James Cunliffe

Producing

New Skool Community

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The Hidden Archive: Free Creative Tools, Resources and a New Teleprompter App Over the past few years, I’ve created a slightly ridiculous number of things. Books. Apps. Courses. Music. Videos. Experiments. Resources. Some useful, some strange, and quite a few that sit somewhere in between. One of the things I’ve wanted to do for a while is create a single place where I can bring more of this work together and make it accessible to people who might find it useful. That place is The Hidden Archive Skool community. The idea is to build a growing library of creative tools, resources, courses and experiments for people interested in creativity, technology, storytelling and the changing world of creative work. And there’s already quite a bit inside. Introducing Archive Prompter The newest addition to the Archive is Archive Prompter, a teleprompter app I’ve been developing to solve some of the frustrations I’ve had when recording videos. As someone who spends a lot of time talking to cameras, recording presentations and trying to remember what I was supposed to say next, I wanted something simple, clean and genuinely useful. Archive Prompter has grown from that idea into its own little application, with different ways of displaying and controlling scripts depending on how you like to work. Rather than keeping it tucked away as another personal project, I’ve decided to make Archive Prompter available through The Hidden Archive’s free tier. But it isn’t the only thing available for free. Rob Like a Robot | Free eBook I’ve also added my book Rob Like a Robot to the Archive as a free download. The book explores creativity, automation and the strange relationship between humans and machines — particularly the idea that as technology becomes increasingly capable of doing repetitive work for us, perhaps the goal shouldn’t be to compete with machines by becoming more machine-like ourselves. Instead, we should be asking what technology can free us to do. It was written during an earlier chapter of my own exploration into creativity and technology, but many of the ideas feel even more relevant now as AI rapidly changes the creative landscape. Creative Archetypes You’ll also find the Creative Archetypes app available on the free tier. This was an experiment inspired by the idea that we all approach creativity differently. Some of us explore. Some build. Some challenge. Some nurture. Some obsess over understanding how everything works. Creative Archetypes is designed as a playful way of exploring those different creative instincts and perhaps understanding a little more about how you personally approach the creative process. Between Archive Prompter, Rob Like a Robot and Creative Archetypes, I wanted the free side of the community to contain things that are genuinely useful in their own right. You don’t need to subscribe to a paid tier just to find something worthwhile. Going Deeper Into the Archive For those who want to explore further, there is also a premium tier that opens up more of the work I’ve created over the years. Premium members get access to additional resources connected to Field Notes, my series of pocket investigations exploring ideas around culture, psychology, technology and the stranger corners of human experience. That includes access to the presentation slides I’ve created for the series, allowing you to dig into the research and ideas behind the videos in more detail. There’s also access to some of my older music and albums, projects from different periods of my creative life that haven’t always had an obvious home online. And for people interested in learning the practical side of creative production, premium members can access my 2D Character Animation course. The course explores my process for building and animating 2D characters, taking you through the workflow behind creating characters and bringing them to life through tools such as Photoshop and After Effects. You can also take the first module for free:   Building a Creative Library Ultimately, The Hidden Archive isn’t really intended to be a single course or product. I see it more as a library that can continue growing alongside the things I’m already doing. When I build a useful tool, it can go into the Archive. When I create a course, I can add it to the library. When a Field Notes investigation produces interesting research or resources, I can share them there. And when I inevitably disappear down another creative rabbit hole and emerge several weeks later with some strange new experiment, there’s now somewhere for that to live too. I’m also increasingly interested in exploring accessible creative technology, particularly free and open-source tools that can help people create without needing expensive subscriptions or enormous budgets. So over time, I hope The Hidden Archive becomes a useful collection of tools, ideas and knowledge for anyone trying to make things, learn new skills or simply explore where creativity and technology might be heading next. There’s plenty more planned. But for now, the doors to The Hidden Archive are open. You can join the community for free, download Archive Prompter, read Rob Like a Robot, explore Creative Archetypes, and have a look around. Join The Hidden Archive: https://www.skool.com/the-hidden-archive-4393

