Summary of Activity

In early 2025, Griffith Film School launched a Masters-level Innovation Academy on AI Filmmaking Workflows, designed as an immersive, collaborative, and industry-focused experience. The Innovation Academies at GFS promote hands-on, problem-based learning, encouraging students to innovate through experimentation, cross-disciplinary practice, and peer-to-peer teaching.

This academy focused on the rapid evolution of generative AI and its potential to disrupt traditional filmmaking pipelines. Structured as a collaborative learning environment, the course positioned both students and facilitators as members of a community of practice, working together to explore, critique, and apply emerging AI tools to the creative process.

Challenges Faced

At the outset, the most pressing challenge was student scepticism. Many arrived wary of AI, having absorbed media narratives that positioned AI as a threat to creativity human employment and indeed, existence.

There were also technical hurdles: the fast-changing nature of AI tools meant that new capabilities were emerging weekly, and consistency across outputs - such as maintaining character likenesses or locations - was often unreliable. Additionally, no single tool could carry a project from start to finish. Effective workflows required combining multiple tools, many of which were obscure, experimental, or still in beta.

As the facilitator, keeping up with this fast-moving space while also supporting students required constant research, tool testing, and adaptation of weekly learning materials.

Outcomes & Impact

Despite early hesitation, students became increasingly confident and agile in using AI tools. Assessment revolved around each student’s Maker Journal, a weekly record of experiments, reflections, tools tested, and insights gained. The facilitator also kept a journal, surfacing lesser-known resources like voice cloning platforms, lip-syncing tools, and storyboard generators to extend the collective learning.

In just 12 weeks, the group covered a wide range of filmmaking processes, including:

• Prompt engineering

• Scriptwriting

• Storyboarding

• Character and location consistency

• Voice generation and cloning

• Lip sync and dialogue syncing

• Music and sound effect prompting

• Editing workflows

The course culminated in a final showcase of short-form AI films, including two student productions and a reflective video essay. These highlighted not only the creative outcomes but the growth in students’ critical engagement with AI, showing a shift from anxiety to agency.

Reflection & the Future

Student reflections revealed a transformative shift. Initial fears about AI were replaced by informed, critical perspectives, grounded in hands-on experimentation. Many came to see AI as a toolset rather than a threat - especially valuable for short-form, abstract, or experimental content.

The collaborative format empowered students to take ownership of their learning and to support one another as the class navigated uncharted territory together.

Looking ahead, there is clear potential to evolve this course into a permanent offering or elective, as well as to explore advanced modules focusing on ethics, aesthetics, and interdisciplinary applications of AI in media production. The course succeeded in fostering not just AI literacy but AI fluency, plus a mindset open to experimentation, grounded in critique, and confident in applying technology creatively and ethically.