by Simon Edl -

Impulse 6 – Ghost in the Shell (1995)

I finally got around to watching it, after having it be the number one movie I wanted to watch not only for the design & research impulses but also purely out of personal interest. Considering I have a soft spot for anime movies from that time and loved Akira so much that I more or less based my AI generated movie on its aesthetics and setting, it’s strange that it took me so long, especially considering the thematic relevance for my master’s thesis, not only from a production standpoint, but also because of its themes of a future where cybernetic augmentations and AI are commonplace.

The story

Honestly, I’m a little disappointed. While the themes and concepts were engaging and interesting, I felt like the pacing of the story was a bit strange, but I suspect it has something to do with the movie’s short length of only 82 minutes, 4 of which are end credits and 4 more being reserved for a lengthy title sequence, not to mention the frequent use of long sequential establishing shots that serve to set the mood of the setting.

Some aspects were left unexplained and some political conflicts were only briefly mentioned, but played an important role in the end, which made me feel like i never completely understood the motivations of the parties involved.

The ending, which felt like it happened too early, left me wanting for more, which I guess can be considered a good thing, I definitely want to follow this experience up with the movie’s sequel: ‘Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence’ (2004), though apparently that movie covers a different arc of the original anime. I’ll just have to see for myself.

Production

Because this is not supposed to be a movie review, I want to talk a bit about the production of the film. Aesthetically it was absolutely gorgeous, its carefully selected color palettes were beautiful, the design of the city, its buildings, objects, vehicles and weapons were tasteful and in general the movie was not as hyperfuturistic as I expected, which helped me relate to its world a little better.

The animation over all was great and made use of some 3D animation, but usually in a stylistic way, as navigational systems or computer generated graphics the characters interacted with, so it always felt grounded in the world. Establishing shots and backgrounds were much in line with what I was able to recreate using Midjourney, so that was further good news. The film was also absolutely drowned in glow and glare effects, often washing out the frame quite heavily, though carefully respecting the color palettes. I want to define color palettes of my own for the project and, depending on what direction I want to go in, am considering referencing both Ghost in the Shell (1995) as well as Akira (1988).

Apart from the complex action heavy sequences that I will try to avoid for my project since I assume that AI is not far enough to pull off an actual choreographed performance, I noticed that there were many times where the characters were not animated a lot at all. Specifically sequences that feature heavy dialogue were often a single frame of a character with their mount moving, something very obvious if you think about it, but for some reason it took this movie for me to really notice it.

This honestly fills me with quite a bit of hope, because dialogue where the viewer can directly and closely see the subject is very jarring to look at in photorealistic and even 3D stylised AI movie attempts. Maybe I can emphasise the storytelling and dialogues of the individual characters more in my project, since those are really easy to do from a technical standpoint. However, this also means that I would absolutely not get away with AI generated voices, because of the heavy emphasis on the voice actors’ performance. Maybe a music video is again the best way to go, provided it allows for storytelling via subtitles where the characters’ facial expressions are more important. Then again, that could be hard to pull off technically.

All in all there’s a lot I keep learning from watching these beautiful movies, and a lot to consider when it comes to recreating similar styles using AI, but overall I think the project could turn out very nicely. I’m looking forward to the animation tests in the future.

Links

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghost_in_the_Shell#Animated_films

by Simon Edl -

Blog Post 6 – Brain Dump 2

After the semester had settled down and the exhibition was more or less successfully dismantled, I was treated to three one-on-one talks about what will happen after the FH – my portfolio, future career, life decisions, what I want to achieve in life and so on. But before I can get to all that, I will have to tackle my Master’s Thesis.

Both the talk with Roman Pürcher and Ursula Lagger were about exactly that, albeit with slightly different focuses. As the title suggests, this blog post attempts to freeze my current headspace in time, because I feel like I got a lot of really useful input during the two sessions and I want to write down what is going through my head right now while it’s still fresh.

Roman’s talk

I talked to Roman about more general approaches to the thesis, when I would want to do what, how to go forward with the Design & Research blog posts and impulses and so on. But we also talked specifically about the practical and theoretical parts of the thesis, only briefly discussing the latter, to be discussed with Ursula Lagger the following day.

The practical part

We talked about some technical approaches and I took some notes on those, but most notably for me was the hypothesis of what could happen if my practical part doesn’t work out like I keep assuming; If anime style animation using AI simply is not possible at a level of quality I deem ‘good enough’ with the current tools, then what happens?

