Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Hello and welcome to Storyteller In Depth, a podcast where we go behind the scenes to learn more about the School of Communications, Media, Arts and designs, people, places and things. I'm your host, Pat Quigley. Artificial intelligence has made its way into so many different parts of our lives throughout our AI series. So far, we've seen AI in editing, content creation, and the writing industry explored as themes within a book. And now in today's episode, we'll be looking at AI in the film industry. To speak on this, we have Karen Schopswitz. Karen is an instructor at the School of Communications, Media, Arts and Design, as well as a Peabody winning producer, director, editor and camera person. To find out how AI has begun to embed itself in the filmmaking process, as well as some considerations, professionals should maybe consider a discussion on AI voice generated software advice for future filmmakers. And there is a lot more, so be sure to stick around for this podcast.
Thank you, Karen, so much for being on the podcast today.
[00:01:06] Speaker B: Thank you for having me.
[00:01:08] Speaker A: Yeah, no, it's awesome. It's cool to I was a previous graduate of the broadcasting program and you're a fairly new coordinator, I guess, for the past couple years. So it's nice to put a face to the name.
[00:01:21] Speaker B: No, I think that's great. It's good to meet you. And I love that you went through the program, so that's great.
[00:01:26] Speaker A: Yeah. So just before we kind of dive into the AI side of things, which we're going to talk about today, can you tell us a little bit about yourself and provide listeners with an overview of your experience in the film industry?
[00:01:38] Speaker B: Oh, boy. Well, without sounding like I'm 100 years old, I have been working in the industry for about the past 30 years. I work primarily as a documentary filmmaker. I'm one of those well, I do a lot of documentaries for other people, but I'm also very much an independent in that on my own films, I am often the producer and the director. I am also the editor and often the camera or second camera person. My husband is also a camera person and a director of photography. So on our own documentaries, we work a lot together and I work a lot as an editor for hire and as a director for hire. And I've worked primarily in documentary, but I've also done music videos, short fiction, films, corporate, pretty much anything.
[00:02:28] Speaker A: Why do you want to do documentaries?
Why did you choose that path?
[00:02:32] Speaker B: Okay, well, without scaring you, originally I wanted to write sitcoms. Okay. Yeah. And I wasn't really that interested in documentary. Oh, documentary students don't judge me. But I fell in love with it because when I was in I did a degree in journalism school and film studies. I went to Carlton, and then I did a master's in film and video. And when I was supposed to write a screenplay for my masters and I was going to write a comedy. And then I got this crazy idea. My father was a wonderful, wonderful amateur film filmmaker and he shot tons and tons of 16 millimeter film. And his grandparents had a hotel in Muskoka. And my dad as a kid, as a 16 year old boy, went up there and shot all this footage. And I knew that people still knew about the hotel. This was a few years ago and had gone there and I realized I had all this beautiful footage. So I said to my thesis advisor, I don't really want to write a screenplay. I'd really like to make a documentary. And then I made that documentary and I had some success with it and I just fell in love with the craft of it and just kept going from there.
[00:03:45] Speaker A: It's always interesting to hear why people choose the vocation they choose, right? And to know that you're taking some of your history and wanting to expand that and to share that with other people is incredible. And it's so awesome to hear that.
[00:04:02] Speaker B: Yeah, it was really good. It was something that meant a lot to me. I really grew up with a dad who gave me a super, a camera when I was 16, much in the same way that he had gotten a 16 millimeter when he was a kid. And I always tell my students, I was that nerdy kid walking around making little films and editing them together. Probably even earlier, probably from age twelve, age 13. So I knew I wanted to do something in that area. I was also really interested in theater, but film just kind of kept pulling me over.
[00:04:34] Speaker A: Wow. So you've been a director, an editor, a writer and a producer on a number of different documentaries and short films, including the one we just talked about. Can you share a little bit more about the traditional process involved with each role?
[00:04:45] Speaker B: So pretty much as a producer, it's my least favorite part, only because you have to find the money and I hate it. And I've gotten smart and have started to partner with other people who somehow seem to enjoy that part. But as a producer, it's a lot of it is figuring out, what does the market want? Is there a broadcaster for it? Everything that I've done has been pretty much for a broadcaster for television. And so it's figuring out, who do I pitch this to? What do I do with this? How do I write a proposal? What am I going to do in terms of characters? Once we're out in the field, I'm always torn. I love being out in the field. I love directing. I get really excited. It's really fun. I love the connection with people, put a camera in my hand. I love that part too.
