available to the general public. The part that surprised him most when he entered the location was the sense of familiarity he experienced. “You begin to see exactly where Apple filmed when you are inside,” he said.

That presence influenced much of the whole video. It wasn’t that he was winging it on composition either. Not only was he able to see a location and identify where, exactly, a scene took place and compose a shot very similar, he could do so with a very simple rig involving two iPhone 17 Pro cameras and a gimbal.

Another question was what kind of reaction might have come from Apple employees who would have likely noticed the filming. “They told me there was a no-tripod rule,” he said. Other than that, they really didn’t care. It’s certainly not the first time they would have seen creators shooting at the center, either, but the nature of trying to recreate an event, based on leaks and speculation, I thought, might have raised an eyebrow or two.

There wasn’t any. If anything, they helped. When the gimbal battery died, an Apple employee went downstairs and returned with a micro-USB cable and a power bank so he could charge it while grabbing lunch with a friend. Later, when he realized he didn’t have a fast enough cable to move footage, another employee lent him a Thunderbolt cable. “They were super chill,” he said. “They didn’t care.”

The environment itself became a fun challenge. The way Apple’s presentations make Apple Park sound empty and meticulously managed is the opposite of the reality on the ground. “There are cars that honk for no reason in Cupertino,” he said. “I had to retake several recordings because of it.” The Visitor Center sits close enough to roads that the sound cuts straight into the recording. Wind picks up without warning. People wander into frame. Everything ends up on tape.

Audio ended up being the biggest issue. “It got really bad to the point where I couldn’t even tolerate it,” he said. Dubbing was an option he explored but quickly canceled. “I dubbed a minute, didn’t use a single clip from it. It’s pretty obvious when it’s dubbed,” he noted. He changed to a lavaliere microphone and used isolation plugins from DaVinci Resolve. It didn’t eliminate all of the non-desired noise, but it made the video usable.

The edit brought in a whole new set of problems. He chose to shoot everything in Apple Log to have maximum flexibility in post. “Nobody realizes how heavy Apple Log is until they edit it themselves,” he said of his own situation. It’s a problem even with an M4 Mac mini and MacBook Air, with a very full timeline of 4K Apple Log footage.

“It is surprisingly laggy, even on a Mac that’s like meant to handle these files. Smooth playback is nearly impossible, at least for me. It’s laggy as hell,” he noted, recounting the expereince of editing the video. “We probably had close to an hour of footage, if not more than that. Generating proxies from all footage takes a long time.” In total, the project file size was 320GB.

It also shifted how he looks at Apple’s own videos. “They remove doors, stickers, and lights,” he said. “They make the wall look a lot cleaner than it actually is.” For reference, he showed me a comparison between a shot from Awe Dropping featuring Dr. Sumbul Desai on the Visitor Center balcony and his own recreation from the same spot.

There is also additional pressure that came with the timing. Unlike a common leak video, you need an event script to be developed. You need to lock scenes, transitions, and product moments prior to filming. “It’s like writing an event script early, anticipating that leaks won’t occur, and ruining things with a leak,” he said. In his event recreation video from last year, that happened to him. That put him in a loop because that happened at a very late stage. Fortunately, he did not take as many risks this year.

The event is based on a potential March 2026 Apple event to reveal the “iPhone 17e”, a low-cost “MacBook e”, and a wall device he labels “Apple Home.” It took collaboration with 3D artist @zellzoi on the designs and the renderings. “These projects get out of hand fast,” he explained. The production details in the video are based on leaks and rumors, so take everything with a grain of salt. Visually, though, they’re stunning renders.

The products weren’t what stayed with me after our conversation. What lingered was the realization that Apple’s production work, even for something as routine as a product event, has quietly created an entire creative ecosystem around it. Writers, myself included, have built long-term work around covering Apple. Sites and channels live and breathe everything the company does. This project feels like the next step in that evolution; creators moving past commentary and into experimentation, using Apple’s own work as a reference point for the learning process rather than chasing products.