This week I unfortunately was unable to attend my classes due to issues related to post-wisdom teeth removal, which was very disappointing, but allowed me to work on my independence skills in working through the upcoming assignment, and the content for the week. I completed the readings, with the main focus being on the idea of creative constraints linked to how AI might provide limitations in our work. Feiten’s ‘Constructive Constraints’ from the reading list explores the idea that constraints can actually be highly beneficial to the creative work that we do, opposing the popular belief that constraints limit our ability to create to our full potential.

Throughout the week, I have done my own generating as a creative prompter where I have been attempting to work with AI to write a story, and generate it into a 2 minute video. I worked with ChatGPT to generate the story, where I asked the AI to write me a story about something very broad, to which it did, providing me with its own details and extra material. From here, I found that my brain became inspired and sparked new ideas from the material, which is where Feiten explains that being given nothing to work with, often can stump an individual or make an individual overthink and confuse themselves. Of course, this is not true all the time, as we know some of the greatest stories are created from minds only. Another way I have been thinking of it is that we are using ‘teamwork’ with AI. Just as for most films where it usually takes multiple people or a team who build up and work off each other’s ideas to produce a script and storyline, co-creating with an AI requires a level of this too. I have been tweaking prompts based off new ideas from AI and even asked AI for feedback or how to improve certain things in my prompts.

This week I took on my own academic research to further my knowledge on co-collaboration with AI, where I found a couple studies. One of which was conducted by Quian Wan who studied how normal, everyday people utilise AI to assist them in writing a story. It was found that many participants started off with a direct question asking the model to give them a story, as they did not know where to start, or had lack of inspiration. This is interesting as it demonstrates the ways that people who might not consider themselves creative or artists are able to become such through a new way. I think AI can give people the desire to create or make something new, which is in my opinion the most important part of life. We will not evolve or learn without the desire or will to do new things.

References:

Feiten, P., Larusson, H. and van Gelder, T., 2023. Constructive constraints: On the role of chance and randomness in the creative process. Journal of Creative Processes, 14(3), pp.155-176.

Wan, Q., Fan, X., Sun, Q. and Li, Y., 2024. ‘It felt like having a second mind’: Investigating human-AI co-creativity in prewriting with large language models. Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, 8(CSCW1), pp.1-26.

Unfortunately this week I was absent for our classes as on Monday I went and got all four of my wisdom teeth extracted. In the following days up till even now, I have been and am still in a lot of pain in my mouth as now the anaesthesia has worn off. I have also been on a lot of medication that has made me extremely sleepy all the time! Nevertheless, I have attempted to do the readings and watched a couple links from the set readings for this week.

In Andy Lomas’s ‘On Hybrid Creativity’, Lomas explores the “potentialities of the system we are working with, as well as the limits of its capabilities”, in reference to how we as creative individuals should be utilising AI systems in ways that expand the creative boundaries. What I gathered from this reading was that Lomas argues that we must not simply use AI generative systems to find a designated, simple, one way or another answer, but we should be “open to a process of exploration”. Rather than working to find an answer, we need to work with the AI to test the limits, and attempt to expand the horizon of potential output we may receive. Lomas also uses the term “emergence results” which refers to the results from AI generative systems that are not easily predictable or directly programmed. We can think of it as the results ’emerging’ from simpler interactions, leading to new and unexpected outcomes!

In the AI Film Festival Los Angeles 2024 Panel Discussion, one man explained how in most projects our goal is the final product and the final result is all that artists care about, but that AI allows one to understand the importance of the process or journey to the outcome. As it is a collaboration between human, and machine, there is a relationship that has never been possible before, and it is creating extraordinary outcomes. This leads me to something Paul Trillo says in the panel. Trillo explains that “there is no judgement with AI” so therefore speaking ideas and giving all your creativity and thoughts to AI allows possibility for anything. AI will not shut down an idea immediately like another person will. Instead, AI will listen and try to work with or improve the idea. Of course, this idea may not always end up how you want it, but it is the way that this trial and error would be too time consuming with only people. Trillo says that “having this internal experience is totally unique”.