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The Hidden Archive

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What is The Hidden Archive? The YouTube channel finally got a rebrand. I realised two years ago that my YouTube page was starting to feel uncurated. The simple truth was that being multidisciplinary, and wanting to explore a wide variety of mediums, had led to a kind of anti-niching. In my own way, I was navigating the principle of correspondence. In creative abstraction terms, that essentially means gaining an understanding of multiple fields and then connecting the dots between them to deepen my understanding of creativity as a whole. That said, I realised that on the surface, this focus was beginning to look unclear. So I split the channel into three: one for music, one for creative tutorials, and one for the exploration of myth, technology, storytelling and ideas. And I really got drawn into this new direction. Since the switch-up, I’ve created two series. The first is The Hidden Archive, a documentary-style video essay series covering a wide range of topics; from UFOs and the Gnostic creation story to the hidden psychological patterns that repeat across human history.   I also have Field Notes, which is a more raw, presentation-led educational format that I record from my desk rather than the studio. These are pocket investigations into subject matters that keep me curious about the world.   I briefly want to talk about the creative direction behind the rebrand. The logo itself is heavily inspired by occult symbolism. The further I dig into the subject of psychology, the more occult themes tend to emerge. I find that a lot of old occult symbols lack readability, though, so I wanted to make The Hidden Archive logo feel less complex. There’s a dual meaning to the logo design. Carl Jung’s Red Book has had a huge influence on my life, and there’s a vision he has about a well at the top of a mountain. From this well flows water, which acts as a metaphor for wisdom. That knowledge travels down from the peak to all those who seek it. There’s a small circle at the top of the peak in the logo. The lines travelling down around the silhouette of the person signify that movement of information. The silhouette receives the wisdom at the centre and sits within the target of an outside force. The message is really this: if you watch this channel, you will be targeted with new ideas. The split silhouette represents balance. The teal colour represents the water from above, while the contrasting gold suggests that the ideas explored on the channel hold real-world value. To people outside of the creative industry, the logo might just look like random lines and circles, or maybe an alien getting abducted. But it has been crafted with intention. And if you’re a curious mind, now you know what it represents. I plan on running The Hidden Archive channel in the background as an outlet for expression, but also as a place where I can provide value to those who want to gain a better understanding of the world we exist within, and how we can get the most out of it.

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What Are UFOs?

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What Are UFOs and What Do They Say About Humanity? Back in 2024, I went down the rabbit hole of UFOs/ UAPs. It was around the time David Grusch hit the scene and it really did seem like we were going to get disclosure any day. There was an energy around the topic, it felt charged, so much so that I found I could rarely think of much else. I read American Cosmic by Diana Pasulka, picked up Elizondo’s Imminent, watched all the congressional hearings on the topic, and got hooked on AJ’s The Why Files. The whole topic was a special interest of mine right until January 2025, when News Nation released a video with US Air Force veteran Jake Barber, of a UAP crash retrieval of a giant egg. The evidence… A video that looks like someone poking a normal sized egg with a stick in low resolution… And honestly, that video switched me off from the subject all together until I started to see patterns re-emerging once more. More recently I spent 6 months working on a series called ‘The Red Book’ which investigated Carl Jung’s Libre Novus, bringing his visions to life, and using the stories and lessons as a lens to view the modern world. Eventually I discovered that Jung had wrote about UFOs in 1958. Carl noticed that UFOs seem to emerge in times of a meaning crisis, which would ultimately become the thesis of the investigative video I made on the topic. I wanted to lay out a timeline of UFO encounters across history, from the alien cave paintings in Western Australia, which are potentially 4000-17000 years old, to the more modern sightings and stories around the Nimitz Tic Tac video. And it all gets a little bit strange to say the least. I feel like I’ve done a good job of condensing the heart of the topic into 35 minutes, exploring UFOs from a multitude of angles, using visuals to help others better understand the recurring patterns that emerge. But where do I draw my own conclusions on the subject matter? I have never seen a UFO, although I have had strange synchronicities in my life that have made it near impossible to remain nihilistic. My gut feeling is that when we feel unsatisfied with reality, there’s something within us that draws us to the sky and hopes that there is something beyond our current understanding of reality. I also think from a philosophical point of view, that we shouldn’t sit back and hope that saviors will emerge from the sky. Instead, we should find ways of living that have the potential to align the world and put it on a brighter path. While I think there probably is more to reality than we can fully comprehend, we should remain humble to the fact that we don’t have those answers and we should be skeptical of those who say they do without substantial evidence to back it up.

