The end-of-semester Exhibition is finally happening! I have looked forward to it for so long. I am excited to see what other groups have done and what feedback we will receive. To set up our group’s displacement space in accordance with our theme, we brought a special prop to the exhibition – a small clock. This clock has served as an important hint for our short film. It mostly appeared in the background throughout the protagonist’ illusion and reality; however, something special about this clock is that its legs do not move at all. It was completely stationary, meaning that time has been distorted both in the illusion and the reality. Through this, we wanted to raise a question for our audience – is the reality that the protagonist thought he was in actually the reality? Is it possible that he was in the illusion throughout?

In order to see whether this hint has been successfully conveyed to our audience, I conducted some survey at the exhibition. I explained to two groups about the meaning behind the clock, and asked them whether they have noticed it. Out of the six classmates I surveyed, one person has fully noticed it (after watching the video twice), four people have guessed that the clock is special but did not recognise its meaning, and one person did not notice it at all. Overall, I think the hint was conveyed quite successfully. One thing that I think we could improve was to make the appearances of the clock more obvious. Initially, the camera did not focus on the clock until the very last scene, but if I were to refilm the project, I would probably include a few more medium shot on it during the first half of the film. I therefore learnt that, when we are planning the plot – especially something that is subtle – we have to always remember that the audience knows less than you, and most of the time you only have one chance to make them understand.

Other feedback I receive from the class were mostly about our editing. A few people also commended on our audio tracks, as they thought that the background musics we used were very accurate, and the transitions between them are smooth and natural. They also liked how we layered different soundtracks (keyboard typing, footsteps, calling, etc) in complementary to the scene in the office which was generated by AI. By layering different soundtracks, they thought that the scene has become much more real.

Overall, I think the exhibition has drawn a very nice end to my semester. I have enjoyed all the assignments in Augmenting Creativity, and there was not one moment where I regrated taking this course. I am fully confident that the skills I gained from this course will be of bigger use for my future projects. Thank you, Dan.

We spent two full days in the underground dungeon (the edit suite ^^) this week to finish off our assignment 4. I know this might sound crazy, but it was actually my first time using Premiere Pro, which makes the whole process very interesting and rewarding. I’ve been using Final Cut Pro for a few years, so I decided to keep using it for my Uni assignment (at least for my previous ones). Although I knew that I should probably start switching to Premiere ASAP, I was never brave enough to step out of my comfort zone and make this change, because for me, changing editing tool = losing all previous editing skills = producing academic rubbish.

But for this assignment, I am willing to try out Premiere for the group, because it’s something that the rest of my team members are familiar with. Surprisingly, it has worked out so much better than I imagined. I feel very lucky to be able to work with Chuling because we both love editing – we’ve treated it as something that is more than a school assignment. We wanted to try our very best for this project, so we spent so much time navigating through different functions on Premiere. We were never stopped by the scary settings on Premiere; whenever we had an idea, we would try every way that can achieve it. Within that few days in the edit suite, we’ve watched dozens of tutorial videos, gaining and applying a lot more new editing skills, and finally producing something that we are both happy with in terms of editing.

One of the most exciting attempts we did was trying to apply mask onto our videos. Since we’ve generated a lot of AI footages, we wanted to mash them together in different ways, rather than just layering them or making jump cuts between them. I therefore thought of masking, where I can manually draw a shape, and replace the part within the shape with something else. By selecting and replacing the parts from a clip one by one, the old clip will essentially be replaced by a new clip, like a transition. The results we got from experimenting this was also satisfactory.

This assignment therefore let me realise something new about teamwork – the best and quickest way to learn something is when you are in a group environment (at least for me), because it makes you feel like that you are not facing the challenge alone. There are definitely imperfections in our final video, but I don’t really want to talk about or critique them in this reflection. No matter what grade we will receive for this assignment, I genuinely feel proud for myself and my team, for the attention we paid on the details, the time we dedicated, the challenges that we overcame, and the tolerance and encouragement we gave to each other.

This week is also very practical as we systematically looked at the process of writing a good academic essay. Although I have written some essays during middle school and high school, I always felt like I was not taughton how to do that – we kind of just figured our way through, even if the writing pathway we eventually settled on wasn’t necessarily the most productive one.