I know I sound like but I like all aspects of it. I love when I am finished and I sit down in my studio, which basically is a desk with a computer on it, and start editing. That has changed a lot.
And so once I start editing, that's also really great. And in the last few years, I've started taking on editing gigs for other filmmakers. And I love that part because I don't have any preconceptions going into it. I'm watching their footage, I'm discovering their stories, and there's something really nice and really satisfying about that. But also in terms of the technology, like, when you think about it and why I get so interested in how AI has evolved. My first film, I cut on tape. That was tape to tape, and it was brutal. And I had no money, and I rented two old decks that every 20 minutes, I had to unscrew the top of the deck, stick my finger in, and move the reel around, because that was all I could afford.
And you know that when you're doing that, you have to really try and not do 100 cuts because it's tape. So every time you start again, the tape looks worse and worse and worse and worse. And so then when I made the transition, that was linear editing. When I made the transition to nonlinear editing, I still remember I was working on a film, and I invited one of my best friends to come over and watch it. And she said to me, oh, I really love this, but have you thought there's something really cool that happens in the end? What if you put that up in the beginning? And I was like, oh, that's brilliant. I never thought of that. So click click, mouse, oops, copy, paste it's at the beginning. And I went, wow, what a great idea. I love that. And she looks at me and she goes, okay, you have now defined for me what nonlinear editing is, because when you were doing linear editing, if I had said that to you, you would have been like, no, I don't think it would really work. And it's just because you knew it would be a lot of effort. It would take a lot more work to do it. But this is like a word document. You're just cutting and pasting and moving stuff around and seeing where it lands. And that's been the biggest change for me in terms of what I do now.
[00:07:44] Speaker A: For sure. Yeah. Just the evolution, even in the last, what, 1015 years, of how editing has changed drastically.
When I was doing a co op back at a community television station back home, we were doing everything on DV cam tapes, and everything was done there. And you had to make sure that if you were going over the hour, you had to be real quick to switch those tapes out so that you didn't miss a second so that if it had to be recorded, you didn't miss anything until now. Where everything's on digital and on hard drives and in the cloud now, too, right?
The evolution to that is wild.
[00:08:24] Speaker B: Well, it's crazy even when you think about shooting. When I first started doing documentary, it was 20 Minutes Beta Can tapes. Beta SP tapes. Then I went to 30 minutes beta SP tapes. And then I remember I was working on a series where I was directing it, and the camera person I was working with was like, oh my God, I hate the new technology because now they were our tapes. So as a director, I'd expect this fellow to just keep rolling for an hour straight. And it was only because I was shooting that I understood how hard that was on your body when you're doing more of a verite follow the action type of filmmaking. And now with cards, I can run 2 hours, 3 hours without stopping. I do stop, but I can for sure.
[00:09:09] Speaker A: I remember back in the program, we did the Bolex projects and we did the tape products, which I'm not sure if you guys still do these days. And we did a 60 millimeter film in one of the Malcolm Byard's class. Hope I said his name right. If he listens to this, I'm going to be in trouble. But yeah, we did a project there and that taught us a lot about just that process of things, too, about the original and traditional process of how film was done right. And how important it is to get the shots you need in your lighting and all these different aspects that now kind of get taken away in some ways because you have all of these AI advancements and all of these digital advancements that you can have with digital cameras and technology.
[00:09:56] Speaker B: It changed so much. Well, I was going to say, like the film project. I love that film project because of the discipline that's needed. When you only have X amount of feet of film and you can't see it while you're shooting it. Oh, yeah.
I mean, nowadays you can do the video assists and all this kind of stuff where you can monitor it. But for the project that the students are doing, they can't. And so you're waiting in anticipation to see what comes back from the lab. And that's really cool.
[00:10:23] Speaker A: It was a long two weeks, I remember that very stressful. Yeah. And then the editor got it and she's like, it's all good. Everything's good here. It's like all thinking.
So do you think there are some ways you can think that AI might help to assist in the traditional processes?
[00:10:38] Speaker B: Yeah, I was thinking about it because I've used in terms of AI, one of the things I was thinking about is just at the very beginning of the film, would I use AI for research?