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The Gnostic Creation Story

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Why This Story Is Valuable While researching the Red Book series, I’d occasionally read comments linking Jung’s work to Gnosticism. I was raised by Christians, and although I’m agnostic myself (if I had to put a label on it), I’m still interested in the history of religion and more recently whether the stories hold any value in the modern world. I eventually made my way to an Alex O’Connor video with Bart Erhman where they outlined the core aspects of the Gnostic Creation Story, from the Apocryphon of John. Which then led me to a translation of those texts here: http://www.gnosis.org/naghamm/apocjn-davies.html It’s a wild take on the ‘true’ nature of Christianity. That turns a lot about that tradition on its head. If you want to know how, I recommend you watch the video. I think like any story it can be interpreted in a multitude of ways. If you’re like me, with a slight technological bias, you might draw parallels with simulation theory, I enjoy finding relevant symbolism in these kinds of stories, but above all else the gnostic world view felt like an appropriate lens to view the current state of geopolitics and global affairs. The story itself is about a narcissistic and jealous ruler who projects a false narrative to his subordinates with the intention of control and manipulation. It’s a theme that we’re all too familiar with and I think that’s why the story resonates with so many people. Because there’s this glimmer of hope that each and every one of us has the capacity to break away from a broken system, that we have the potential to see through the lies and do something about it, and that’s a powerful archetypical idea. I think a lot of people in society feel helpless as the bigger players make moves that we can’t fully comprehend, yet whose actions cause significant harm to ourselves and those around us. The messaging in this story, at least to me, reminds me of the butterfly effect, where a single flap of a butterfly’s wings can cause a sequence of events that changes the nature of reality for everyone. I think we need more butterflies aligning and flapping in a better direction, and if nothing else I’d like this video to imbue a sense of hope in those who watch it. To help them understand that they can make an impact, and that there’s still a reason to try and do the right thing, even in a world that doesn’t seem to reward it.

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New Red Book Series

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What this series is about? Carl Jung’s The Red Book was released to the public in October 2009, almost a century after he began working on it between 1913 and 1921. Jung had collaborated closely with Sigmund Freud until their split in 1913, after which Jung entered a period of intense inner exploration. Around that time, Jung recorded vivid visions: flooding across Europe, mass death, a continent “washed” in blood. A year later, Europe entered the First World War. Whether those visions were prophecy, pattern-recognition, anxiety, or something more symbolic, Jung treated them as meaningful, and followed them inward, deliberately, to map the forces shaping his psyche: persona, shadow, desire, fear, and (in his own language) soul. This series is an attempt to take that work seriously. Not to sensationalise it, but to ask a practical question: what can The Red Book teach us about meaning, fear, and the stories we tell ourselves when the world feels unstable? Why I’m making this? A couple of months ago I woke up in the middle of the night with a rare kind of clarity, the “quiet certainty” you don’t get often. The idea arrived fully formed: make a series exploring The Red Book, and use it as a craft challenge, as well as a research project, writing, presenting, storytelling, editing, with something useful on the other side. Part of the urgency is due to the times we’re living through. When conflict in Europe escalates, it’s hard not to notice how quickly stability can feel conditional. I’m not trying to predict the future, but I do think introspection matters more in anxious times, as the fear can permiate into our culture. It becomes politics. It becomes behaviour. Jung’s work is one of the most direct attempts I know of to meet that fear internally rather than outsource it. And at a more personal level: I don’t want to drift through the next decade passively consuming commentary. I’d rather build something, and build it with intent. Why the production approach is mixed-media (and includes AI)? One practical problem: The Red Book is full of imagery that’s intensely visual, symbolic, and often surreal. To do it justice traditionally would require huge time, specialist craft, or a very large budget. At the same time, the themes feel timely, so waiting “until I can afford it” doesn’t make much sense. That’s where the modern tools become useful. Used carefully, they allow an independent creator to visualise material that would otherwise be inaccessible, as long as you treat the output as raw material, not a finished style. My approach is mixed-media: building a coherent visual language, then using AI-generated elements as components that I art-direct, edit, and integrate through a more traditional post pipeline. On the research side, I’ve used tools like Perplexity and NotebookLM to sanity-check interpretations and cross-reference details in the manuscript, not as an authority, but as a faster way to catch mistakes and surface alternative readings. Visually, I’ve taken cues from Jung’s own illustrations, a blend of illuminated-manuscript detail, abstraction, and private symbolism, then used that as a style constraint. From there: generation, selection, compositing, paintover, layout and motion, with Photoshop and After Effects doing the heavy lifting. The goal isn’t “AI aesthetic”. The goal is authored coherence. Why use AI for parts of this at all? Jung’s concept of the collective unconscious describes shared psychological patterns, archetypes, instincts, repeating motifs across culture. There’s a quiet symmetry in using machine learning systems trained on large-scale cultural material to help visualise a project rooted in shared human symbolism. Not because the machine “understands” the symbols, but because it can help surface forms and textures that feel dream-adjacent, which suits The Red Book. More importantly, this is about creative agency. I understand why people are uneasy about AI, the ethics, the economics, the speed of change. I’ve had the same discomfort. But blanket dismissal doesn’t protect your creativity; it often just delays your ability to navigate reality. Used responsibly, these tools can help tell stories where footage doesn’t exist, where locations are impossible, or where the budget simply isn’t there. Big creators are already doing that, and so are the companies many of us work with. My view is simple: learn how it works, decide where you draw your line, and stay in control of your process. This series is partly an argument, in practice: storytelling is becoming more accessible, and creators shouldn’t surrender their voice out of fear. You don’t have to love the tools, but you do need to understand them.

