The final work l did for the studio was a film called Revenant with two of my classmates we wanted the film to tackle ideas of lost media, why films don’t get released and what’s left/remembered of them. “While terms like ‘unmade’, ‘unfinished’, even ‘unseen’, can be problematic, underlying these terms is the principle that there was some kind of creative effort that left behind artefacts, however fragmented.” (Fenwick, 2020) With these ideas in mind we tried to craft a narrative around a film and story that was never told an artefact on history only preserved in film. this is one aspect we wanted to emphasis is the power and influence that film can have as a form of storytelling and how it can affect people. Our story directly tackles this with the forgotten film in the narrative playing a crucial role as characters actively seeking it out sets in the plot and conflicts in motion. l learned in the studio about the blurring between what is considered an unmade film if it’s a movie that never got filmed, never released etcetera I also did research into why these films never see the big screen and my group and l wanted to give a more dramatic approach in the film to push these ideas and thoughts on the audience without making the film too boring. My group had a few roadblocks in our production but l think the main issue we had was communication in a few aspects the main big one was that there was a lot of time where we wouldn’t hear from group members. Not hearing slowed down pre-production a lot because we couldn’t really be on the same page with it. On top of that we had some miscommunication on who was doing certain aspects of the project or what times we were meeting up which made shooting days a lot tighter than they needed to be. In saying that l think our best aspect was the work ethic and ideas when we were all together, the days where all of us we’re in and discuss plot or shooting the movies were our most effective we were able to collaborate and bounce off of each other’s ideas really well. Our main problem was that didn’t happen much. I think the key thing l would improve is the pacing of the movie. When we first came up with our pitch, we had a lot of branching ideas and story threads with time a lot of these aspects got cut due to time and scheduling “The reason fast cutting doesn’t necessarily speed up a longish film? Because what really matters is not the number of cuts per minute, but the amount of story beats per unit of time.” (Segers 2022). With that added time I think the story wouldn’t have felt so rush and we would have been able to explore our idea of lost media better and examine it’s impact in a more nuanced way. As Segers says separating scenes of story beats will slow down your story and l think the film need a few of those to ease into the story in a proper way. I think as well reshoots would help the pacing more extending some scenes and doing them again after seeing the results from the original shoot would have allowed us to rethink certain scenes.  

One big one for me is the use of found footage in movies I don’t really watch horror movies which is where it was popularised and saw it more as a gimmick. “The practice of using found footage in cinema has been variously claimed as a ‘junk aesthetic’ or as an ‘aesthetic of ruins’, descriptions that recognise its status as an alternative, subcultural, underground, environmentalist and even anti-capitalist mode of artistic expression.” (Danks 2006) From the reading and using it in the film I think I get the use of it more. I see it more now as a more enhanced way of conveying theme or ideas with themes of class in mind I think the tool can be excellent to displaying that divide. I also think with characters scenes can feel more personal and real with the use of found footage and it is something l want to experiment with in our projects going forward. One big takeway l had with collaboration is how a group is able to develop ideas and practices as l touched on before when my group was all together l think we worked really effectively. I found doing everything together would be the best way to go about a production like this because everyone comes with their own ideas and are able to expand and improve them through the discussion and feedback within the group. With other projects and just in general l want to seek out that feedback and improve me work through it.  

Looking at the project now the production was very difficult to juggle Will wasn’t that responsive and Chiara was away for a week with all that the production has taught me a lot about communication, time management and teamwork within the realm of making a film. With production around the corner, we made some more bigger changes a changed from having Me, Will and Chiara being the main characters to just me and my friend Theo. We decided this would be best since Chiara would miss a portion of production and this allowed Will to be behind the camera for most of the filming. Thankfully this didn’t affect production to much and required minor adjustments to the script which me and Chiara worked on. The first scene we had planned to film was the talk show scene giving us some extra time to revise the script changes and get better understand of the equipment and style we were going for. The shoot went great unfortunately the audio was unusable so we would have to refilm that scene later. From there the next few days of filming went pretty well with Me, Will and Theo getting major parts of the film shot and even redoing the talk show scene this time in the bigger studio and with access to the prop room which made the scene feel a lot more authentic. For the reshoot we did have to change some of the actors around with my friend Maddie playing the director the film time and Chiara playing the host, Will played the host the second time and my friend Hiedi stepped in as the fake director which was great. From there filming got down to the wire we we’re really short on time and a lot of the scenes were filmed quickly to make up for it with me and Theo filming some scenes by ourselves in Williamstown. One thing that was challenging while filming was that Will was the only one with the footage so figuring out if needed to do reshoots or keeping continuity was hard to do. Postproduction was kind of a mystery for me and Chiara since Will said he’d work on that since he felt he didn’t pull he’s weight in pre-production but because of that we have no idea how the editing is going but l trust he’ll get it done on time. 