Referencing:

Lomas, A 2018, ‘On Hybrid Creativity’, Arts, vol. 7, no. 3,

Panel Discussion | AI Film Festival Los Angeles 2024 | Runway 2024. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BWtKk-i0RPk accessed 12 August 2024

This week was one of my favourite weeks yet. I not only learnt a lot in class, but found that through this learning I actually had a lot of fun which I do not usually say. In Wednesday’s class, each table was given the assignment of finding some way that AI impacts our lives, and then researching for evidence and stories to support our claims. My table argued that despite AI releasing carbon emissions, AI can actually be very beneficial to the survival of our planet against climate change. We found reports and articles that discuss how AI can track and record weather patterns, track deforestation, and I even found a story that talks about how AI is being utilised to speak or communicate with endangered birds that can hopefully distinguish bird calls that might lead us to understand why this breed is endangered. It was a very interesting article which I really enjoyed reading and sharing my findings with the class.

Another group’s topic was how Canva has bought the AI generative image company Leonardo.Ai which I thought was a very interesting topic which discussed how this has split or divided the industry. They explained as one of their points that Canva is a straightforward platform that most people know how or can easily learn how to use quite efficiently. They said that this may benefit people such as students who may not have the experience with AI softwares or are just beginning. But they also said this might be challenged due to certain people wanting authentic creativity which they may not feel like they can do with an AI model in Canva, which means people may stop using Canva. I found these points interesting as I sided with both. I am not a terribly tech savvy person so I can understand how it may be simpler on Canva, but I also understand that it might limit the creativity people feel they can provide.

In Bender’s ‘Generative AI, the media industries, and the disappearance of human creative labour’, he speak about how the development of AI into the creative industries specifically film has caused terrible outrage from the artists who believe that AI is “soulless” and can not replace the raw human emotions that actors can. They say that “it is a snub to audiences to use an image generator to create an animated film in which a character is portrayed with the human emotion of grieving”. Instead, these creative industries think that AI should remain only for the “simple, mundane and repetitive tasks, presuming that this will save creative human individuals from being replaced themselves.” This argument is difficult to side with as I wholeheartedly do agree that acting is an art form very specific to human emotions and I struggle to imagine an AI film that can accurately portray these emotions. But I do also know that AI is developing and ‘learning’ about human behaviour and emotion and feeling at an alarming rate, so who knows what accuracy it will have in resembling human emotion.

Leonardo.Ai reflection

During Wednesday’s class, the studio Augmenting Creativity really harnessed the studio’s name as we utilised Leonardo.Ai by using our own original ideas through narrowing down our own prompts to generate AI images. While being provided with guidelines for what our outcome should resemble, I found that Leonardo.Ai was particularly weak when provided with too many details. It was almost like the model became confused when being fed too much information, and would entangle or twist certain words, linking them with other words in the prompt that were meant to affect different areas of the desired image. I encountered this and thought maybe my punctuation was not accurate in listing the attributes I desired, however even with edited punctuation, the model still seemed confused. I had a lot of difficulties when generating my self-portrait and found that to get closer to what I wanted, I needed to be less wordy, and try to describe less of my features! I am also half Chinese which I think made it very difficult for the model to accurately depict what I look like as putting in words such as “mixed race” or “half Chinese” or “wasian” is a very broad scale, and one that the model could not really get perfect for me! But it tried!

I thought I would also mention that Leonardo.Ai does attempt to attach all aspects of the prompt to the best of it’s ability, even when the given prompt might not make sense or be an incorrect description of what it wants. I tested this by giving it a prompt that I knew would be difficult to generate as showing it in one image wouldn’t work easily. I gave it the prompt ‘A gorgeous beach with coral and fish and crystal water, and soft white sand’. I have linked the image that it generated which was an obvious attempt of incorporating a beach AND an underwater scene with the coral and fish. Though the image did not make sense, it was interesting how the model tried to find a way around this inconvenience, while still making it an attractive image. This is where I think the model definitely takes creative liberties as it works around inconveniences and thinks outside the box to provide an image as close to the given prompt as possible.

