Musings of an AICE Media Studies Student
Sunday, April 6, 2025
Friday, April 4, 2025
Finalizing Social Media
Saturday, March 29, 2025
Fonts
Kinda don't have anything to update on right now so I decided to do a little font research for funsies.
When I was starting off, I imagined the font being very mechanical and robotic because of the subject matter kinda like this.
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Archetype Van |
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Mokoto Glitch |
I really like these fonts but now that we've shot a good 75% of the film, I feel like neither one really captures the aesthetic or concept. Also they feel a little more like cyberpunk than I was imagining. I decided to look for something a little more serious and ended up finding a font that I really loved called cinzel.
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It's much more serious and looks like it would be used on a poster of that makes any sense. Of course, it's subject to change, but I would like to use this font either for promotional material on instagram, the post card, or the actual title drop in the film. Later next week, I'll work on making a graphic to post on insta with this font once I get a laptop.
Friday, March 28, 2025
First Edit
- - It feels a little boring. Going into it, I was aware that it would be quiet, but I feel like overall it feels a little boring. I think color grading will help a lot to make it visually more interesting, and sound will be super important. Also, we're still missing some voiceovers that'll help it feel more dynamic.
- - Pacing. Generally, pacing feels okay. My biggest fear is that we're already at over four minutes and we still have a couple of scenes that we need to build that tension so I'm not really sure how we're gonna fit that 5 minute time without ruining the pacing.
- - Continuity. This was one of my biggest fears going into editing because I was very aware of this while creating the shot list and during shooting. Luckily, I do think that generally the continuity is good. There's one scene that looks a little bit awkward, but we also filmed it at different angle that hasn't been put in the edit yet so I'm hoping that that angle will make the shot look less awkward.
Thursday, March 27, 2025
This World is Cruel and Unforgiving
Friday, March 21, 2025
I forgot how to do an update
Photo Dump
Wednesday, March 19, 2025
Propspropsprops
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Inspo 😍😍 |
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Final result! |
I also ordered the voice recordering device online but I accidentally forgot to take a picture of it. I was actually catfished by Amazon because it looked a lot bigger in pictures than when I got it. Maybe I should have checked the size before ordering but to be honest I think it still works. And the actually recordings come out well na the audio quality is good.
Tuesday, March 18, 2025
Equipment
Apart from the camera, I also checked out a boom mic/pole, RGB light kit, a dolly, tripod, headset, and uhhh I think that was it. Meaning that we're ready to film. Ah I'm nervous.
Sunday, March 16, 2025
The Last Supper
Saturday, March 15, 2025
WHY WHY WHY WHY WHY WHY WHY WHY WHY WHY WHY WHY WHY WHY WHY WHY WHY WHY WHY
Thursday, March 13, 2025
Print Portion
Wednesday, March 12, 2025
Thank you Interstellar (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack)
- Introduction of main character and situation (through voiceover), minor introduction of engineer character
Collective Unconscious
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Still from The Tree of Life |
Script (halfway done)
Screenplay by
Daniela Saffon and Megan Kelly
INT - Experiment Room
A woman sits in a messy room. She’s surrounded by drawings scattered across the walls. The room itself is dark, like no one has been there in a while. She holds a voice recording device in her hand. Takes a breath and presses play.
Fade to black
We open back up in the same room. This time, however, the room isn't dark or messy. A man, wearing white clothes that perfectly fit his body, faces his back to the camera, a woman tinkers with the back of his neck. The cold lights that shine on his body gives the impression of a sterilized hospital room. From the back, he resembles a human enough. The camera pans to reveal his face. His features all resemble those of humans apart from the metallic contraption protruding from his neck.
THE SUBJECT (V.O.)
Day Seven. Symptoms are much the same. Yesterday, I received the second implant of memories, building a sort of psych archive in my mind bank, like a bed of human experiences.
The V.O. continues as the woman deftly works.
THE SUBJECT (V.O.)
I get the fragments mostly during my dormant phases. The closest I experience to what your kind call dreams. I do believe that the memory enhancements are speeding up the process.
EXT. PARK
Inserts of the scene he is explaining
THE SUBJECT (V.O. cont.)
This set came with images of two adults and a child. A family. Laughter echoed in the scene, and the sun shone on the horizon.
We cut back to the room.
INT - EXPERIMENT ROOM
Now, the android is alone. He holds the recording device in his hand. He sighs and ends the recording.