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Updated Motion Reel

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After a year at GMGN delivering typography-led motion and design for a range of Web3 clients, I’m back in freelance, and back in the gaming space. The last three months have been full-on: producing, editing and animating across multiple deliverables, with a heavier focus on social-first formats and fast turnaround. This has been overdue, but I’ve also taken the opportunity to refresh the site, starting with an updated motion reel:   What’s New? Before GMGN, typography wasn’t a core part of my toolkit. I came up through video production, where the work is often driven by footage, pacing and story. GMGN’s output was different: message-first, text-heavy, and designed to land in-feed. That year forced a step-change in how I think about hierarchy, clarity and brand voice. Over the course of the year I built and shipped hundreds of pieces, embedded into a Figma-led workflow, and left with a stronger, more flexible design palette that now carries into everything I do, especially when a project needs content systems rather than one-off edits. If you’re curious, the case study is here. Tool-wise I’m still primarily in the Adobe ecosystem (Photoshop, Premiere, After Effects), with Resolve when a project calls for it, and selective use of AI-assisted tools where they genuinely speed up ideation, visual development or cleanup. Blender and Unreal are still on my roadmap, I’m just being intentional about where I invest learning time while client work is busy. Is That Rotoscoping? A lot of the recent gaming work leans on rotoscoping, cutting subjects frame-by-frame so you can place type, UI and graphic elements behind the action without losing readability. It’s one of those techniques that looks simple when it’s done well, but it’s very easy to get wrong: edge quality, motion continuity, hierarchy and composition all matter. The good news is that modern tools can handle a large chunk of the grunt work, but getting it to a professional finish still needs a careful eye and a clean process, especially when you’re trying to create something that feels distinctive, not templated. It’s been a genuinely fun area to lean into again. Availability? At the moment I’m on a rolling retainer with a tech and gaming-focused marketing agency, and I’m rebuilding my freelance network after the year at GMGN. I’m also balancing a couple of personal projects alongside client work, so I’m selective, but I’m always open to the right conversation, especially where the brief needs strong delivery, clear creative direction, and post-production leadership.  

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How I Built This ‘About Me’ Video