While completing the prompts for the class activities, I found that Leonardo.Ai was very successful in creating different scenarios for my prompt for the studio poster. I told it something along the lines of ‘students in classroom discovering and collaborating with AI’, which gave me university students with a type of robot that resembled the artificial intelligence as it’s own physical human-like being, in a futuristic robotic way. I think it made a very clear image for the poster that portrayed the message that in this studio students will be working with AI to further their learning… We will be collaborating ideas with AI to expand the barriers of our creativity.

I am very excited to continue utilising new tools in the coming weeks such as Leonardo.ai, to further my understanding on communication between human and artificial intelligence.

I

While I initially thought that I would not enjoy this class very much as it was not in my preferences, I can honestly say that after my first week in the class, that I am not only intrigued, but find myself wanting to explore more about AI in society. Hearing “AI” being used frequently in conversations today never really grasped my attention as I had in my mind that AI was something that sure, is growing and expanding, but I had no idea to the extent. I was not even aware that a lot of what I do on a regular basis is because of AI, such as google translate!

Daniel, our studio leader has mentioned a couple times in class that “AI isn’t magic” which though is obvious, it made me realise that I was under the impression that AI is something that is always just there, and able, which it is not. Even AI has its limits, where it then depends on actual brains from humans to formulate ways around these limits by feeding the AI new information or in a different way. In our first class, we explored coding with two special visitors who taught us how to fix a game of Rock, Paper, Scissors so that when you pressed ‘Play’, the two hands would do either of the three, with all possibilities of wins or draws as options. This was not as simple as a normal game of rock paper scissors, but after a while of figuring it out, I can say it was very rewarding, and that I have a new respect for people that code!

In this class, I hope that I will continue to explore the way AI is being used across the world, in all ways. Although it is still new to me, and  I am fairly disinterested usually with all things AI, I think it is an important subject to learn about and will be highly beneficial to my knowledge as a media student. I am wanting to pursue film media and PR after I finish uni and I know that AI will and is already playing a large role in film from script analysis, AI video editing, and even AI simulated characters. It will be interesting to further explore down this film and TV side of AI which hopefully I can do a lot more of this semester!

This semester in ‘The Plot Thickens’, we have developed stories from a small, simple idea jotted down from the brain, all the way to finishing with completed treatments of that idea. This has taken dedication and effort over the weeks, as we have strengthened and solidified our plots to leave us with the perfect finished product that we have worked so hard on. To get to this stage, this semester I have focused on one of the key ideas from the studio which is the idea that a story should follow a structure to be effective. I have attempted to follow a solid, three act structure, however if I were to continue or develop this media piece, this is something I think I would need to improve on, as there are some plot points that I could have made it more evident which act they fall in to. Overall, I think that my structure is well done and easy to navigate, without looking too much like a structure, and still having the natural flow of the story that resembles a realistic story. If I were to develop my story into a script, I think the main concern would be how I would go about portraying some scenes where my protagonist is by herself and thinking thoughts or ideas on her own. This was an initial issue, which I have attempted to solve in my treatment by having more social connections between my protagonist and other characters, allowing for there to be more scenes where my protagonist is talking to somebody rather than having internal monologue or internal thoughts that would be difficult to portray on screen.