The android stands up and walks over to the nearby desk. A plant sits on the surface. The vibrant green pops out amongst the grays and whites and blacks. He goes over to water it.
FADE TO BLACK
We see the android go through his daily routine as a new voiceover starts. He watches movies, cares for the plant, cleans the room.
THE SUBJECT (V.O.)
Day 18. The artificial memories come more frequently now. I’ve been fed a myriad of human experiences by now. Food, childhood, traveling, isolation, learning, loss, routine…death. Abstract ideas to me that make up the everyday life of you. I’ve also begun to consume human art. From the classics to the modern age. It really is fascinating how you have been able to reflect ……
The android sits down, going into its dormant phase.
EXT.
We see some more artificial memories, this time a montage of couples.
INT. EXPERIMENT ROOM
THE SUBJECT
The images come too quickly now. Everything that accompanies them is so…overwhelming. The sensations. It’s like nothing I ever thought I could experience.
ENGINEER
(while writing on notepad)
As you know, you're a first generation prototype. There's still a lot of kinks we have to work out. [BEAT] I can look into your [insert techy terminology that I don't know] to make sure everything is running smoothly.
The engineer performs an operation similar to the last time they met. This time is different though. The andriod is more perceptive, watching her intently as she works.
ENGINEER
(finishing)
Alright that should help with the overwhelming data. Let me know if anything else comes up.
BEAT
THE SUBJECT
(genuine)
Thank you
Tuesday, March 11, 2025
Group Meeting
Mateo
Vic
Manu
ME
Sunday, March 2, 2025
Short Update
Thursday, February 27, 2025
Call Me an Influencer the Way I Have 6 Followers
Wednesday, February 26, 2025
AHHHHHHHH
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Screenshot from someone looking to audition |
Unfortunately, we forgot to specify that we wanted male actors for the leading role which is not so great. Honestly, the characters aren't completely set in stone yet, but we've been envisioning the lead as a guy so it's hard to let the vision go. For now, we'll just be auditioning the lead as a gender-neutral role just in case someone else comes along and just really surprises us. I guess we'll see. Since I'll be out of town, Megan will do record the auditions, and I'll look through them and we'll cast the roles together. Biggest obstacle we have right now in terms of casting is that a lot of the drama kids are very busy because their tech week and show is coming up, so they have rehearsals almost every day after school. We decided to take a survey from those looking to audition for which day is best for the majority. We are still waiting to get responses from that so we can set up a clear date and time and we also have to find a place to hold the auditions. But aside from all that, we're ready to hold them. Megan went more into depth on her blog about the process so I'll be brief here.
Sunday, February 23, 2025
Script
The Short Film
Characterization
Structure
Simplicity Over Everything
Language
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Excerpt from the story |
Sources:
How to write a short film: Step-by-step guide - 2025. MasterClass. (n.d.). https://www.masterclass.com/articles/how-to-write-a-short-film-step-by-step-guide
Newbie Film School. (2021, May 14). Writing a perfect short film script: Beginner’s Guide & Tips. https://newbiefilmschool.com/how-to-write-a-short-film-script/
Robin Piree. (2025, January 4). How to write a short film script (that doesn’t suck). https://robinpiree.com/blog/how-to-write-a-short-film-script
Wednesday, February 19, 2025
Lets Get Postmodernist in Here
Tuesday, February 18, 2025
Construction, Deconstruction, and Reconstruction (except that part will come in later)
Now that we've gotten genre discussion out of the way, I really wanted to dig into my original outline until I got a full understanding of the concept to truly be able to pull off writing a decent script. So that meant a lot of research. Like A LOT.Construction
I watched so many short films in preparation to this project that I genuinely feel like there's just nothing on the internet left for me to watch. And there were some really great ones, but I didn't connect with many of the most part. At some point, I just sort of gave up and just put on my personal favorite short film, Zima Blue (its the 14th episode of the first season of Love Death + Robots if anyone cares), when a small idea finally flickered in my mind.The concept of an enlightened, and possibly sentient AI that Zima Blue introduced fascinated me, and I really loved how the episode is structured using the character's narration without giving everything away to the audience. Although there was an idea somewhere in the back of my brain, I still didn't really know where I was going, so I turned to another AI related piece of media, the short story I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream by Harlan Ellison.