It's flawed.
My nephew and I have been working on taking one of my films, the one that I mentioned, and doing a series with it and we've been playing around with it, with scripts, and he was looking at more research for it. And so he put my grandparents names into the Bing AI platform, and it came back totally wrong. It had them not living in Toronto, but living in Chicago. And so know, he prompted with the prompt he put, and he said, Actually, that's wrong. They didn't live in Chicago. So then it came back with something else totally ridiculous. And he said, no, it's still wrong. And eventually the AI generator said to him the equivalent of, I think we'll have to agree to disagree.
When I saw that. And I think of students who might think, I think I'll use Chachi PT to research this thing out, I'm kind of like, I don't think so. No, you got to really question it because you sort of have a tendency to take it and go, oh, that's so cool. Scan the web. This is what happened. Look what I got. But it might be wrong. So I take all of that with a big grain of salt. Now, would I use it to design a pitch deck? Sure. That's great. And I have used it when I think about it, not pure AI, but using something like Canva or even PowerPoint, and then having it suggest design elements that's AI it's analyzing the text and then adding a design element that I'm not a great designer that is coming up with a better image. So on that side, it's really, really good. Where I've probably used AI the most is when I've come back from the field and I have hours and hours of footage, and traditionally I would sit down and transcribe it. Part of me likes to transcribe it anyway, especially if I'm editing it because it's when I'm shooting or when I'm directing. I'm not always there's things I miss, like, I'm listening, listening, listening. But there's things going on.
It's a day and it's so full and there's so much happening that I'm processing that when I sit down and I word for word transcribe. I'm revisiting the footage, I'm making notes, I'm doing all that kind of stuff. But it's time consuming. So now knowing that there are some programs that I can send the footage over to get back a perfect transcript. That's great. Perfect. It always misspells my name, misspells other names. That's all good. But having said that, I've also worked with some really great human transcribers. And they do stuff that's not going to be replaced by a machine, like putting notes in, like beautiful shot or creating. Like I often when I'm editing a very big project, I create my own taxonomy of keywords. I haven't figured out if AI can do that yet. That's where I really need the human to go through and help. Although I'm pretty sure AI can do.
[00:13:45] Speaker A: You know, every day it seems to get a little bit stronger. I don't want to use the word better? No, but it's getting stronger. It's getting smarter in being able to pick up how we're doing things and the lexicon and all of that stuff. So that one of these days you might get a note back from going, oh, that's a really nice shot. And you're like, I don't like this. This feels weird.
[00:14:10] Speaker B: Well, that's the thing. And even with the editing, like, I was talking about this with a couple of people that I know, and they've said to you can you can use AI if you do a multi camera clip. And often a lot of the stuff we shoot now, I shoot two or three cameras, so I premiere and Final Cut, Pro, X, and Avid, they all do a great job of creating multi clips. DaVinci does it too. But then one of my friends said to know you can actually pop that in into an AI generator and it'll make the decision of when to take the wide shot, when to go in for the close up. It can do it, but it doesn't do it well.
It doesn't have that human sense of story. Like, I know that I teach editing for our program and I always say to the students at the beginning that, yes, yes, I know what's going through your head. I can download an app that can do this in 2 seconds and make it ready for Instagram and that'll be great. What do I need you for? And I said, because you can do that, but it won't be good enough to tell a real story. It'll process the clips quick enough for you to create an Instagram reel. Sure, that's perfect. But in terms of the emotional arc and the emotional side of the story, that is something that's what we're developing here is storytelling. And that's not going to come through an AI program that's analyzing it based on camera movement or pauses or things like that.
[00:15:32] Speaker A: Especially when most of the time people are still filming, at least for what we're doing, right? Everything's still being filmed horizontally, not vertically. So as soon as you try to do that reframing sequence and using the AI generative stuff, suddenly you've got these weird pans and moves. And I remember I did one and it was like, okay, I didn't really need to shoot the door, I needed the person who is walking to the door. And then you're like, I don't know, AI, I can do this way faster.
[00:16:02] Speaker B: Well, even like when I have done stuff where if I've taken like, say I've taken a show well, I had one job a couple of years ago where I was helping somebody with their social media campaign. So I was taking beautiful, beautiful shot in 16 x nine 4K footage stories and then reframing them for Instagram or for X, previously, Twitter, that kind of thing. But I had to physically, through my keyboard, move it over so that it would be properly framed. If I had Led AI, I would definitely get the stuff that you're talking about.