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I recently re-subscribed to Midjourney, to test out some of its new video functionality and I discovered a little VFX/ Post-Production hack that really helps out when isolating images. But first, if you haven’t already seen it, the video is below (there’s no sound as it sits on the Website’s homepage).   Why Make This Video? There’s a big project I’m working on behind the scenes which is going to require the blending of traditional design/ motion graphics/ filmmaking techniques but mixed with modern AI tools. There’ll be more about that in a later post but while I’m paying £50 a month to Midjourney, I wanted to familiarise myself with the tool. So thus began the challenge of rehashing what I’ve been up to over the last half decade in a visual format that would sit well on my website. The limitations I set was to keep the text in 2 containers around a central video component, make the copy rhyme throughout and keep the imagery relevant to the copy while complying with the blue and purple colour scheme of the site. Is it all A.I? No, I wanted to have full control of the copy for this, I often use tools like ChatGPT to bounce ideas off or to troubleshoot but as this piece was about me, I wanted the written part to be as close to unedited as possible. There was a challenge in getting certain lines to fit within the containers, so a lot of sections did change.  There’s a hybrid of Midjourney and Photoshop throughout this one, for example the director’s clapperboard was without text, which was later added in Photoshop. The 3D camera is a gen that required heavy editing in Photoshop (Midjourney tends to generate images with blemishes that need fixing before you can run it through their video gen). The laptop, phone and book are all pulled from previous work I’ve done and are modified After Effects templates. Finally, everything has been colour graded to fit the brand guidelines of the website. It’s Not Possible Without Keylight Here’s the secret sauce to making a video like this, first of all you’re going to need to prompt your images ‘floating’ in front of a flat green background. You’d end up with something like this:               It’s not perfect, but it’s good enough to tweak, the following step is to take it into a tool like Photoshop and remove the background, then add a chroma green backdrop afterwards. You would then add this back into Midjourney as the reference image before prompting the video component to spin on its axis extremely slowly. If you’re lucky you’ll get something like this:   And once you have that, you can take it into After Effects and run an effect called ‘Key Light’ to take away the green, allowing you to place it over any new background you like.   What Are The Limitations? You’ll still have to generate multiple iterations to find a clip that you like. You have to be incredibly specific with your prompts or the A.I is going to run off and create a lot of weird visual artifacts. You have to be eagle eyed when looking for mistakes and even with ‘good’ generations, they’re still not perfect. A.I should still be treated like a tool and is worth exploring, but the important factor is blending it with the other creative skills you’re developing. I wouldn’t have been able to create this video without having experience with motion design, typography, Photoshop and After Effects. As these creative tools become more accessible, those with a solid background and understanding of the theory will still have an edge.

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The Roko’s Basilisk Documentary Post-mortem

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On the 28th April, I released my latest single ‘Callie’s Quest‘ aptly named after my amazing wife Martina Callegari who has been a beckon of positivity, always encouraging my creative pursuits. I’ve always loved making music but after failing to secure a spot on Artlist’s platform as a creator, I decided to dust myself down and start up a new project. The plan was to revisit documentary filmmaking, which had been on my mind for a while. Mini docs used to be my bread and butter while working as a videographer in Manchester, UK. I’ve shot, edited, and directed dozens of shorts, some of my favourites were Jordan Thomas // Track To Tokyo for UK Sport and Music Worth Fighting For, which I’d worked on with my former business partner Luke Barnett. I seem to have this problem of overscoping my personal projects. Trying to do too much with too little time and resources. I’d love to be in a position to hire the many talented creatives