This week’s lesson was therefore very helpful for me, as I learnt a lot about constructing the skeleton of an essay, which turned out to be much more important than I originally thought. The way I prepared for an essay was quite lazy – I would have a document called “idea bank” and then another document called “actual essay”. In the research document I would note down some links to some articles but never annotate them; having one sentence summarising it was the max that I would do. I am also pretty sure that the order I did my essay was wrong – I would come out with a research question or a thesis myself first before I delve into deeper research. After I construct the thesis, I would also write out some points that I want to make in my essay, and then look for sources that match my ideas. I think this lazy method was able to work for my previous assignments because they were quite simple and generic, which luckily makes the questions I came up with reasonable. But now, I realised that as I step into higher education, I should really change my way of doing it. From the lesson, I learnt that a real good thesis must come from research, not my own head – I have to see what scholars have studied, proposed, and asked, and whether any of this can relate to my interest or experience. I also learnt that a good way of doing this was to construct a ‘network of academic sources’, and choose some from it to make an annotated bibliography, where we summarise, cite, note, and highlight the academic studies.

This week is my favourite week so far! The lessons are all very practical and intriguing – in Monday’s lesson, we learnt to use camera, microphone, and tripods, and got to shoot a short experimental video. Right after the lesson I decided to borrow some equipment from tech for our project. Here is a list of things we borrowed: a Sony FX3 camera, Manfrotto Stills Tripod, a clapper, a Litepanel LED light, and a Sennheiser shotgun microphone. Honestly, if it wasn’t for this lesson, I would not even try to borrow anything from tech; I would just use the cameras and tripods I have at home, even if they are less professional. Monday’s lesson changed my mindset – after playing around with different shooting gear, I realised how much difference equipment could make to a video’s quality. Plus, once I leave school, I would have to pay for them, so I might as well take advantage of school right now.

Another interesting thing I learnt from this week’s content is about planning and script writing. I loved the part about ‘industry-standard formatting’ of scripts, and the writing tool recommendation. I downloaded Writer Solo almost immediately after the lesson and started playing around with it. We originally wrote our script in Chinese as it was more convenient, and so translating the script and re-formatting it was very essential. I think Writer Solo is very easy to use for beginners as all of its options and functions are clearly laid out. I spent about three hours finishing translating and refining the script. I found this process especially useful because it allowed me to critically assess the script again; I found a lot of details lacking in the script that we have not noticed before. I was therefore able to add in more notes, as well as asking more questions to our original plan, questioning whether there are any other / better ways to shoot a certain scene.

This led me to another lesson I learnt from doing this group project – never be afraid to communicate and make changes. As I was refining the script, I felt that there are some plots that didn’t flow very well. Luckily, both of our team members are very communicative, so I was able to ask these questions and propose some solutions I’ve come up with to them. Looking back at this, I truly feel grateful that I was able to team up with these nice people. We stayed up quite late to discuss and often met outside of classes, which all make the shooting on Friday very smooth and successful.

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This week we did a class presentation. I loved this assignment because it’s very reflective, and it gave me opportunities to hear feedback and advice from our studio leader. The parts that I liked the most in the presentation were our plan for the group project and the critical reflection, because the feedback I got was very constructive. In the presentation, I talked about a mind map I did that led me to the thesis, which covered a few different areas, such as gender stereotypes, ethnic stereotypes, socioeconomic stereotypes, etc. I was hesitating a lot about which one of the stereotypes I should chose, so I was hoping to get some suggestions from the panel regarding this. The panel has recommended me some readings that are particularly relevant to ethnic and gender stereotypes; from my own research, I also found that there are much more available studies on these two types of stereotypes than the others. These findings helped me eliminate some options and allowed me to narrow down to one of these two topics, which I am very grateful for. I have not yet decided what my final thesis would be, but as of now, my interested direction of research leans more toward to the feeding and training of data, where these stereotypes in AI originated from, and how they were able to make their way into AI.

After the presentation on Monday, I spent the rest of my study time this week focusing on the group project. I completed the concept document and the pre-visualisation parts in the production document. I have never done a production document before, so I had to do quite a bit of research. But once I completed some parts, I realised its importance for the final construction of the piece. By physically writing out everything and logically categorising them into why we chose the theme, the treatment, and the objectives of our short film, I became clearer about our story and how we wanted to achieve better storytelling. It gave us more solid reasons to choose the angle we want to shoot a particular scene from, the type of background music we want, lighting, colour tone, and so on in the pre-visualisation. We decided that our shooting style is going to be realistic, gritty, raw, and cold tone. We also did some music browse together and wrote down some reference music for each scene, so we could play them while shooting to help our actor get into the mood.