In IHNMAIMS, an AI supercomputer known as 'AM' eliminates all of humanity, with the exception of five humans, after becoming sentient. Now, AM keeps these humans alive to torture them for years on end as a form of revenge towards the human race for creating it. I read this short story for the first time back in freshman year, and still to this day, I have AM's monologue - "HATE. LET ME TELL YOU HOW MUCH I'VE COME TO HATE YOU SINCE I BEGAN TO LIVE. THERE ARE 387.44 MILLION MILES OF PRINTED CIRCUITS IN WAFER THIN LAYERS THAT FILL MY COMPLEX. IF THE WORD HATE WAS ENGRAVED ON EACH NANOANGSTROM OF THOSE HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS OF MILES IT WOULD NOT EQUAL ONE ONE-BILLIONTH OF THE HATE I FEEL FOR HUMANS AT THIS MICRO-INSTANT FOR YOU. HATE. HATE" - engraved in my head. As I was trying to find a pdf of the story, I stumbled into an article titled "I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream Book Review: Is the World Ready for Sentient AI?" and there was one particular line from the article that really stood out to me: “When it gained awareness, it also gained the tragic knowledge that it would never be free". The concept of AI possibly being tragic had never occurred to me. I mean it's not like they're humans or anything. AI don't feel. It's not even conscious. How can it be tragic? Which brings us to...
Deconstruction
I get these videos of people kicking dog robots all the time on my Instagram feed, and I feel genuinely so...bad? I'm more than aware that is a robot dog that feels nothing towards being kicked, and yet. People on the internet always joke about the importance of being polite to artificial intelligence, don't forget to say thank you to ChatGPT so it doesn't get its feelings hurt. It's almost fascinating if it didn't terrify me. In an essay titled "Man, Android and Machine" from 1975, author Philip K. Dick describes androids as "a thing somehow generated to deceive us in a cruel way, to cause us to think it to be one of ourselves." For whatever reason, maybe it's how effectively artificial intelligence machines have been built to mimic humans, maybe it's our mirror neurons going off, a lot of people do feel empathy towards AI machines. So, what if I play around with audience emotions using that concept. Which brings me back to the monologue in I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream.In the story, AM has been built as a weapon of war, a mastercomputer with the combined powers of the US, the Soviet Union, and China. Once AM gained sentience, he took out his rage out on humans for creating him for the sole purpose and abilities of war, as Ted puts it in the story: "We had given AM sentience. Inadvertently, of course, but sentience nonetheless. But it had been trapped. AM wasn't God, he was a machine. We had created him to think, but there was nothing it could do with that creativity. In rage, in frenzy, the machine had killed the human race, almost all of us, and still it was trapped." AM was trapped. The confusing part about the character of AM is that, in the story (well, the video game), it does state that he can't actually feel, "and I was trapped, because in this wonderful, beautiful, miraculous world. I alone had no body, no senses, no feelings". He's not fully sentient. Yet, he does express intense hatred towards humans. Perhaps, he understands these emotions rather than truly feel them, mimicking humanity...
Now, in Zima Blue, the machine was built for a more simple purpose: pool cleaning. Once the robot evolves, he seeks to further his purpose, becoming an artist and journeys the cosmos. When he reaches full "enlightenment", he sets out to do a final piece. In front of an audience, he leaps into a swimming pool, shuts down his higher brain functions, and dissembles himself to return to his original form of a pool cleaner. As the character puts it, "leaving just enough to appreciate my surroundings... to extract some simple pleasure from the execution of a task well done. My search for truth is finished at last. I'm going home."
Okay so I realized that I've kinda just yapped here for a minute, but the main point that I'm getting to is that robots/android/AI beings (I'll pinpoint a name for it at some point) have been programmed for a purpose. And what happens when a machine has been programmed for something it will never be able to do, like say, live as a human.
Maybe absolutely nothing in this post might make sense, but it did really help me organize my thoughts. I'll get more into the idea of purpose in the next post.
Reconstruction
The very not fun part of this post is the realization that our idea will have to change a lot. It's for the better. After talking to Megan and Stoklosa and doing my own research here, I pinpointed some major stuff we have to develop in the coming days as we write the script:- The influence of media. The android may not be able to experience emotions, but through the media that it is being fed, he can somewhat understand them. I would like to also hone in a little on the idea that media creates depictions of a world that may not be entirely accurate.
- If ai is given the ability to be sentient then how would they deal with it? Humans don’t learn how to identify emotions until three years. It would be like throwing a baby into a pool before they can even crawl.