We came to the conclusion that that would be fine, too. In the unlikely event that the animation looks so bad and is so unusable that I could not use it, the worst case scenario would be that my anime video looks like the trailer I already made for StoryVis – featuring essentially no animation, yet brilliant backgrounds, amazing colors and a carefully art-directed aesthetic. That doesn’t sound too bad I think and I could still animate some things manually. This does mean, however, that my conclusion would have to be brutally honest: ‘AI Anime doesn’t work (yet)’. While disappointing, this doesn’t make the conclusion any less valid.

Going forward & next steps

Blog posts and impulses.

Just kidding – while the deadline of 22.FEB.24 approaches slowly but steadily, not to mention my holiday from the 8th til the 15th, I’m also thinking about the time after Design & Research. The next practical task I will need to tackle is of course the actual animation of my characters, since I think I don’t need to spend much more time on the backgrounds because Midjourney is already capable at producing essentially perfect backgrounds.

I want to use Pika to try and animate my already existing AI movie for StoryVis. This would allow me to use a story, art style, world and characters I already established and really like and therefore saves me a lot of time, serving as an experimental playground to test out the AI. Having said that, I really have no experience with animation AI and I don’t even know if you can give the AI images or if it can only do prompt-based generation of if Pika is even the tool to go with. I definitely want to talk to Kris van Hout about her amazing AI movie which featured a lot of very convincing AI generated motion that was generated on top of the generated images from Midjourney.

Ursula Lagger’s talk

Talking with Roman, we came up with a list of questions for Ursula Lagger, mainly concerned with the theoretical and scientific part of the thesis. Upon mentioning the questions about expert interviews and how to write research blog posts as quickly as possible before I go on holiday, it quickly became apparent that the core concept and structure of my theoretical part still needed a lot more work.

The theoretical part: structure

My overall idea of writing a cultural / historic section about past paradigm shifts and how they affected work culture is a great approach, but is a slippery slope that could cost me a lot of time. In order to make the section relevant, I would need to find out which example of innovative technologies in the past bears the most resemblance with the current developments of AI and then compare the two and speculate on the future of AI using my findings. These steps each require immense amounts of actual scientific and literary research. Just filtering out what I won’t write about because it’s not relevant enough will require so much work that it honestly might not be worth it, which is why I will need to drastically reduce my aspirations about the cultural and historical part of the paper, as not to get lost in the sauce.

However short this section is going to be, it necessitates a chapter in which I theorise about the future of AI and how it correlates to a past paradigm shift. For this, I will need to look into future studies, maybe conduct interviews with ‘Zukunftsforschenden’ (I really don’t know how to translate that accurately), and finally, give a prognosis or at least a personal opinion on the topic.

Something else I hadn’t considered up until my talk with Ursula Lagger was the inclusion of examples from works of other creatives and artists using AI technologies. According to Ursula Lagger, this is an absolutely essential part and cannot be left out of the thesis. A no-brainer, really, that contextualises my own findings and work in the current landscape of AI tools and possibilities. There are so many approaches and use-cases out there, out of which I have chosen a very niche combination: the creation of an anime.

  • How have other people tackled this?
  • Why am I not doing it the same way?
  • What AM I doing the same way?
  • What about ethical concerns of certain use cases?
  • What do I think of potentially dangerous use cases?
  • How are people using AI in the best and worst ways?
  • How can I compare this to new technologies in the past?

New technologies usually scare people and can cause shifts not only in the work culture but also in the art form itself. Another obvious observation if you think about it. Maybe I can write about early awful Photoshop creations of people overusing the layer styles resulting in terrible artworks, or how early photography was used completely differently from today? I could compare that to early AI creations, how we can usually tell when something is generated by an AI, how anatomy is weird, how text doesn’t work properly or how scripts and company or movie names generated by ChatGPT usually sound very cheesy and almost have a style on their own.

It’s only a matter of time when young artists figure out how to make something genuinely new with these new tools, genuinely good works of art that are not at all hindered by AI, but made possible because of it. Ultimately, that’s what I want to achieve with my practical part too – a genuinely good work of art that doesn’t scream ‘I WAS MADE WITH AI’.