[00:16:37] Speaker A: Yeah, the weird jello shots and the framing and all that stuff. So, yeah, that's course.
[00:16:44] Speaker B: And where AIS come in really well in terms of post color grading, that was one of the areas where I think that color graders, people who are doing that are always going to be needed because there is such an art to it. But Premiere and any of the editing softwares do have built in things that you can use to give specific looks, but they're based on cameras. And so you can say, like, if I'm shooting something and I shot it on, much like, it's weird because Premiere doesn't actually have the Sony effect, but I have them, that I can plug them in, and then it'll automatically bring the color into the shot. But I still need a really good person who works in that area to do the beautiful stuff, to really make it work. So it adds a lot in those tools. And I was looking up, there was one program that I found, which is no way an endorsement, but I thought this was kind of cool. There's a program out there called Runway that will do text to color grade, so I could say, give it a blue hue, make it look like Avatar, make it look like Dune, and it'll automatically take that text and create that on the image.
[00:18:04] Speaker A: But for me, that's incredible.
[00:18:06] Speaker B: It's very, very cool, but it still feels gimmick, but very, very cool. And I was kind of like, Whoa, that is kind of neat. Would I use it professionally? No. Would I use it as a starting point? Maybe. But knowing that I still have to go in, talk to my colorist, or if I'm doing the color, really look at it and think, okay, well, how can I really work with that? Yeah, there's some cool. I mean, a lot of the AI that I've been seeing in editing is correcting stuff there's. Topaz is another program that I've played around with. It's also a really good one for Photos, for restoring old photos, but where people would use it is say that I look at that film I did years and years ago with my dad's 16 millimeter footage that was shot in the late forty s and the mid forty s and had faded. Bring it into something like Topaz, and it will correct it or enhance it, or it'll take it and pop it up to 4K, if that's what you're actually delivering it.
[00:18:54] Speaker A: Wow.
[00:18:55] Speaker B: My husband and I were watching The Beckham Doc, the series on Netflix, and I was looking at I was going, oh, my, this footage from the 90s looks incredible. And then I thought, I wonder, would that be something that would have gone through it? Because it's being delivered in four k.
[00:19:11] Speaker A: Or six k.
Yeah, especially with everybody's demand to want to see things in the highest and best quality. Right. And you kind of lose that, the older tape feel or the film feel. But being able to scale that up, it's always intrigued me just to see how that process works and how to make something that if you look at it on a map where it's like this tiny, and then you just blow it up to this movie theater screen size. And it's still going to look as good, if not better than most stuff you'd film today.
[00:19:50] Speaker B: Yeah, and I think that's where the AI is really coming into its own in terms of helping to enhance footage. We always laugh, and I tell the students this, too. The one thing I hate as a director, if it's a show I'm editing, is if I see something and the camera person goes, oh, don't worry. They can fix it in post. And then I'm often like, you know what? I am post and I don't want to fix it.
Even things as simple as white balance, like, you've got a certain color temperature for indoors and another color temperature for outdoors. And I was once on a show where the camera person didn't switch, and I looked over and I was like, that looks horrible. Don't worry, don't worry. They'll fix it in post. And I knew I was going to be cutting the show, too. So I was like, yeah, I don't think so. Can we just kind of step back and redo it? Because that doesn't help. But now the technology allows you to do it much quicker, and that's where it's good. I think that we've sort of get this kind of like, oh, scary AI. Oh, is it going to take away everything? No. If it helps me to spend more time on the creative storytelling, that's great, but it's not going to take your job. I'm not going to never call my color person and say, oh, I've replaced you with some really cool program because I need her. She has an eye that is incredible.
[00:21:05] Speaker A: Yeah. And I mean, that kind of flows into my next question is how do you see it changing the film industry as a whole? Do you think it's a helpful tool to help cut down cost, for example, or do you see some areas where this could hinder the industry?
[00:21:19] Speaker B: Well, I think it can help in certain ways, but it's also scary. I mean, I look at the recent Screen Actors Guild strike. What was the big argument? What was one of the big sticky features was the use of AI in character generation. And that's scary.
