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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