One reason why I love having the studio website, apart from being able to share my voice on things, is getting to see other people’s insights on things from class that are new to me and teach me more about the structures of stories and the concepts that we have explored. From the Plot Thickens, I have read a few stories that sparked my interest from the descriptions. Ally’s was one that I read and had read drafts of previously and I can really see her development and improvement over the weeks. In her assignment 4 reflection, Ally spoke about a key concern of the studio which was Ryan’s Cheap Plot Tricks, Plot Holes, and Narrative Design, and how through group activities in class, we were able to identify them and hopefully prevent them in our own treatments. Ally has done well to avoid plot holes and coincidences which I imagine would have been tricky due to her complex world building of her story. I think that she has done a great job in creating a complex story that both still makes sense and is entertaining! Another example from our studio is Seyyid who also discusses how Ryan’s ‘cheap plot tricks, plot holes, and narrative design’ influenced the development of his treatment. Seyyid suggests a solution or “different way” something could have happened for the limited time in Kamila’s body to be explained. This is something that I wouldn’t have really understood prior to the class that explained what plot holes were, or something I could potentially have overlooked, but like Seyyid, I have learnt how to analyse my own and other people’s work to find these things that can be fixed to make our stories even better.

I was very interested in and engaged the most with The Scene in Cinema while researching all the other studios. I came across Kevin’s film called ‘Picture the Moment’ which was a studio Ghibli inspired film. What mesmerised me about this was not just how accurate some of the scenes looked to studio Ghibli scenes in movies, but how effective the film was even without dialogue or excessive action. This made me really appreciate and value how the style of filming and editing had such an impact on the finished product. It shows me that films are not just what is being filmed or what is happening, but how it is being filmed and how it is being shown in specific ways that tell certain stories. I think Kevin did a great job in demonstrating how a scene is so much more than the contents of the screen, and that different genres can be portrayed in the style of film making being used.

Nothing Without Anything

Treatment by Lily Mao

‘Set in modern day society, an unamused teenage girl discovers a watch that allows her to see moments into her future. Thrilled at her new abilities, she thinks she can fix her life, but soon discovers the dangerous effects of changing events in her life.’

Nothing Without Anything is a story about growth as a young person, in a world where time appears to be limited and running out. The story focuses on the complications of young adulthood, honing in on feelings of self-doubt and not feeling worthy enough in a competitive world. Developing this plot was a great learning opportunity for myself as it showed me the complex ways in which you must take notice of a story for it to work, including acknowledging plot points, plot holes, and cheap plot tricks. Character development was a significant part of my story as I do not have a specific antagonistic character throughout most of my treatment. This means I needed to make sure that their story was strong enough without a ‘villain’, for the protagonist to change over the course of the story. Through feedback from peers and teachers, and analysing my work, I was able to craft a story that has a strong structure, while also being an entertaining, emotional journey through the experiences our protagonist endures.

Treatment:

Treatment nothing without anything-2

Finalising my treatment has taken it’s time but has left me with a rewarding outcome that has greatly been a result of collaboration with the class throughout the semester. From all of our in class activities such as the Little Red Riding hood one early in the semester which allowed us peers in groups to rewrite the fairytale in a new way that focuses on the beats, or the activity where we watched a short film, identified the beats, and then in groups had to continue the story using Snyder’s model up until the end of Act 1, all of the activities assisted in how I developed my story as I learnt to creatively think about what could come next, or what could change to thicken my plot. Outside of class I was also able to collaborate, reading parts of my treatment and other works to peers who gave their opinions. This helped me to not get too caught up in my own thoughts and opinions, I was able to see things from other perspectives which inspired new ideas. The group activities this semester were definitely highlights about the whole class. Listening to other people’s ideas and stories was inspiring and even benefited my own creativeness as I would suggest ideas to them. While writing my treatment, I was very focused on minimising the amount of unnecessary parts that come with writing a story. I wanted it to be as concise and to the point as possible as this is what keeps people hooked and entertained throughout the treatment. In ‘What is a Synopsis? An Outline? A treatment?’ by Michael Brindley, he describes the treatment as the ‘selling document’, meaning this is what needs to convince the reader that there is a strong narrative, along with strong characters and plot points, and overall a good story. He highlights that ‘speech and environment descriptions’ are ‘neither required nor productive in a treatment’. I attempted to keep this in mind although a big struggle point for me that I found was keeping the speech to a minimum. It was difficult to describe what the characters were saying without dragging on the conversations to where it may become insignificant. Marie-Laure Ryan wrote ‘Cheap Plot Tricks, Plot Holes, and Narrative designs’ which was one of the readings towards the end of the semester that I found most interesting. It is the most frustrating thing when you watch a good film, but as the movie finishes you realise that they never went back to a plot point that seemed significant at the time it was shown, or that something in the film doesn’t add up to something else that happens in the film. Under the subheading ‘Plot Holes’, Ryan describes it as “an inadvertent inconsistency in the logical and motivational texture of the story’. This was something I wanted to avoid in my treatment, however I definitely found it challenging, even as the writer, to make sure everything made sense in the end. Overall, I think I did well in constructing a logical structure. If I were to continue developing my treatment to a film, I would need to focus on the parts where my protagonist is alone, as it is difficult to express emotions and thoughts in a person without them speaking it out loud. Next time, I would like my treatment to have more exciting turns that this time I may have been too scared to attempt this time. I would hope that from my treatment, people are able to find an attempt at creativeness, while also having a very strong message within the film. Action is easily done, but having a purpose in your product is very important and I hope people will be able to take that away from my treatment.