I think that's really freaky, the idea that I probably not me star in a film. Yay. They have my image, and then they replicate and create many, many Karens in a crowd scene. And that's the stuff that used unethically is bad, is really, really bad. And that was one of the big sticking points from what I understand, in the strike, same with in the Writers Guild strike. That was the other thing, and I talked about this with one producer, is that whole idea of getting AI to create scripts. Well, that's scary.
We use things like writing prompts all the time. Or at least I have you get like a word prompt and you use that to just get you writing. But do I want it to write a whole script for?
And that's that's something that I think we just really have to be sensitive of and understand.
Have CGI does stuff like that, but it doesn't take an actor's image or the person who came in as an extra made X amount of dollars for the day, and next thing you know, he's replicated in a film he had no idea that he was going to be in.
[00:22:49] Speaker A: Wow.
[00:22:50] Speaker B: Yeah. So that's the ethical issues that I think are kind of scary.
[00:22:55] Speaker A: Every now and then I've gone back and I've watched a black mirror every so often. And I believe that's an exact remember we watched my wife and I watched the episode about the AI generative shows, and I was that's and then all this stuff came out about what's happening exactly. With Netflix and all of the major streaming services wanting to do that exact thing where we get your image and we get to reuse it as much as we want and all this stuff. And I went we just watched this happen.
[00:23:28] Speaker B: Yeah, when I watched that episode, that was crazy. I couldn't believe it because it is so on the money. And also the idea of, like, I'm getting my head around deep fake technology.
I can't remember what it's called. I have to find out. There was a British show that we watched that was all about using deep fake technology to put words in a politician's mouth. And a lot of that has started to come out more and more in different areas. And I could see I mean, one of the things when you think about cost saving, I think I have a young friend who's just in probably the third or fourth year of her career as a voice artist. And then you've got companies that are creating there's a company called I think it's called Replicate or something that will allow you yeah, it's called Resemble, which will create voices. So rather than call an actor, is that say, okay. And when I played them back, I gave a talk to one of our classes about this, and I was know, it's actually pretty good, some of them. It doesn't sound digital. It doesn't sound like Siri or Alexa. It actually sounds like a human, but it's still not human because it's missing the breath, it's missing the tone, but it's advancing.
[00:24:47] Speaker A: Yeah, that's scary. Especially like, I don't know, I think it'd be cool to play with. Right. And that's kind of the way that I've looked at chat GPT and a bunch of the it's like, you know, this is fun to dip my toes into, but I don't see myself using it for anything that I do in my career or anything like that. I mean, there are some days that you work with talent and you're like, you know what, I could use an AI voice.
[00:25:12] Speaker B: Well, I almost wonder, like to me if I was a young person, so I look at me as a twelve year old little nerd with my super A camera and then cutting up the film my dad gave me little egg cartons and putting all the clips in. If I flash forward to that twelve year old me now, and that twelve year old me is playing with some of the free apps that are allowing me to create that and it's sparking me to become a filmmaker in the future. I think that's terrific. Yeah, as long as I don't make those films later that only make with AI.
[00:25:43] Speaker A: There was a statistic. I don't remember what it is off the top of my head, but the amount of young adults and young teens or children who want to grow up to be YouTubers, right? And want to be in that creative field, and hopefully they figure out the fundamentals and the good parts of it before they just dive into, okay, here's a camera that will move all by itself and get the perfect framing and lighting. And I'll get a voice generator to change my voice and change how I look.
[00:26:14] Speaker B: All of that well, when I watch YouTube, I went to a workshop right before COVID started. I went to this is a weird side thing, but I have juvenile diabetes, so I have a site called Grown Up Diabetes and I was also looking at how to use it on something like Instagram. So I went to a social media conference for diabetes influencers.
[00:26:39] Speaker A: Oh, wow, that's very specific. Yes.
[00:26:41] Speaker B: And I thought, okay, what are they going to be, five people? But actually there were about 40 influencers and they had workshops on how to use a ring camera, how to shoot properly, how to mix your audio, how to get the best quality. And I thought, yeah, this is really interesting. Like, this is really, really developing. And even some of the YouTubers that I have followed for a while, I see how much better their shooting has become and I see how good they've gotten from just this one fashion influencer that I've looked at. And when I look at what she was like at the beginning and she was just shooting herself, holding the camera up and selfie and then a little bit further, getting a selfie stick and a little further. But now she's got a light set up and the camera on a small tripod and she's doing much more sophisticated editing, possibly assisted by AI. But that's okay for those purposes. Yeah, I think that makes. Sense.