out in the world but with how expensive the cost of living is. It makes it close to impossible for me at the moment. That urge to create never really goes away for me, it’s a hunger that’s never sated. It doesn’t matter if I’m working a full-time gig or I’m busy with freelance, I always want my next project to be bigger and better than the previous. It’s why I haven’t shied away from AI technology. I’m seeing creators big and small using it and the truth is I don’t want to be left behind by ignoring it. All that said, it’s allowing me to produce more creative content, to a higher standard and quicker than ever before. I lived through analogue to digital. Spent nearly two years creating training data for Epic Games Metahuman Creator while at Cubic Motion… Being a creative in an increasingly more complex digital world has been my whole career so far. What’s bigger than the approaching AI singularity and the duality of what it means to be human? That’s what I found myself asking, and 2 weeks after releasing my last single I’d finished a 35 minute documentary/ video essay about Roko’s Basilisk. It’s a modern day Pascal’s Wager. Having grown up in a religious household, becoming an atheist and then agnostic, It felt like the right time to revisit the topics of spirituality viewed through the lens of technology.     It’s not perfect by any means but the fact that I could make this within 2 weeks (albeit ridiculous hours) made me happy as a writer/ director/ producer. If I was just a motion designer/ editor I could see myself being frustrated because there’s a real fear of becoming irrelevant as the process is automated away. Still, if you’re a generalist like myself, you find yourself bouncing ideas off of AI and working with it to problem solve faster than you would on your own. AI is essentially another team member, it takes leadership and direction to get the most out of these tools (if you can call them that). I find myself talking to them as if they are people that I care about and want to work with. What I get back is enthusiasm that matches my own as well as novel solutions that I otherwise might have missed. I used my own custom GPT that has trained off of my book ‘Rob Like A Robot‘ it’s specifically tailored to  help structure feature length documentary style projects. I spent 2 days compiling notes around Roko’s Basilisk, checking in with numerous thought leaders to understand their take on the topic. I explored my own understanding of psychology, religion, mythology and the human condition. Once I had 13 pages of notes, I uploaded them to my custom GPT and discussed breaking the topic into 10 chapters that made the most sense from a linear filmmaking perspective. 2 more days were spent refining the script. On the 5th day I read and recorded the entire thing myself to get an understanding of the overall length of the video. On the 6th day, I’d used Elevenlabs to generate the additional voices used throughout the documentary. Audio is never perfect from Elevenlabs, it takes a tremendous amount of editing. Luckily Adobe Enhancer does a lot to bolster the overall quality and you can get as many takes as you like. The ASMR voice used over the titles was originally without reverb, I wanted her to feel eerie and I had the perfect VST for the job. On the 7th day, the script was converted into a Google Sheets document where each line corresponded with a shot number. I then noted down which lines I was going to create titles for, which I was going to Stable Diffusion some stills for, and which needed more tailored motion design elements to explain difficult concepts. Everything else was going to be stock footage, toned down to black and white to try and make the piece feel more cohesive. By day 8 I had all of the voice over audio and music layed out for each chapter in Adobe Premiere Pro. I wanted to make sure the piece had the right energy from the sound alone before I started adding any visuals. Days 9 – 12 consisted of finalising the motion design assets, sourcing footage, cutting, grading and doing minor effects work. The 13th day was a major sound design day, utilising Splice’s sample library, which gave me access to incredibly unique sounds that probably not many filmmakers consider as it’s a website primarily for musicians not editors. The final day we spent in review and going over minor fixes. It’s set to release Friday 17th, April 18:30 GMT. I am absolutely shattered, this was a complete mammoth of a project t0 push over the line in such a short amount of time but it was also a fun challenge that pushed me to develop some new skills and figure

