Inside Newark Academy’s AI-Powered Film Class
Take a peek inside Dan Gold’s Upper School film class and you’ll be transported to a place where giant cookies are dominating the world, the last two humans on earth are fighting for survival, and the planets of the Milky Way are within reach.
In Newark Academy’s new film and photography studio, students can now bypass the enormous financial and time constraints of filming a movie and jump right into the world of creating and editing scenes from their wildest imaginations — giant world-dominating cookies and all — thanks to the use of images generated by artificial intelligence (AI).
For this assignment, Dan tasked his students to create a 30- to 45-second trailer for their dream movie using three different AI software programs. Inside Newark Academy’s AI-Powered Film Class
STEP 1: Students had to imagine a particular scene, using ChatGPT to create a more detailed description of that scene.
STEP 2: They then entered the enhanced scene prompt from ChatGPT into Adobe Firefly to create high-quality illustrations of the scene in seconds.
STEP 3: After creating hundreds of such images, they used another AI tool, Runway, to animate each scene from the AI-generated images.
STEP 4: Finally, after crafting all of their animated scenes, they edited them together to create their dream movie trailer in Adobe Premiere Pro.
“The project expedites teaching students the principles of editing and the principles of creating a story shot by shot because the immediacy of the technology lets them create an image in five seconds, rather than five hours,” Dan says. “They can go right into the editing. The inevitable editing mistakes that they will make are very fixable by generating another image rather than having to go out and film a scene again.”
Drawing on their knowledge of the principles of filmmaking, students are able to instruct the Runway software on how to turn their still images into moving images, determining which camera angles they want, how each character should move, which parts of a scene should be animated and which parts should remain still.
“It’s definitely my favorite project that we’ve done this year,” says Jack Becker ’27. “We get to go in and be very unique because we’re not restrained to just our resources.”
India Hylton ’27 is particularly grateful for the opportunity to learn how to use AI constructively and responsibly. “When people usually hear ‘AI’ in school, they think about cheating. But I find it cool how we’re incorporating it within our daily school life but with a good connotation behind it,” she says. “It’s fun seeing your ideas come to life. You see really cool movie trailers and you’re like, ‘How did they do that?’ And now, you’re not even close to where those animators are in skill level, but you’re still able to do it because of AI.”
Having become pros at creating AIgenerated images, two students from Dan’s film course, Joe Murphy ’27 and Teo Levin ’27, led a demonstration of Adobe Firefly for students in Humanities teacher Micah Duhaime’s “Propaganda: Past & Present” course. Micah’s students then used the software to create AI-generated posters for their final propaganda campaign project.
“The kids are imagining and getting immediate feedback,” says Dan. “Each student can really sink their teeth into it, and what we’re seeing is they’re getting really excited about doing their work and they’re really engaged. It’s very fun to watch.”
