In an attempt to freeze my current state of mind in time, as not to lose my current motivations and fresh thoughts, I will summarise two breakthroughs or epiphanies I have had in the last few weeks regarding my master’s thesis.
The practical part
As part of one of the subjects in the third semester, Story & Visualisation, we have to come up with a movie concept and trailer with the help of AI tools, more or less exactly what I want to do for my master’s thesis. During the first phases of the process, I quickly noticed how much I disliked the workflow – using ChatGPT for the idea, storyboard and shotlist, and especially prompting and using Midjourney. Obviously, I can’t go writing a master’s thesis for 700 hours if I hate the entire process.
It wasn’t until I switched from a photorealistic style to that of an 80s anime movie, inspired by Akira (1988) that motivation struck me. And it struck me hard, leading me to work late into the night during my free time, perfecting the perfect prompt, getting filled with excitement when they turned out nice, and eagerly putting it all together in After Effects and starting to come up with a soundtrack and voiceover.
I want to preserve the importance of this moment in this blog post, so in case in the future I get frustrated or confused about what I’m doing again, I can look back at this and maybe get a better feeling for why it is I want to do all this. And that’s to be able to create the things I’m inspired by, which as it turns out, does not include as many cinematic masterpieces as I thought. During my free time, the shows I watch, the movies I enjoy, and hell, even the tattoos on my body are all anime or animation based, so I don’t know why it took so long to come to this conclusion, but I’m glad I did.
The AI also works much better for the hand-painted backgrounds I love so much from 80s and 90s anime, the parallax effects is also easy and quickly looks just like the real deal, with a fraction of the time needed to pull it off (not to mention the fact that I can’t paint at all). The biggest challenge at the moment is definitely the animation aspect of it all, so I will focus my future practical research on this.
The theoretical part
During my talk with Daniel Bauer, we also talked a lot about the practical aspect of my paper, but I did not want to spend too much time on that, given that I had just made a breakthrough about it the week prior or so. Instead, I wanted to gain some input about where I could take the theoretical part of my paper, since that was still giving me headaches.
Daniel and I talked about the more obvious AI topics such as the legal situation and the ethics of it all and quickly agreed that those are either useless to write about, boring, or both. Daniel recommended I focus egotistically on what I actually find interesting and ignore some of the more obvious aspects, since those will get covered by someone else anyway.
We ended up talking about paradigm shifts in culture and, more specifically, work culture; From how people feared that ‘painting was dead’ (Paul Delaroche upon seeing the first Daguerreotype in 1840) when the photograph was invented, or how the art community feared Photoshop when it was introduced in the late 80s to name just two examples. Both of which didn’t kill any art form or deleted jobs from existence, but rather caused a massive shift in culture and the industry.
That is what I want to focus on; an analysis of paradigm shifts caused by technologies in the past, focussing on the creative industry, and comparing them to the current developments of AI, speculating on how this will affect the creative industry.
Conclusion
These two breakthroughs felt like I was finally able to crack my back that was bothering me for a while, relaxing me at the end of a stressful day. I feel like these new approaches have enabled me to actually look forward to my master’s thesis with excitement, rather than dread. Even while writing this blog post that was initially only meant as a way to preserve my current state of mind, I found out some details about how I will approach the paper, like focussing on the creative industry’s paradigm shifts and wanting to focus on work culture. All in all, I’m more excited than ever to get started on the project. But first, let’s finish this exhibition.