Starting out on the big project for the course a wanted to look at directors’ cuts in a documentary format analyse where the line is drawn between movies that never got made and ones that did but were shells of their concepts and craft. With Will and Chiara joining our idea shifted more towards looking at why movies don’t get made and who would stop them through the lens of a narrative tale. I research began into the horror genre and how we could convey this idea for our own movie, l found the movie Sinister that features a plot of finding these hidden tapes of secret about previous owners of the house and we wanted to use that in the story. For style l looked at the Blair Witch Project’s use of found footage giving the story a more grounded approach in aspects. From this start we had a lot of ideas and concepts but that was kind of it l think when we did the pitch, we all had vague ideas but nothing truly concrete. One big thing l learned from this project is not underestimating scale and the pitch helped with that a lot, things like the cult member trailer and extra scenes of finding bits of footage were great but given the time and effort that it would of taken raining in our idea was much needed. After that the group did a lot more talking and l mapped out a extensive plan of the story, characters, what needed to be, where and when. That plan has helped us keep on track of everything for the film which also was quite daunting to do. Once that was sorted out, we changed it so that everyone would do one part of the script I was doing the first third, Chiara did the second and Will the end. With this idea to keep characters and ideas cohesive me and Chiara went over the script together and reworked aspect. From their Chiara did some storyboarding for the film and we finished preproduction from there. Although we we’re a little behind schedule at this point we still had enough time to film and edit everything together.  

Phantom Cinema Blog 1: https://www.mediafactory.org.au/jonah-alexander/2025/08/08/phantom-cinema-blog-1/

Phantom Cinema Blog 2: https://www.mediafactory.org.au/jonah-alexander/2025/08/08/phantom-cinema-blog-2/

I didn’t really do many extra readings or anything thing week l’ve mostly just been working on my assignment two. For this assignment since it’s fully done by AI generations l really wanted to use as many different tools as l could so l started with a new one which was chat GPT, I used the tool to figure out a story for my short film l asked it a few questions about what generative AI is the best at making and it suggested landscapes and sculptures. From there l asked about stories involving those thing which lead to my idea of a time traveller jumping from time period to time period. From my experience with chat gpt l found it to be very smooth and polish. From what l’ve heard about people using it to write essay l don’t think it would be that good at that for me l found chat GPT works best in conjunction with your idea such as helping edit writing or giving feedback on a piece. Chat gpt is a tool more sorted to working with a person rather then working by its self. I found this to assignment to be a big shift in my mindset towards AI with chat GPT especially from what l read about AI and the way people talk about it AI seems like it could everything perfectly automatically without any human input needed which is completely missing the mark on these tools. I admit AI is very efficient and quick but it is not always accurate chat GPT requires a good amount of human input to produce something note worth most of the time so an over reliance on it won’t be useful but using it to enhance, review or make suggestions on piece you’ve done is really where it shines. This some what relates to one reading l did do on creativity with generative AI tools the reading emphasis need for creativity to still drive our productions and that creativity doesn’t come from the machine but what you give the machine l think this is another reason the hate towards AI tools are blown out of proportions the human aspected needed to still creative something special like l discussed last week with the art piece. I’m hoping to have all the video clips done on leonardo AI all finished up by the end of the week and do some research on a tool that makes music for the short film to go with it.