[00:27:33] Speaker A: Yeah. What are some considerations professionals in this industry should keep in mind when utilizing AI tools and their processes?
[00:27:40] Speaker B: I think that one of the biggest thing to just look at is to just think about, am I helping my story or am I hindering my story? Am I relying too much on something or am I using it as a tool? But am I forgetting that it is just that? That it is only a tool? Like, I did a thing in the film and television business program. I went and visited a class last year and I had them use Chat GPT to come up with TV concepts.
And because of the limitations of AI of Chat GPT, they were coming up for concepts. But there was one really cool one that they fitted in some prompts. And what they came back with was basically shows that we've seen a hundred million times. So how do you protect yourself from that? By using your own brain?
By not thinking of Chachi BT as the be all and end all, and not forgetting about that human touch.
Of not discounting the people that work on a film. Like I was just working on a series and I sat in on the mix. And yes, there's lots of technology in there and lots of really interesting apps and things that you can use. But there's nothing like watching the sound designer and sound editor who have 20 to 30 years of experience are really masters at what they do. That's the art. And that's not going to get replaced by all of the technology that they're using.
[00:29:15] Speaker A: For sure. Yeah, I've seen some people who can just it's like watching a master piano player kind of perform their final song, right? And you're like, oh, wow.
I come into the studio and I'm like, okay, I know what buttons I got to press and how this works, but how do I translate it? And having that human touch and that human element that you talked about is so important.
[00:29:40] Speaker B: Yeah, and especially with like, when I get to something like editing, I don't because this is the part that's really fun for me, but I could see somebody saying, oh, I'll just let AI create my timeline for me. But I'm like, no, because you're going to miss stuff. You're not going to have the storytelling craft that you've developed over the experience of doing that kind of work. Not to say that AI doesn't have like one of the things that I was looking at was there was a big controversy a few years ago when the documentary on Anthony Bourdain came out and there was a short letter that AI generator had used to bring his voice to voice, this one piece. And people went crazy because they were like, oh, no, that's so unethical. How can you do that? You've created a dead man's voice. And how horribly insensitive and everything. But it's an interesting thing because the filmmaker's argument was, well, he wrote the letter and we do reenactments.
So I'm not as troubled by it because for me, it's a little bit like the stuff that we know. You see commercials where there's Fred Astaire dancing or where they've brought a musical artist onto the stage to do a duet with somebody who isn't alive anymore. That's weird.
But I think that the trick in. And it's something I talked about with my class a couple of weeks ago when we were looking at ethical issues in documentary. I was like, how do you feel about that? How do you feel about using AI to create broll for a documentary?
To use that instead of archive, to have AI create your archive instead of using actual archive? And we had a really good discussion, and I think a lot of it is just not trying to trick an audience, but making the audience a partner in that journey and letting them know what you're doing.
[00:31:33] Speaker A: I know there's a couple of times I wish I had an AI generated broll when I missed a shot or just you couldn't get it and you're like, you know, it'd be great to just punch something in and you'd get that perfect shot that you can just slip in and you wouldn't have to even think about it twice.
[00:31:47] Speaker B: And you can now.
Okay, scary part.
[00:31:51] Speaker A: If I could go back five years.
[00:31:52] Speaker B: And tell myself that, fill in all of your shows that were missing that.
[00:31:57] Speaker A: Thing, or you had to use a different shot and you've got it off colored, you're like, oh, how did I fix this now?
[00:32:06] Speaker B: Oh, yeah, for sure.
[00:32:08] Speaker A: So as the AI industry progresses, though, do you think that post secondary programs in film and television need to completely revamp their material to fit with the times?
[00:32:16] Speaker B: No. Well, it's interesting. I don't think we need to revamp because I think it's really important for us to always have the basics. It's like when I hear you talk about how exciting it was to do that 16 millimeter project. I mean, the basis of storytelling is storytelling, but as a program like ours, we're always watching and seeing what the trends are and looking at how people are telling stories, and that's part of it, and understanding that. I'm not going to pretend AI doesn't exist when I'm teaching editing or when I'm teaching any course in our program, because I think it's important that the students are aware of, like, I love in editing. There's one exercise that we do myself and Helen, the other faculty, and it's having the students talk about a scene that they love and how it was shot. And it's the stuff that they're watching, and I love it because it means that I'm looking at and going, hey, that's what they're watching. That's how stories have changed. I think of what we always say, you need the basics, but then you get to break them. So we're teaching, don't cross the axis, don't do this, don't have a jump cut. But then as you're more experienced, if you can do that.