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In this week, we were officially introduced to the next group assignment in Augmenting Creativity, which is especially meaningful for me. I forget whether I have mentioned this in my previous blogs – but I really HATED group projects. I know people often say that we “should get out of our comfort zone”, and although I’ve been trying to live up to this most of the times, I always found it the least motivative when I am facing a group project. I have a long recognition about this mindset myself, and I have been actively trying to figure out why it is so. Lately, I found out something new – I hated group projects because I always get disappointed at myself for not being able to express my ideas in English. In groups where everyone else is native English speakers, most of the times I would just be nodding and doing what other members told me to do, even if I have my own ideas in mind. I was always so eager to say my ideas, but every time I stopped because those ideas never sounded as awesome and convincing as they would if I say them in Chinese.

After experiencing that feeling repeatedly, I started to get a sense of inability where I doubted myself whether I can be at all conductive – until I started this group project. This is the first time throughout my uni where all of the members in the group have Chinese as our first language, which is why I said this project is especially special at the start of this blog. Not to be exaggerative, but I do think that I have become a whole different person in this project. I have taken up the sort of ‘leadership’ that I have long wanted to try in group projects but never succeed before. In the first lesson of the week, I composed a group document with timelines, requirements of assignments 3 to 5, submission details, and production portfolio parts, so the whole project is clearly laid out in front of us (felt so good when I finished all of that). We then quickly arranged a meeting on the weekend, and more importantly, what our objectives are for that meeting. I have wanted to do this for so long!!!! In my previous group projects, I found that we often come out of a 3-hour meeting only finished discussing half of the things we initially wanted to finalise, so I wanted to learn from that. With the objectives for each meeting clearly listed, we were able to follow them during meetings and quickly tick them off one by one.

After the meeting, we have finished allocating parts in the Production Portfolio, a comprehensive timeline by personnel, mini deadlines, theme / concept for the short film, ways to integrate AI into the film, shooting schedule, presentation template for the presentation in Week 9, and our next meeting time & objectives. I think the biggest point of this group project is not about teaching me to ‘only collaborate with Chinese students’, but to give me confidence about the contributions that I could make in group projects which I have been doubting for a long time. I want to try my best in this group project in every way I can, because I have enjoyed this studio so much and I want to draw a nice full stop for it.

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In this week, we visited an exhibition at RMIT gallery called “This Hideous Replica”, which focuses on a future where algorithmics are increasingly intertwined with our lives. Before visiting the exhibition, I found its name resonating with me, especially the word “replica”. I felt it symbolises parallels between human and technology. At the exhibition, the curator elaborated that “replica” could be anything produced by AI that possesses traits drawn from the reality – whether it is someone, something, or some places that physically exist. This blending of the artificial with the real creates an unsettling, almost eerie feeling because you’re confronted with something that looks so familiar yet remains fabricated. It’s like seeing a photo of yourself doing something you’ve never done, and that dissonance between the real and the unreal evokes a sense of strangeness, even repulsion.

This idea resonated with me so much because I just heard a heartbreaking AI scandal while I was in China over the break. The scandals were about an AI technology, Deepfake, which can digitally alter a person’s face, so they appear to be someone else. Deepfake can create extremely convincing photos and videos, which has caused a lot of concerns around scepticism, spread of misinformation, and privacy. This technology hasn’t come to public’s attention until this month when the scandals were exposed in Korea. In the scandal, we see that the faces of many females – including a lot of underaged girls – were manipulated to be on porn scenes. What is even more scary is that these deepfakes have been spread to an incredibly number of people; just on one online group alone on Telegram, there were over 220,000 members who have exchanged these fake footages. The leader of the South Korea’s Advocacy Centre for Online Sexual Abuse victims (ACOSAV), Park Seonghye, said that “With the latest deepfake technology there is now so much more footage than there used to be, and we’re worried it’s only going to increase” (BBC 2024).

It is just heartbreaking seeing young girls being terrified by the explicit photos they saw on the internet that they have never taken before, viewed by millions of other people, even by someone who are close to them in real life. At moments like this, I always couldn’t help to wonder: what good would it bring to have a technology that can change a person’s face so convincingly? Should technologies like this even exist? Aren’t they just giving potential criminals opportunities to take actions? Why aren’t there enough laws to regulate these technologies? I’ve been angry for the past week because of this, and to some extent, visiting the exhibition of “This Hideous Replica” let me know how many ways there are for expressions. Although I wasn’t able to understand all of the artworks, looking at some of them who condemn a hideous future of AI manipulating everything let me feel calm and relief. I couldn’t quite explain why I felt that way, but I am thankful for it.

