The Undergraduate Senior Thesis that Got Away

The culmination of undergraduate education at Chapman University's Dodge College of Film and Media Arts is the senior capstone project - at least, it was in the early 2000s. Thanks to a great cast and crew, and thanks to faculty and staff support, my senior thesis, Itsy Bitsy, was screened internationally at over 50 Film Festivals. Feeling overly ambitious, I thought I'd shoot a second senior project called "The Boogieman," which was intended to be a horror-comedy-musical (with heart), but unfortunately, it was never finished. 

Nearly 20 Years Later

As an early adopter of technology, I decided to jump in and explore these tools after all of the artificial intelligence (AI) tools became available. I started to use ChatGPT to write the first drafts of some of my blog posts and generate images on Midjourney. As a recovering filmmaker, I was impressed by the generative AI for video that I saw on Twitter, particularly from Ben Nash. After watching some of his creations, I also decided I wanted to jump in. I started with little tests and realized I have a bunch of unused source footage I could reference so I don't have to shoot new footage for my AI tests. Then I realized, "Maybe AI can help me finish "The Boogieman."

What the short film here >

AI Tools Used

• The image prompts generated in Midjourney.

• Video developed by RunwayML Gen-1.

• Voices by FakeYou.

• The song was generated using Rave.

• Inputs were Nightcrawler: https://youtu.be/BrxFy5thPDE and

• KC and the Sunshine Band: https://youtu.be/_Ee3C2m3OXE