Sure. And in the same way I do the course that preps our students for their internships last year, when there were some of the students who are on their internships, they were like, this is really great. We're learning how to use AI because people are using it out in the field. So when they told me that, I thought, this year I need to talk about how they may encounter AI being used in their internships.
[00:33:52] Speaker A: And it's just kind of trying to relate it back to, like and it feels funny to say that even almost ten years ago now, wow, that made me feel old.
But ten years ago, when we were still looking at social media and how to integrate that right? And that whole world and digital media, how do you integrate that into the traditional realms of broadcast and television and film and radio and how do those worlds work together? And now you've got this brand new beast called AI, right? And how does that fit into this? Plus the social media and digital media aspects and teaching that suddenly your courseload has gotten so much larger because you've got to cover so many more things.
[00:34:35] Speaker B: Well, it's important. I think it's just that you have to maintain that awareness of what is going on. Right. It's like in any kind of production. Whereas before well, even now, when I'm looking at teaching, I've been teaching the career management course, the prep for the internship, for a few years now. And at the beginning, it was like, oh, you have to have a website, and you do this project and you do that project. And then the social media was kind of an add on. But the social media that I would have discussed with that group would have been Facebook and Twitter. Well, you know what? They're not on Facebook and none of them are on Twitter. So now it's what's your social media presence? How important is your instagram? LinkedIn is an obvious tool, but especially in that I talk a lot to the students about how you present yourself on social media. How do you use it to promote yourself as an artist? How do you use it to promote yourself in films and in the work that you're doing? That's huge. And that's something that we've evolved to make sure that they understand that relationship.
[00:35:42] Speaker A: No, and that's super important because it's not the education that you get moving forward if you don't inform yourself. Right. So for students, they're getting this ground level experience where they get to learn about all these new tools. But someone who's been in the industry for 510, 15 years, and now having to work with it as it's evolving, right.
It's a little bit more tricky.
[00:36:09] Speaker B: It's tricky, but I think that it's something that we always impress upon students, but I impress it upon myself all the time, is that you can't stop learning, right?
[00:36:17] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:36:18] Speaker B: So it's like, for me, especially in something, a course like editing, editing is a tool. So if we were first teaching Final Cut Pro Seven, and we were teaching Avid and we were teaching Premiere Pro, and then Helen and I are always listening to what is the industry using. DaVinci resolve has come up. Great program. Now we're teaching DaVinci Resolve. And we teach After Effects. And we teach Premiere. And then the last show that I worked on, I used Final Cut Pro X or X or whatever they call it. And that program has really evolved. So it's like being aware of what's out there, of playing around with the tools and constantly bringing yourself so that you understand not I played around a bit with looking at Unity and Unreal Engine. I am not going to become a Unity or Unreal Engine artist. No way, no how. But it's really important for me as an editor to understand how that stuff works and as a producer and as a director, because I need to know the tools that might be available to me in the future.
[00:37:26] Speaker A: For sure. Yeah. It's knowing what's in your toolbox so that you can play with all the tools right.
[00:37:30] Speaker B: And be imaginative, be able to think, okay, I would tell this story one way. Oh, wait a minute, I know somebody. I know a woman who's really great at unity. I want to have a conversation with her and see if there's something that I can do in the traditional storytelling realm that might add something else to it.
And I think that's what's key in that. It's the same like cameras. I always look at a camera as a camera. Yeah, but the menus get more and more sophisticated and the resolution gets more sophisticated. It's no longer HD. It's two k. It's 4K, it's six k, it's eight k. So just being aware that those changes are always happening, and then how am I going to use it to tell the best way that I can to tell those stories?
[00:38:14] Speaker A: Yeah, for sure. So there's going to be probably a lot of listeners who are listening to this podcast that want to get into this industry, potentially. What advice would you give them if they were a bit worried about AI and the different uses of it?
[00:38:27] Speaker B: Think about who you want to be as a storyteller.
