Columns
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Crash Course: A Professor Quickly Learns about AI
Earlier this year, as ChatGPT, Midjourney, Runway and a long list of other AI tools ignited a national conversation about artificial intelligence, many of my colleagues in the School of Cinematic Arts at the University of Southern California shuddered in horror over the displacement of human craft and creativity by visuals created through simple text prompts. Published in The New York Times in February, columnist Kevin Roose’s description of his creepy conversation with Bing added gasoline to the fire, prompting a desire to prohibit the use of all AI across all of our programs. And what about plagiarism?! The general […]
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A New Kind of Cinematograph: New Filmmakers at the AI Film Festival
We see a childhood photograph nearly centered in the frame on a black backdrop. In the photograph, a boy of three or four years of age smiles inside the bathtub with his two dogs. A few seconds later, the black screen around the photograph becomes part of the photograph; the image expands and the rest of the room is revealed. Everything looks familiar and slightly off at the same time. The tiles are slightly skewed, as if the wall has melted. The shape of the bathtub looks normal but perhaps larger than usual. There are suddenly three more dogs in […]
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Peak TV is Over—What Comes Next?
Remember “Peak TV”? It was a good run, starting more than a decade ago with the launch of filmmaker-driven shows such as Lena Dunham’s Girls on HBO, David Fincher’s House of Cards on Netflix and Jane Campion’s Top of the Lake on Sundance Channel, not to mention episodic heavyweights like Breaking Bad, Game of Thrones, Mad Men and The Walking Dead, all of which supplied steady work for a plethora of indie writers and directors. But that party is over—or at least taking a break. If the corporate mergers and media layoffs of the past year weren’t enough of a […]
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Turning Poetry into Art: Joanne McNeil on Large Language Models and the Poetry of Allison Parrish
An application like ChatGPT is “taking the last 20 years of the internet and chewing it up, then producing a system that draws from that,” Allison Parrish explained when we spoke over Zoom last month. To the poet and programmer, generating content with large language model (LLM) neural nets is like “powering an engine with the methane that comes from decomposing corpses in a graveyard.” Few artists working today have Parrish’s depth of experience with generative text. You have likely encountered her work online, especially if you were active on Twitter in the “Horse_ebooks” era. Early on in her career, […]
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Binge Watch: How Silicon Valley Lifestyles Are Being Portrayed on Screens Large and Small
A number of recent films and television shows have been set in the tech industry. And regularly, I notice these projects can’t seem to decide: What’s the problem with Silicon Valley, anyway? One might draw a straight line from a character like Wall Street’s Gordon Gekko to jobs lost and houses foreclosed upon, but the consequences of “disruption” can be trickier to distill into lines as visceral and powerful as “greed is good.” I was thinking about this when I watched part of Super Pumped on a plane earlier this year. As it happens, American Airlines is one of the […]
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Paradigm Shifts: TV-Focused Curriculum Changes at Three Film Schools
A couple of years ago, I was chatting with writer Jack Epps, a colleague of mine at the School of Cinematic Arts at the University of Southern California. We were marveling over the rise of the limited series as a format, and he explained that it allows for an expanded second act. “You can really develop the relationship between a protagonist and antagonist,” he said, using Killing Eve as a great example. I was intrigued by the idea that new formats could allow different aspects of storytelling to emerge so, for this issue’s column, I asked the heads of three […]
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New Generation: How A24 Is Helping Keep Art Films Alive
A trio of celebrated and highly distinctive breakout movies at this year’s Sundance Film Festival—Raven Jackson’s visionary All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt, Savanah Leaf’s heartrending Earth Mama and Celine Song’s gripping Berlin Competition selection Past Lives—share a few conspicuous elements: They were all debut features made by women of color, they each display an impressive mastery of their forms and they were all backed by A24. A24 has been celebrating one of its biggest years ever—a record 18 total Oscar nominations and its highest grossing film in Everything Everywhere All At Once—but amidst the genre mashups, prestige star vehicles and […]
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Hit & Misses: The 2022 Releases of Six Recent Sundance Features
In just three (admittedly, very momentous) years, the marketplace for independent films has completely changed. During previous turning points over the decades, executives would use words like “waves” or “cycles” to describe instances of upheaval, but what’s happening now is more like a comprehensive reset. In a recent online article titled “The Sky is Falling, Take Shelter,” producer Rebecca Green wrote, “This year is unlike anything I’ve seen in the 20 years I’ve been working in this business.” If Sundance and its films are a barometer for the independent film industry, consider this comparison: The pre-pandemic class of Sundance 2019 […]
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Beyond the Third Act: Everest Pipkin’s Cinema-Inspired Tabletop RPG World Ending Game
“Endings are very hard,” said Everest Pipkin. “It’s one of the most difficult things about making anything, and only gets harder when you are collaboratively telling a story with lots of people.” Speaking via video chat from their home in southern New Mexico, Pipkin, an artist and game designer, recently released World Ending Game, a tabletop “falling-action game” designed for players to bring existing campaigns to a close. Say you’re part of a weekly group playing Dungeons & Dragons and everyone is ready to move on. Your party can wrap things up and bring your existing characters — the druid, […]
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Daydreaming, Neuroscience and Screenwriting: The Imaginative Teaching of Mary Sweeney
“I have always had a hard time explaining my creative process to people,” says Mary Sweeney, a professor of screenwriting in the John Wells Division of Writing for Screen & Television at the School of Cinematic Arts at the University of Southern California. Sweeney boasts a long list of filmmaking credits but may be best known for her collaborations as a producer, writer and editor with filmmaker David Lynch. In particular, Sweeney edited Lost Highway and Mulholland Drive, two deliriously dreamy films that highlight a form of poetic cinema and a creative process that Sweeney hopes to share with students. […]
