I continue to find it mind-boggling that people seem to think that a good use of AI tools like ChatGPT is to gather accurate information. Any cursory reading on the topic should explain that ChatGPT is designed to predict language in response to a prompt, not actually present information based on “knowledge” or “intelligence.” I don’t pretend to understand how it really works, but it’s pretty clear that it’s not a reliable alternative to a search engine. And yet, people keep using it that way. I had an odd experience with it this week in marking student essays: the prompt was to analyze a spec ..read more

Like many academics, I’ve been seeing a lot of concerns around how AI tools like ChatGPT might impact the work academics do as teachers and scholars. I don’t want to dive too much into those muddy waters, but I saw one post on Mastodon that piqued my interest and led me to do some experimenting. Ryan Cordell, noted digital humanist and literary/print scholar, posted the following thread: In our lab introducing AI writing to students I encourage them to probe the models—to try & find limit cases & places where the “wires” of the machine become visible. Some things they found… 4. ChatGP ..read more

I’ve produced and posted the final video (save the introduction) for my videographic book, The Chemistry of Character in Breaking Bad. As discussed below, this chapter has one of the most extensive written commentaries, which I’ve reproduced to present and contextualize the video. (All the videos are now available in tentative sequence on my Vimeo showcase.) I hope to finish the introduction by the end of January, and then submit the full manuscript to Lever Press! So this will likely be the last public update on this project for awhile – I hope it is well-received. Introducing Characters: Lyd ..read more

I just returned from a truly exceptional conference: The Theory and Practice of the Video Essay at University of Massachusetts – Amherst. Not only was there the simple joy of attending my first in-person conference in three years, but it was best type of conference: a single-stream of presentations that help to connect and build a community around a shared set of interests. The quality of the presentations were stellar, and the resulting conversations were similarly fantastic. I knew many people in attendance, mostly spanning years of participation in the Scholarship in Sound & Image works ..read more

Today I had the pleasure of presenting a keynote address at the Television Aesthetics conference at University of Kent in the UK, entitled “Television Aesthetics, Videographic Criticism, and the Case of Breaking Bad.” Well, not exactly “at” the conference – my Tuesday flight out of Vermont was so delayed that it prohibited me from getting to England in time to make my talk! So we pivoted to Plan B and I gave a Zoom talk, which went well enough, but it would have been far nicer to actually attend my first in-person academic event in over two years… As part of my talk, I showed four videos** fro ..read more

I am excited to launch a new project called Media Mirrors: Critical Analysis of Film & TV and Film & TV! This website collects undergraduate student writing that has emerged from my course Key Concepts in Film & Media Criticism. The site emerged from a decision many years ago to encourage my students to write papers that would be aimed at regular readers, not just me, and the process leading to the publication of the site has been long and winding. This project emerged from work I was doing around 2015 around the Digital Liberal Arts – one of the key insights emerging out of those ..read more

I’m excited to share the next video in my Breaking Bad project, “The Sounds of Silent Mike,” focused on fan-favorite character Mike Ehrmantraut. This was a nice palate cleanser for me, after spending around a month laboring on my last video, “Breaking Genre“—this video only took two days of editing to produce, as its scope, speed, and parameters were much more manageable. I hope the efforts were worth it. Below is the video, followed by a short contextualization that I intend to publish with it as part of the larger “Chemistry of Character” book (I recommend reading it after watching the video ..read more

Earlier today, I debuted my newest video essay at the Society for Cinema & Media Studies conference – alas held online rather than in Chicago as planned. It was part of a great panel on “Genre in the Age of Transmedia,” where the presentations included both typical papers and videographic pieces. I screened this new video: In thinking about genre, I said a few words after the screening about genres of video essays. Part of the design of my larger audiovisual book project, “The Chemistry of Character in Breaking Bad,” is an attempt to explore a wide range of videographic styles, modes, tec ..read more

Last week I shared the epic five-part miniseries “Skyler’s Story,” retelling Breaking Bad from Skyler White’s perspective via a hybrid of women’s melodrama and experimental dual projection film. It took me weeks of work to assemble the 160-minutes from hours of footage, and thus I certainly felt a sense of accomplishment in completing the series, and thought that I would be relieved to be done with Skyler’s portion of my larger Breaking Bad project. But I had more to say. As I was working on the Skyler videos, my colleague David Miranda Hardy asked if I might make a “synopsis” version of the m ..read more

A ..read more