Referencing:

Brindley M (2009) ‘What Is a Synopsis? An Outline? A Treatment?’ Screen Australia; 2009:1-11. https://www.screenaustralia.gov.au/getmedia/ae5708a4-05d9-4db0-b5fb-4f999fdfed57/What-is-a-synopsis.pdf

Ryan M.L (2009) ‘Cheap Plot Tricks, Plot Holes, and Narrative Design’, Narrative (Columbus, Ohio).17(1):56-75. doi:10.1353/nar.0.0016

week 4 blog post – https://www.mediafactory.org.au/lily-mao/2024/04/15/the-plot-thickens-week-4-blog-post/

week 5 blog post – https://www.mediafactory.org.au/lily-mao/2024/04/12/the-plot-thickens-week-5-blog/

week 6 blog post – https://www.mediafactory.org.au/lily-mao/2024/04/19/the-plot-thickens-week-6-blog-post/

Beat sheet:

Beat sheet Sarah:Lydia

Reflection:

The Blake Snyder Beat Sheet was a very specific structure layout that I do not resonate with very much. I find that if I were to follow this structure I would lose my creativity and end up writing a story with very little imagination as I would be too focused on  getting the structure right. I find the structure to be too controlling with ‘bad guys close in’ assuming that every good script has an antagonistic character. Some of the most interesting films do not, such as Frances Ha or The Worst Person in the World (hehe ironic). For my script I have decided to use Aranson’s 9 point plan to beat out my story, however there are some parts that I know I can rearrange that might make it an improved beat sheet, which I will explain now. I have written out my set up as Sarah’s normality and the trigger of her grandmother telling her to live her life as she did many years ago, which causes Sarah to book a ticket to Positano. The surprise it that Sarah’s plane doesn’t make it and she ends up in Greenland which is the opposite kind of place she wanted to end up. Her obstacle is now that she is stuck here and her adventure has failed so she wants to go home. Beat 7 (complications/substories) is when she meets Elio who tells her she should go back with him to his small town as it is more beautiful and less touristy… he also likes her and wants to spend time with her. This beat is also when she realises the truth about her grandmother. Looking back at my beat sheet, I’m wondering if it would be a better idea to move back the steps in my beat. By doing this, I would put the events of Sarah arriving in Greenland and meeting Elio in the ‘Plan’ beat, and then the ‘Surprise’ which turns into the ‘Obstacle’ would be Sarah finding out from Elio’s family that her grandmother is not actually her grandmother and that she stole her mother from her actual grandmother. By moving back these steps I think I would be able to put a lot more detail and focus into this plot which is the main plot.

Snyder, Blake. (2005). Save the Cat!: The Last Book on Screenwriting You’ll Ever Need, Michael Wiese Productions.

Aronson, Linda. (2010). The 21st Century Screenplay: a comprehensive guide to writing tomorrow’s films. Crows Nest: Allen and Unwin