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Diving into the Wes Anderson A.I Meme Phenomenon with a Twist

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Over the past week, the internet has been flooded with videos parodying Wes Anderson’s unique filmmaking style, transposed onto pre-existing franchises. High-profile parodies include a Star Wars homage by Curious Refuge and a Harry Potter spin by PanoramaChannel. The prior of these creations not only went viral due the influence of its LA-based marketer/ creator, but also because Anderson’s quirky aesthetics harmonise well with the constraints of current A.I-driven art tools.    Despite their popularity, A.I-driven creations like these remain a hotbed for debate. Fear and excitement run rampant in the creative sector, sparking contentious discussions about the future of human labour in a world increasingly dominated by A.I. I recently saw this tension firsthand in LA, where writers were picketing outside Universal Studios, expressing fears that cutting-edge technology like ChatGPT could eventually replace them. While I empathise with these concerns, my experience in the creative sector has taught me one immutable truth: adaptation is key. Our industry moves at a relentless pace, and anyone who fails to keep up risks being left behind. Thus, regardless of personal preferences, we need to acquaint ourselves with emerging tools if we want to stay relevant in the creative world. With that in mind, I decided to dive into the Wes Anderson A.I meme craze and craft my own version. So with the help of various A.I tools I created a Pokemon parody called ‘The Grand Isle of Snorlax’ Here’s my process:     Crafting a Script with ChatGPT The first phase involved creating a script using ChatGPT. Over several conversations, I fed the A.I with themes and ideas, iteratively refining the output, and handpicking a list of actors who might be humorously suited for the characters. Image Generation with Midjourney Next, I employed Midjourney to generate images. I hadn’t used Midjourney before, but I was pleasantly surprised by the striking results. While the images still required a bit of Photoshop and cleaning up for a professional setting, they were quite sufficient for creating an engaging internet meme. High-Resolution Refinement with Stable Diffusion and Photoshop As the default Midjourney output was 720p, I decided to upscale the images to 4K using Stable Diffusion. This enhancement not only sharpened the images but also helped facilitate the use of Photoshop’s ‘Select and Mask’ feature. With this tool, I could separate the characters from the backgrounds more efficiently than the pen tool, significantly reducing the time spent on isolating components that would later be animated in After Effects. Animating Stills with D-ID Wanting to bring life to my stills without investing too much time, I turned to D-ID. With D-ID, you input an image and a silent 5-second mp3 file, and the tool creates a stylized motion effect. Although you don’t have much control over the output, it serves its purpose for quick meme-style videos. D-ID again doesn’t output at the highest resolution but this was a quick fix in DaVinci Resolve. A.I Voiceover Magic with Elevenlabs Finally, I used Elevenlabs for voice overs. It was my first experience with their service, and I was taken back by the improvements in A.I voiceovers. Although the service may pose a threat to traditional voice actors, the ability to make edits and perform multiple takes makes it a powerful tool. When paired with Adobe’s voice enhancer tool, it’s easy to forget that you’re not listening to a human voice.  Enriching the Experience with Assets & Music from Envato Market & Artlist Many Wes Anderson A.I memes tend to overlook a key component of dynamic storytelling: an evolving musical landscape. A common pitfall in these memes is to ride out a single track from beginning to end. However, seasoned editors know that well-curated sound design, skillfully mixed SFX, and varied music greatly enhance the video’s energy and keep the audience engrossed in the narrative. Thus, for my own meme, I decided to source a more diverse range of stock assets and music from Envato Market and Artlist. Capturing Wes Anderson’s Colour Palette Another element that seems to elude many of the A.I memes is an authentic colour grade that emulates Wes Anderson’s iconic visual style. I found the perfect solution for this in Premiere Pro’s Lumetri Color panel, with its Color Wheel and Match tool. This feature lets you borrow the colour palette from a still frame and apply it to your image. To truly capture the essence of Wes Anderson, I used a scene from the Grand Budapest Hotel as my colour reference and cranked up the Faded FIlm setting. Reflecting on A.I’s Disruptive Potential There’s no denying that A.I will drastically reshape every industry it permeates. It raises profound questions about our very human identity in a future where robots can outperform us in nearly every domain. I spent close to 18 hours on this project from start to finish, I can see a future where much better pieces of media are created in a push of a button. In the entertainment sector, we’re about to witness a seismic shift similar to the advent of social media. The ways in which we consume and interact with digital entertainment are on the brink of a transformative evolution, for people working in the creative sector this is terrifying. We’re all worried about our livelihoods but for the average consumer, there’s about to be a content golden age where they’ll finally be able to create at the same level as the pros. Navigating Licensing in the Age of A.I The intricate entanglement of A.I with human input necessitates a thoughtful approach to licensing and copyright regulations. Some argue for stricter oversight, others propose more explicit copyright guidelines, considering that much of A.I’s current foundation is built upon prior human creativity. Presently, most A.I memes skirt around copyright infringement due to being parody and the clear markers of artificiality, aligning them with ‘fair use’ regulations. However, as the technology evolves, the distinctions might not remain as overt, muddying the waters around intellectual property rights. Unfortunately, concrete solutions to this impending

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The role of the producer in the video production process

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The producer is an important member of the video production team, as they play a vital role in the planning, organisation, and execution of the project. From developing the concept and treatment to managing the budget and schedule, the producer has a wide range of responsibilities in the video production process. Here’s a look at the role of the producer in more detail: Developing the concept and treatment: One of the main roles of the producer is to develop the concept and treatment for the video. This might involve things like working with the director and the creative team to come up with ideas, writing the treatment, and presenting the concept to the client. By developing the concept and treatment, the producer helps to set the direction and vision for the video. Managing the budget and schedule: Another key responsibility of the producer is to manage the budget and schedule for the video. This might involve things like setting the budget, negotiating with vendors and suppliers, and creating and managing the production schedule. By managing the budget and schedule, the producer helps to ensure that the video is produced on time and on budget. Coordinating the production team: In addition to budget and schedule management, the producer also plays a key role in coordinating the production team. This might involve things like hiring and supervising crew members, coordinating logistics and equipment, and ensuring that the production runs smoothly. By coordinating the production team, the producer helps to ensure that the video is produced efficiently and effectively. Overseeing post-production: Finally, the producer also plays a role in overseeing post-production. This might involve things like coordinating with the editor and the post-production team, overseeing the colour grading and sound design, and working with the client to finalise the video. By overseeing post-production, the producer helps to ensure that the final product meets the vision and goals of the project. The producer plays a vital role in the video production process. From developing the concept and treatment to managing the budget and schedule, coordinating the production team, and overseeing post-production, the producer helps to ensure that the video is produced successfully from start to finish.

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