Be aware of what's out there. Play around with it just so you know that it's there, and think of how it can help you in your own work, but don't rely on it. I feel like if I was just starting out, is to let yourself develop as a creator. Think of what you want to do and the stories that you want to tell and how you want to tell it. And I think, too, people getting into the industry right now, they have an amazing thing. They have their cell phone.
They don't have some of the barriers that I had making my first film of thinking, how will I ever rent a camera?
And I'm not saying that you're going to make a full film on your cell phone, although you could, but there's a difference between professional work and craft and all this kind of stuff. But you certainly have something that you can play around with to just give yourself a sense of story and how to tell those stories. And I think that's great.
[00:39:26] Speaker A: Oh, for sure. Yeah. I know that there's a number of times me and my wife, we make little monthly videos just on our cell phones, right? And I think, oh, man, I've been doing this for a number of years. I could pull out a big camera and do it all nice and this. And there's something I don't want to use the word romantic about being able to just do everything in the palm of your hand and getting to use some AI generative stuff to help edit the video together. She doesn't have a lot of knowledge in this field, and that's how she edits the videos together.
[00:39:58] Speaker B: But that's what's great. And then when you come into a program like ours and you get to see how you've developed your eye by playing around with the phone and you've developed your sort of sense of pace by playing around with the AI tools. And then when you get to go and put it into practice in a professional environment, that's gold. Because you've laid some of the groundwork as a storyteller. And now you get to play with the real stuff.
[00:40:21] Speaker A: Yeah, the fun stuff. Sometimes the fun stuff until you break it.
[00:40:25] Speaker B: Yeah, don't break it. But even stuff like I look at the cameras we have and being able to play with. Yeah, sure. I mean, on my camera, I can use cinematic mode and it's really cool, and I can play with the depth of focus and all that kind of stuff. But when I get to a school, I get to broadcasting and I get to take a course. And now suddenly I see I rent from the cage that box of all those really great lenses, and I start thinking, whoa, now look what I can do on the next level. And that's where use this stuff as a groundwork and then let yourself go crazy when you get to use the really good stuff.
[00:41:01] Speaker A: For sure. So something we like to ask all our guests in this AI series is if you had access to an AI feature or tool that would assist either in editing or something you just love to access in your everyday life, what would that be?
[00:41:15] Speaker B: Well, I was thinking about that. I think if I had an AI tool that could go and pitch broadcasters for me, that would be great, but I know that's not realistic. Yeah, I mean, that would be the only thing.
I don't use it to organize my day, but maybe that would be cool. Okay. Maybe an AI that could tap me on my shoulder and say, go, you have to do this now. But it's weird because I like technology. So even I dedicated indoor cyclist. So I use a program called Ruvi where I watch my avatar ride on real roads. And I use another program called Zwift, where my friend in Ottawa and I with our avatars, we ride together on these cool roads with my laptop open and I see myself and I can change my outfits. And once I was riding with my friend in Ottawa and she sent me like a little instant message going, wow, that outfit looks really good on you. And I sent back a note going, you know that's not real, right? Like, that's not really me.
And she was laughing so hard. But I find that's like one of those really great ways that the technology has evolved. I ride on Zwift with people all over the world and we have a real community.
I've been using one platform a bit too much, Ruby, but I'll go back to Zwift, and on Zwift I'm in a type one diabetes cycling group where I ride with cyclists all over and we get to know each other. And I know their avatars and I know the different jerseys they're different wearing and what countries they're from based on their jerseys. And during the rides, we use discord to talk to each other. So that kind of stuff has evolved in a way that is amazing and very practical. Maybe I would use AI to let me ride a little faster because I'm always at the back of the pack.
So that would be my wish. Make me a faster cyclist than well.
[00:43:24] Speaker A: Karen, it has been wonderful to talk to you today.
[00:43:28] Speaker B: Thank you. It's great to talk to you.
[00:43:42] Speaker A: What an incredible discussion we had. Thank you so much, Karen, for coming onto the podcast and sharing your remarkable insight in the comments of our Instagram post. For this episode, let us know your thoughts on AI and filmmaking. Is this the way of the future? You can find us at Story Art Center. If you really enjoyed this podcast, be sure to give our podcast a follow on the listening platform you're on right now because there are so many more exciting episodes on the way. Until next time, I'm your host, Pat Quigley, and this is Storyteller in Depth.