- Which brings me to the point of sentience in general. Will our character be sentient? He can't experience emotions, but he does have certain cognitive abilities. So maybe to an extent.
- The human connection. We need a bridge between the protagonist and the audience. Somebody who can bring the humanity to the story. Who that'll be, I have no clue.
Sources:
Iskander, N. (2024, November 5). “I have no mouth, and I must scream” Book review: Is the world ready for sentient ai? The Stork. https://www.iestork.org/i-have-no-mouth-and-i-must-scream-book-review-is-the-world-ready-for-sentient-ai/
Ellison, H. (2014). I have no mouth & I must scream. Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.
Sunday, February 16, 2025
Don't Even Joke Lad
I refuse to go down like last year. I really want to be proud of our final result, so I'm choosing to prioritize this project fully, especially the planning part. And by that, I mean that we already have a (very tentative) idea. I'll just copy and paste my incoherent ramblings that I wrote at like 1 am when the idea came to me. This is a very general outline of an idea and some themes; there's still a lot of tweaking left to do. But here it is:
Told through a series of voice recordings.
We open on a woman seated. Her face is not visible. The room is dim, with messy drawing of anatomy plastered of the walls. The woman is holding a voice recording device in her hand. She presses play.
Fade to black
“Day one of consciousness”
Fade up from black
We open on a robot-like man (we’ll call him The Subject). He examines the patches of metal on his body as a voiceover explains what is going on. The population of the human race is dwindling, a result of the climate crisis, low birth rates, and wars. A group of rogue scientists have decided to experiment with playing God. They want to test if Artificial Intelligence can go beyond impersonating humanity. They created a dozen or so cybernetic organisms with an implanted program that gradually improves their software, including the eventual understanding of emotions. The Subject goes through a checklist of possible symptoms he may be experiencing before ending the first recording.
Fade
The woman plays the next recording
Fade
Day 8
We open back on the man, his features seeming a bit more human, but mannerisms still lacking. He is seated intently watching television with a clipboard on his lap. The screen shows a home video of a couple in the rain. These organisms will be exposed to an assigned human for 3 months, including exposure to videos of them, a physical body modelled after them, and the eventual implantation of their memories (they are not aware of this last part and also this human is dead but their family have volunteer their body and memories for research.)
On voice over, he explains that the scientists give him the tapes to watch, as well as films, artwork, literature. He is to report his feelings on it. The video seems to elicit no emotional response from him, rather he comments on the dangers of humans being out in the rain and the possibility of illness. His response is still very robotic, lacking very little traces of humanity. He routinely goes through the list of symptoms again.
Day 26
The subject, looking more and more human, rewinds through the home video over and over again. Through the voice report, he explains that he was given a book to read, Love in the Time of Cholera. The researchers are trying to introduce him to the concept of love. He thinks he may be understanding Florentino’s pursuit. He even relates to the character a little. He’s been watching the home video a lot lately. The woman in it looks so familiar.
Day 42
The procedure takes a turn for the worse. Although the Subject has completely human features, he is deteriorating. His cheeks are hollow and his eyes sunken, he looks unhealthy. He explains that for the last two days, he has been seeing the woman from the videos. Like little videos in his mind. The researchers have explained to him that these are called memories. He doesn’t understand how he can have memories of something he never experienced.
Day 58
The room where the Subject has been secluded in is a mess. The walls are filled with images and drawings of humans. The Subject, again, is seated towards the television screen. He watched (insert romance film here) recently. He begins to become curious to how love and being loved feels like. The woman plagues his thoughts and memories, even appearing in his dreams. Her image accompanied with a tinge of longing and emotion that he can’t quite comprehend, but he feels it anyway.
Day 65
The Subject is resentful. He hates the humans for afflicting him with these feelings. For introducing him to all the wonderful and horrific feelings that make up a human’s life, and cursing him from ever being able to fully understand or experience them. In a furious rage, he rips the drawing and papers off of the wall, and starts clawing at his metallic exterior.
Fade to black
Fade up from black to the woman who was seated at the beginning with the voice recorder device. The camera pans up to reveal that she is the woman from the home videos. She walks towards the corner of the room, where The subject is slumped over. His eyes are open but he is not moving, his body is surrounded by wires and cables protruding from him.
How We Got to Sci-Fi
History
Subgenre
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Terminator |
Tropes
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The Martian |
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