Going forward & next steps

In any case, it seems like my practical part still requires a lot of thought and work to figure out how to weigh each of its parts, which at the moment seem to be:

  • Documentation of my practical work
  • Comparison to other approaches
  • Similarities to paradigm shifts in the past
  • Conclusions and Speculations

This list is what the theoretical chapters could look like judging from my current state of mind. I want to use the time until the 22nd of February to figure things out even further, continuing to write blog posts about my findings. I feel like Ursula Lagger’s inputs were as useful as they were abundant – so I need time to let all of it sit and see what I truly want to write about in the theoretical section of my thesis.

by Kris Van Hout -

Impulse #7 – Meta Modernism

Movies nowadays feel so different than movies that they used to make. There is very little straightforward storytelling and film anymore. Movies are either part of a multidimensional franchise or a satirical, surreal or absurd. They might contain a multiverse, break storytelling or a combination of those. There always have been movies like this but these things have gone from the occasional novelty to the norm.

Modernism
In modernism the medium film can been seen in a way as the default state of cinema. A movies sincerity and traditional story telling is what makes a movie modernist. Modernism looks at the traditional governments, art, religions and saying a lot of this seems flawed. And if we apply science, reason and rationalism we become more enlightened and have a more objective understanding of the truth and that would make the world a better place.
The movies are not just modernist in their values, it’s also modernist in its storytelling structure. What makes films surprising watching them 70 years later is that there are pretty much no twists. Which could feel very straight forward for audiences who have grown up postmodern and middle modern media.

Postmodernism
When questioning modernist values in film became more than norm in broader culture postmodernism began to form. People start to question if modernist values where actually good and really making things better for everybody. Instead of returning to traditional narratives, Postmodernism starts to question the value of narrative itself. And if you start questioning the narrative itself thing understandably start to get a little weird. In postmodernism we see movies that start to deconstruct the way stories are told in film. Time became fragmented, forth walls are getting broken, stories become more self-aware. They try to remind the viewer that they were a viewer.

Meta Modernism
unlike postmodernism, meta modernism has a depiction of sentiment that most postmodern movies never have. It also harnesses optimism and emotional sincerity. Meta Modernism in general can be seen as a response to postmodernism. It builds on post modernism. It swings back and forth to modernist straightforwardness and post modernism deconstruction.

In post modernism self-reflex is used to draw attention to limitation, structure and boundaries. People are too self-aware of passive entertainment and there is a lot to concern about things that are happening in the world and there might be a feeling we should do something about it. Making just an entertaining movie is maybe better to questioning these things.

Meta modernism is a form of post modernism but more optimistic and less cynical. It still deconstructs the narrative but keenly balanced with comedy, heartfelt, dramatic sentiment.

Cause of the internet and social media we are constantly overflown with traditional modernist and post-modernist narratives all at once. We have a perspective of the world that was never before possible. Meta modernism is an attempt to make sense of this new perspective. To pick and choose positive elements from each of philosophy and to recognize the multiverse that exists around us, while still trying to stay grounded.

Thomas Flight. (2023, 23. Mai). Why do movies feel so different now? [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5xEi8qg266g

by Kris Van Hout -

Impulse #6 – Why we all need subtitles now?

Nowadays I watch almost everything with subtitles but why is that? I can understand conversations when I talk to people when there are no subtitles.

Microphones
All sound used to be recorded at one track, that means that actors had to speak in a curtain angle so the mic could pick up their lines otherwise you couldn’t hear a thing.
But Microphones got better and they don’t impede performance as much anymore. They became smaller, better and even wireless. And we use more of them to be use the performances are getting captured. That would imply that everything is audible?

Editing
In earlier movie productions when lines were not able to hear on the recording actors had to come back and rerecord their lines (ADR). That is still be done today but it also costs a lot of money. So, editors nowadays need to try to make the sound that is recorded sound better. the microphone pickup almost every sound.

But even after the sound editing it is still hard sometimes to understand what the actors are saying.  You can’t just turn up the dialogue otherwise it will be in contrast with the Dynamic Range: The range between your quietest sound and you loudest sound. As the dialogue is as loud as an explosion that follows that dialogue, the explosion is not going to feel as big. Also turning up the dialogue can cause distortion.

What also causes the problem of not hearing the dialogue on your phone, laptop or Tv is that the movies we are watching are edited for big surround sound like Dolby Atmos. And all those 128 tracks have to come down to one or two tracks to match our device we are watching it from. (downmixing)

When you combine not great speakers, mumble performances, dynamic range with bombastic sound over dialogue and a flattened mix. It is not a surprise that we have trouble understanding what is going on.

Solutions:
1. Buy better speakers
2. Worry a bit less about picking up every single word that gets said
3. Keep the subtitles on

Vox. (2023a, Januar 20). Why we all need subtitles now [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VYJtb2YXae8

by Kris Van Hout -

Blog #9 – Can AI make my master thesis?

