Critical Reflection

    The idea of The Divine Synthetic itself was actually born from a lot of the media theory that we learned in class, particularly Jean Baudrillard and his concept of hyperreality and simulacra. Although Baudrillard never explored artificial intelligence in his writings, it could be argued that AI is a perfect representation of these ideas. The purpose of artificial intelligence is to simulate human behavior and intelligence, going so far as to eventually become a representation, rather than a reality of human behavior. To go further into this idea, I decided to look into cases of what I like to call "enlightened robots" in media. I focused on the character AM from the short story I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream and Harlan Ellison's meditation on the existence of an artificially created being. Particularly with the idea that artificial intelligence is an almost Frankenstein-esque invention doomed by its creator. While writing the script, I also knew I wanted to use voice-over recordings to move the piece forward, so I studied Daniel Keyes' epistolary writing style in his short story/novel, Flowers for Algernon. This story was actually a great inspiration for the script since it followed a similar theme of a character who experiences a scientifically induced personality/intelligence development over a set period of time. However, at this point during pre-production, I realized that I had been focusing too much on literary pieces and needed to start tying in that visual aspect. For that, I looked at the way the Love, Death + Robots episode "Zima Blue" blends its audio and visual features. This episode also gave me a gave a good idea of how to pace our short film, especially with the use of voiceover, without boring the audience. 

Graph from Statistica

    In fact, audience engagement is something that was definitely a priority at all points of production. At first, I was a bit reluctant with the subject matter because I felt apprehensive of it not being particularly relevant. However, as I thought about it further, I realized that, with the rise of ChatGPT and other generative AI, artificial intelligence is not only on the forefront of people's minds, but also a great source of worry for many. I think in a way, I wrote this script, and we made this film to represent that fear that a lot of people are feeling. At its most basic form, the thesis of this film is that artificial intelligence cannot replicate the human experience. We targeted this film to young adults (16-24) since we felt it was the generation that could relate most to the artificial intelligence situation, and the young adult demographic are the biggest consumers of science fiction media. To engage this audience, we chose to market the film on Instagram. Aside from YouTube, Instagram is the most used social media platform amongst teenagers and young adults. In fact, it was reported 75% of Generation Z are Instagram users. We also figured that Instagram was the best social media platform for cohesive branding since it allows photo posts, reels, and stories for interaction.   

  

In terms of actual film branding, Megan took charge on that, particularly on social media and general creative direction. We wanted to capture that science fiction aesthetic through social media, so we went with a very robotic color scheme of black, gray, and dark blue. While we wanted that stereotypical science fiction look to an extent, we also didn’t want it to look too cartoonish, we wanted a more, at the risk of sounding pretentious, sophisticated look. To be completely honest, I think we had a little trouble balancing that in the beginning of the process. I feel like, looking through our posts, I can tell that we weren’t completely sure on the fonts and color scheme that we wanted, but it definitely improved as the posts went on. With the postcard, we were struggling on finding a still from the short film to capture its essence enough to put it essentially as the face of the piece, so we decided it would be best to use a drawing instead. Megan ended designing an incredible logo that we used on both the postcard and all through social media. Additionally, we kept the same font on the postcard as the font used for the title and credits in the actual film and any social media teasers to keep that cohesive brand. The back I designed on Canva, it's a still modified enough to make our main character look very robotic. Like with the social media, the color scheme of the piece was that very robotic, almost cold, moody look. There was one scene in particular that we shot, but during editing, I realized that the color, outfits, and part of the room that we shot in just didn’t fit the rest of the look. I ended up replacing that scene. While there were some things we could have caught branding wise earlier with more planning, I’m pretty satisfied with how we branded and marketed this film and feel confident that it represents our vision. 

    We sought to represent humanity in this piece. Which is a very, very general statement. With the memory montage and The Engineer character, we wanted a physical representation of humankind in a piece that centers something very non-human. I think our representation of humanity might be a *bit* too optimistic as there's a whole lot of bad aspects that humans have, but I feel like, with the subject matter we are tackling, it was kind of a necessary reminder of a lot of the beauty of humanity. I think we live in a time where we need to be reminded that more often. Also, we wanted to stray away from those common robot stories where the robots go evil and decide to take over the world. I was hoping to add more nuance to artificial intelligence and to also acknowledge that humans themselves are the root cause for its existence. We also wanted to stray away from a romance, which was the original idea, to tackle the belief that AI can "feel things" or experience emotions.

    There were so many setbacks and problems that happened in the production of this piece, which makes me all the prouder of the final result. I made so many mistakes and learned so much from this experience, particularly with it being my first time directing a full short film (and obviously would not have been possible without my amazing co-director Megan). I hope you all enjoy it.