References:

RMIT Gallery (2024) This Hideous Replica, RMIT Gallery, accessed 9 September 2024. https://rmitgallery.com/exhibitions/this-hideous-replica/

Choi L and Mackenzie J (3 September 2024) ‘Inside the deepfake porn crisis engulfing Korean schools’, BBC, accessed 9 September 2024. https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cpdlpj9zn9go

I finished most of the Assignment 2 in week 6, which involves generating videos using Pika Labs using images I generated in Midjourney last week as prompts. To summarise my experience with Pika Labs, I want to first discuss some features that I found useful, and then some commands that it was unable to fulfil.

Firstly, I’ve noticed that Pika Labs has recently updated some of its features, the most noticeable one to me being the addition of the area for users to give negative prompts. In my Blog One, I discussed some studies I read about how hallucinations occur due to AI’s inherent weaknesses in processing negative commands. At that point, I thought that this is a drawback for all AI models; but after using Pika Labs, I realise that there are exceptions. In my opinion, Pika Labs have done an exceptional job in understanding my negative prompts, from general ones such as “no morphing, erratic fluctuation in motion”, to specific ones such as “no blinking, large body movements”. As I generated all my videos using images, I noticed that Pika Labs gives better results when I add in specific motion demands. For example, if I use the default setting, it will just zoom in and I won’t get any obvious changes even if I’ve given prompts – it almost looks like I was manually zooming in a still image. But on the other hand, if I tell it to pan left or rotate in a specific way, it will generate a different and better result.

I have also noticed some subtle limitations. Firstly, the resolution is still low, especially if it is compared with image generation tool. Secondly, hallucinations occur quite often especially on human bodies. I’ve gotten many results that gave me two left hands on a human, or six fingers on one hand. Contrastingly, it has been surprisingly successful in generating landscapes, trees, and even aliens – basically anything that is non-human. Considering the inherent challenges that video generating AI are posed as discussed in Blog Four, as well as the significant improvements that Pika Labs has already made, I value and treasure my experiment with it. I have been feeling very grateful for the past two weeks while completing this assignment, as it gave me a chance to have a glance into these amazing tools, and to truly experience and understand the advanced stage AI is already in that not many people know about.

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I found this week’s lesson very interesting. I loved the activity we did during the lesson where we put stickers on the board about the film genres that we know. I especially like how we had the time to research a genre from the broad written by someone else, as it allowed me to add something new to my “potential master research direction list”. I have been trying to actively look for things that interest me for a *potential* master degree, and this activity opened me up to so many different genres that I have never exposed myself to. For the research we did during the lesson, I chose to research into “horror”, because it’s a genre that I know but not familiar with.

As a student born in China but now live in Australia, I have encountered a lot of culture differences, so I naturally wanted to look for the difference between this genre in China and the one in Australia – or more broadly, between the East and the West. This led me to the discovery that there are actually a few different horror genres in Asia: horror films from China mainland, Taiwan, and Hongkong are more similar and are often called Chinese horror, whereas Japanese and Korean horror are more similar and are often compared together. From my personal experience, what makes Chinese horror different to the rest of the horror genres is its high relevancy to the Chinese history. China values its history very highly, and often provokes patriotism within the younger generations through the compulsory history courses at school. Consequently, Chinese citizens have developed a very high awareness of the history of China – what it was like before it unified, what dynasties it had and how they were like, and how it has been invaded and colonised… Therefore, when an element related to the history appears in the film, Chinese audience can quickly catch it, comprehending it, relating it to the real historical event that they are so familiar with, and therefore the sense of horror is intensively amplified.

As the lesson has evoked my interest in this genre – particularly about Chinese horror, I decided to do some further research. I then found an interesting article which evaluates the frequent employment of historical elements in Chinee horror films from a completely different angle. According to Li (2021), the reason why Chinese horror films feature so many traditional elements is because of censorship. Filmmakers are prohibited from featuring any religious / superstitious / supernatural / violent elements, which are the core components of western horror films. Therefore, Chinese horror films had to lean toward ancient elements, such as ghost marriages, and traditional beliefs such as afterlife (2021:14).

Overall, the activity in Monday’s lesson led me to a lot of interesting articles and perspectives. I discovered that I am definitely interested in studying Chinese horror film, its components, its difference to the West, and its effects on the society, which is something that I have noted down for my future self when I decided to choose a master’s degree.

References:

Li Y (2021) ‘Contemporary Chinese Horror Films: Genre, Censorship, Market’, Davis ProQuest Dissertations & Theses: 1-14. https://www.proquest.com/dissertations-theses/contemporary-chinese-horror-films-genre/docview/2572615409/se-2?accountid=13552