Can we use AI for our Master thesis? The answer to that is no but is that a good thing or should we be allowed to use AI?
I came across this video on YouTube that had some pretty interesting insights about this topic.

At the beginning not everyone knew where to use AI chatbots for. But for students it was pretty obvious to use it for school assignments to give answers to questions and even with .4 versions of ChatGPT AI can analyze data, read images files, and write at the college level.

What does this mean for education?
How do we know that students have learned?

Banning AI
To ban AI, schools have to block AI websites, they need to use AI detecting software to detect Ai generated texts and shifting more work into class hours and onto paper.
But there are a lot of pros and cons for banning AI completely. Teachers don’t want to be policing measures like this. The detection software is really imperfect and can cause false positives. How can teacher accuse a student of using AI when they are not 100% sure.
Does it make sense to ban chatbot when tech companies are inserting them everywhere else.
Grammerly, Notion, Google Docs have a “help me write” and other functions that are considered AI. Do we now have to cite all the AI we are using?

Allowing AI
Allowing AI in school can be helpful for students to understand how to use AI and how future generations are using it. It will become part of our everyday lives such as spelling checkers, translation software and calculators.
But ChatGPT and other AI chatbots are still not perfect. There are a lot of flaws and you can’t just copy and paste. But how do you know when something it correct when you don’t know anything about the subject. But we have that problem with humans as well.

The risk with AI is that we are not learning enough from it because it’s a passive way of gaining information. Learning it not about having the right/correct answer but it is about the struggle and the growth. It’s for students to realize “this” is where I use ChatPGT for and “this” is where I don’t need to use ChatGPT for.

I think for highschoolers it would be better to ban ChatGPT since they didn’t choose to study and would use AI to quickly get rid of their homework. But College and University Student choose to study for a curtain topic and they want to learn and that hopefully makes them smart enough to use AI in a responsible way. As a Master student you choose to be in university and why would you waste an opportunity to let AI make all your assignments and learn nothing from it.

Vox. (2023, 12. Dezember). AI can do your homework. Now what? [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bEJ0_TVXh-I

by Kris Van Hout -

Impulse #5 – How to make Learning as Addictive as Social Media (TedTalk)

Duolingo made a language app so it is accessible for everyone to learn a new language. They choose to make an app since most people have access to a smartphone. But what also comes with a smartphone are addictive social media platforms.

What Duolingo did to keep people using their language app is using the same psychological techniques as social media platforms and games are using to keep people engaged.

  • One of the most powerful ones it’s the notion of a streak.
  • Another mechanism to get people come back to the app are notification. With notifications you shouldn’t be spamming.

When you learn something out of it you get meaning out of it. And when you don’t get that it feels like you have been wasting your time.

I think this way of thinking can by applied to a lot of different things. As on social media content. The content you are making has to be meaningful and has to be a certain way that people want to come back to your page/campaign.

TED. (2023, 26. Oktober). How to make learning as addictive as social Media | Luis von Ahn | TED [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P6FORpg0KVo

by Kris Van Hout -

Impulse #4 – Duolingo’s TikTok Best practice

In the podcast 20VC from Harry Stebbings he is interviewing Zaria Parvez – Social media Manager at Duolingo. She is talking about the success of their social media accounts with a special look to TikTok.

Zaria didn’t know a lot about advertising and she had fresh eyes to it. She just started making funny videos with the Duolingo mascot suit that nobody was using at the time. The content she was making was different and unexpected and no other brand was doing that yet. The small human moment is what Zaria thinks which made the TikTok page of Duolingo blow up.

Zaria choose for TikTok as a platform because it felt like a native platform to her. Also TikTok mentioned that they hat 1 billion users (September 2021). “And if People are on TikTok they are not on our app. How do we bring people back to our app.” Zaria. Duolingo doesn’t see other language apps as competitors but apps like TikTok or other social media platforms that are taking attention away from taking your daily language lesion. “How do we bring back the daily lesion or push notification to TikTok” Zaria.

For Zaria TikTok and Reels feels more connected and Shorts feels a bit more distanced. The Content that is made has to be fit with the trends that are going on. “Is the content entertaining to you when you are making it? Or do you have fun making it? Then most likely it has a chance to become viral. Is it sharable?”

Zaria doesn’t believe that the quantity of posting is important what a lot of people suggest but she thinks the quality is far more important.

So, to sum up the things that has been said. Make sure why you are using social media content. And try to be different than all the other main brands.