This week l found an interesting case that l wanted to write about how someone won an art competition using an AI generated image and the other artists in the competition were really upset. The thing is he didn’t actually break any rules. I found the backslash to be very interesting and something fairly common in today’s society with the way that AI is viewed. From what l’ve read in the media AI is spun to be this new and imposing advancement in technology, something that when too far, too automatic. The article about the artwork really reinforced that even though the guy never broke any of the rules he was still endlessly criticized. The work was degraded as not real art and something that requires no effort. This is l think one of if not the biggest misconceptions about AI generations from my experience so far, the generation can be very hard to control being extreme finicky and a lot more time consuming than people would think. This is exactly what the articles addresses with it taking the artist over 80 hours and producing around 900 different drafts. No, it may not be conventional, but l whole heartedly believe that the AI generation are art and require an insane amount of skill, time and passion and isn’t that something that should be awarded. This reading was very insightful and interesting with a lot of real-world implications, and it fit in nicely with what we worked on in class this week. In the slides we looked at different types of media generations and one that really interested me that l did some extra research on was showrunner it’s a program that will allow views to essential create the show they want to watch. You put in a short description and the ai creates a scene or episode of that show. The idea of showrunner is both really exciting and frightening that fact that the media in the future could be entirely made by what a viewer is feeling when they sit down on the couch is mind blowing. For me as someone who wants to make media l’m hoping that there is still demand for media being made by people. I see with how much talk there is around AI that it will improve and grow exponentially but l’m just hoping that even when it does reach these next steps that people still make things themselves and tell their stories. 

This week has mainly been spent working on my project. I finally figured out an idea that l thought relates to me and one that l feel l have a nice angle on. I chose to do AI enhanced learning. I started doing tutoring a year or two ago and my mom’s been teaching since before I was born so as a student and a teacher (to some degree) I felt it would be a fun research project. I found the reading l did on this topic to be very harsh and brutal to AI enhanced learning and l found other really embraced the tools as the new way of teaching in every classroom. For me l found these ideals to be too stark and simple, I believe that yes AI enhanced learning does have a place in learning now days with it’s accessibility, ease and how comfortable kids are using it but in person learning l feel is still essentially to the development in kids in general. With in person learning they get in work with other, talk to teachers and have exciting and different ways of teaching from the variety of teachers they get over the years. Since starting this course l’ve become more sympathetic to these AI tool and l think a mix between the two is what the future really holds for teaching in this day and age. Another interesting thing l found when researching is how students are using AI to do work for them which is where a lot of the criticism of AI in learning comes into play. Things like ChatGpt have been used to summaries readings, rewrite paragraphs or even write whole essays although these are bound to happen and will continue too I think there are enough measures in place now days were alot of these problems can be negated. With the project l found it hard to make the blogs and reflection different from what l understand the two seem very similar with the reflection just solely focusing on the project. So, l want to see how l go with marks on the reflection especially. I also found the AI tool helpful on this assignment especially the generative AI ones that allowed me to get exactly what l wanted from a shot and l fell l’ve improved alot with Leonardo most and getting better at use and changing prompt to get the code to produce what l’m envisioning even though it takes quite a bit of time to do.  

This week the big software we began to use was Leonardo Ai the website has been a lot of fun to play around with so far we got given a bunch of tokens so l’m hoping the software will be something we get to use a lot. I found the prompt didn’t always give me what l wanted to and that giving the AI more detailed prompt made in more in line with what l had imagined for each image. Leonardo, as fun as it was big, had a few things that l felt held it back and were a bit difficult to use. Sometime which long prompts especially it would really focus on small aspect of what l wrote and put a big emphasis on it even though in was a piece of what l wanted the picture to be. This was a bit frustrating but most of the time after some trial-and-error l was able to get the results l wanted. I also discovered hands and other limbs on humans and animals sometimes looked unnatural as in they were bent in weird ways or long than other limbs or a couple times some creations had like 6 fingers. The limbs problem was that bad a from the same prompt there was always at least one generation that generated in the right way, so this was more of a little inconvenience. Workflow was another topic that we covered this week and one that a feel has a lot of real world application which l want to see how l can incorporate this idea into doing my university homework or even just a general schedule. The discuss about everyday AI made me realize l do know a lot more about AI then l thought since l use it heaps without even realizing. Siri and video recommendation on things like Netflix or YouTube are ones that l never really considered to be AI more so just some code but the more l delve into this class and it’s readings the more l’ve noticed that thats what AI is just code, very advanced and exciting code but code non the less the discover really helped me visualize all the ways AI is or can be used in everyday living. It’s been exciting looking into the capabilities of AI and how it works to understand more about how AI functions is an aspect l hope we spend time looking into in class.