20VC with Harry Stebbings. (2024b, Januar 21). Behind Duolingo viral success 🔥 [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nPBRuzPF7XI

20VC with Harry Stebbings. (2024a, Januar 20). Duolingo’s Owl Origin Story  [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cOGv96tYdnE  

by Kris Van Hout -

Impulse #3 – Virtual Production

Visual production allows the filmmaker to see what a shot look like in its final form. Visual production is a process where real-world filmmaking and digital effects occur simultaneously. This is in contrast to green/blue screen where the onset cast had the visualize in their minds what the shot will look like.
Virtual production finds it base in video projection being used as backgrounds in film shoots. With video production where the movie relies heavily on green screen it makes it harder to visual the actual shot. Lighting, camera angels and more are hard to predict.  Avatar was one of the first movies using virtual production.

How does it work
Today’s popular usage of virtual production is using a set of LED walls. Combined with unreal engines. Resulting a photorealistic background. Before filming the camera need to be synced with the 3d camera to follow every movement and to create the parallax effect.
One of the benefits is its use as a light source. Where green screen casts green shadows, the LED walls reflect the natural light from the background that is used at the time. But it has some hard time with recreating direct daylight.
Another benefit is that it makes location flexible. But camera movement is limited.
Where with green/blue screen most visual effects were done in post-production with virtual production most of the visual effects has to be done in the pre-production since the set needs to be ready for production. When the screens are not ready for the shoot, green screen replacements can be used.
Virtual production also solves a practical problem:  the eye line. With predicting where the visual effects will be as an actor it can be hard to have the eyes on the same line as the direction where the object would be in post. The LED set will fix this problem.

StudioBinder. (2023, 17. April). Virtual Production explained — Is this the end of the green screen? [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a25BMp5Z1QY

by Kris Van Hout -

Blog #8 – Expose v.2

The Problem
What is the best way to make a social media campaign a question that a lot of marketing teams are asking themselves but still don’t have quite clear answer to that. Why is a social media campaign valuable for brands? How does a campaign communicate? What is a social media campaign and what does it include? This thesis will mainly focus on Short-form-video in these social media campaigns and
want to find out why do they work so well and what is the secret behind it.

State of research
Since short form video is quite new, there are not a lot of scientific papers about it. There are a lot of papers and books about traditional marketing where the essence of marketing can be taken from and put those findings in the new form of marketing. Also interviews and best practice will be done about this topic to figure out what the real reactions/results are of curtain social media campaigns.

Question
There are multiple questions that will be answered in this thesis:
– What is a social media campaign? What does it include?
– Why is a social media campaign valuable for brands?
– How does a campaign communicate and how is that different from traditional marketing communication?
– Would it be better for a company to invest into one brand movie or a whole campaign?
– Why does content matter?

The hypothesis
This master thesis will provide a written form of guidelines for an optimized social media campaign based on short form video. It will also execute a campaign itself to state if the findings are correct.

The reference to theory
There are a lot of social media campaigns with short form video but you rarely find the secret recipe to the best way of doing it the right way. Short form video is quite new and therefore, there is a lot to list out what is the best way to do so.

The Method
The method will be based on three pillars:
1. Best practice, analyze previous campaigns. And interview people who play a key role in defining the industry, are questioned about their social media management processes and point out what the importance is of a good social media campaign.
2. Theoretical contextualization of traditional and agile marketing/social media methods.
3. Implementation, of all the findings to a social media campaign for a live event (achtvanbladel)
All pillars are combined to find optimized guidelines for a social media campaign focused on short form video.

The Material
There are all kinds of sources available: Theoretical books, scientific papers, Tedtalks, Interviews, data of previous campaigns

Bibliography
Brown, R. E., Jones, V. K. & Wang, M. (o. D.). The new advertising: branding, content, and consumer relationships in the data-driven social media era. Volume 1 Traditional advertising transformed (Volume 1).
Coker, K. K., Flight, R., & Baima, D. M. (2017). Skip it or view it: The Role of Video Storytelling in Social Media Marketing. Researchgate.
Kurzrock, Ethan. (2019). Intensified Play: Cinematic study of TikTok mobile app.

Structure

  1. Title
  2. Abstract
  3. Introduction
  4. Literature review
  5. Method
  6. Results
  7. Conclusion
  8. Discussion

Timetable
February – April: Theoretical part, best practice, analyse previous campaigns. And interview people who play a key role in defining the industry, are questioned about their social media management processes and point out what the importance is of a good social media campaign.
April – June: Preproduction for Implementation
July – August: Social media campaign for a live event (achtvanbladel)
August – September: Results, Conclusion, Discussion