The Johnny Carson Center for Emerging Media Arts is hosting the third annual AI Filmmaking Hackathon on Saturday, April 5 from 10 a.m. to 7 p.m. in the Carson Center.
The event is free and open to the public for anyone interested in working with machine learning and storytelling. For information and to register, visit https://go.unl.edu/aifilm. No AI experience is necessary.
A deep-dive workshop is available on Wednesday, April 2 from 5-7 p.m. in the Carson Center Rm. 209 to introduce participants to everything they need to know to participate in the AI Filmmaking Hackathon. The workshop does not require registration.
“It is a hackathon that uses whatever the most current sort of tool set or tool chain for using generative machine learning for imagery creation, whether still or animated or interpolated or whatever that may be,” said Assistant Professor of Emerging Media Arts Dan “NovySan” Novy. “I teach a series of workshops, and [Assistant Professor of Emerging Media Arts] Ash Eliza Smith joins me. The workshops are designed to expose the student, faculty, staff and wider Lincoln community with an overview of what those tool chains actually are, what tools are available, which ones are available for free, which ones are paid, which ones are more advanced. And then I expose them to tool chains that we make available to them. On our national research project, Super Computing Cluster, we have some tools that they can use during the hackathon for free.”
Emerging media arts senior Cade Suing said the event is the chance to experiment with different tools involving AI in some capacity.
“It’s all about gaining familiarity with the tools and what they actually are,” he said. “There’s a big emphasis on experimentation , most of it revolves around wanting to continue the discussion on AI and its place in artistic creation, and it can be very divisive, which is one of the things I like about it.”
On the day of the hackathon, participants show up with their team (or they can be assigned to a team).
“There is a more specific theme. The overarching theme for this particular hackathon is ‘Data,’” Novy said. “Because it is, in part, co-sponsored by the UNL Grand Challenge Creative Data Visualization team that I am on because data visualization and scientific literacy is also super important. You can use machine learning to do data visualization as well. In fact, it’s an area that’s rife with opportunities.”
During the hackathon, the teams create an approximately three-minute film from approximately 10:30 a.m. to 6 p.m. when the event ends with dinner and an awards program, where prizes are awarded for the best films.
“I would describe AI Hackathon as an annual, friendly competition put on by the Carson Center to help encourage people both in and outside of the college to learn how to leverage artificial intelligence-based tools within the filmmaking workflows and pipelines,” said Nathan Smiley, a junior emerging media arts major from Platte City, Missouri, who has participated in the previous two hackathons.
“I participated in it because I actually had a strong aversion to AI tools as they were first coming out and thought this event would be a good way to see the practical uses they might have,” he said. “The more I learned about it and how it worked, the less intimidating it became.”
In his first AI Hackathon in 2023, Smiley worked with his friend, Justin Watt.
“We created a sort of analog horror film in which a PSA was broadcast warning of an outbreak of AI impersonators,” Smiley said. “Again, this was around the time that I had an aversion to AI tools, in general, so that influenced the theme. We ended up winning ‘Best Film’ for the piece. In 2024, our team was composed of my friends Mac O’Brien and Drew Carlson, as well as my brother Noah and his friend, Jack Coon, who both were in Lincoln for spring break. The film was more of our typical comedies and was a sort of parody on old Apple commercials. The ‘product’ in this commercial was an AI robot, which was based off of Justin—who unfortunately couldn’t attend that year. This film also won ‘Best Film.’”
Smiley learned a lot from both hackathons.
“These events showed me that AI doesn’t have to be a scary thing, and that it can co-exist with the creative process rather than replace it entirely,” he said. “Since these events, I’ve been able to find ways to utilize AI in my day-to-day creative pipeline to speed up the tedious tasks so that I can put all of my effort into the creative processes.”
Suing also had trepidations about using AI in filmmaking.
“I kind of hated the idea of using AI for a lot of reasons and decided to go to my first Hackathon as a means to try and understand the tools before passing too much displaced judgment,” he said. “I had also been inspired by artists like Harmony Korine and Jacques, and I know they emply some use of AI in their creation, in a pretty obvious and interesting way. I thought there was maybe something I could say or ideas I could explore that I probably couldn’t dive as much into without the presence of AI.”
Suing attended last year’s Hackathon.
“I ended up creating a kind of skate video with original music that used a lot of computer vision (LIDAR, motion detecting, infrared cameras, deepfake AI models) to sort of get across this feeling of surveillance, violence and a weird balance/imbalance between humans and the machines we create,” he said. “I made it with my friend and frequent collaborator Calvin Doerr. It was great.”
Novy said the point of the event is to be “wonderfully experimental.”
“A lot of people are fearmongering, claiming that AI is going to replace movie studios, that the computer is just going to make the movie for you,” he said. “And the takeaway that almost every student has had at the end of each hackathon is, wow, this still really hard, and there’s no way this going to take my job. It is simply another tool in the tool set for both conceptualization and visual effects artists. It is not going to completely take over the whole filmmaking process, at least not for a good long time. And even then, it will always be a tool for the filmmaker to create what they’re interested in making.”
Suing said participating in the Hackathon changed his views on the use of AI in the creative process.
“Going into it, I had a pretty negative view on AI, as a whole, given its slew of economic and environmental implications," he said. "I think through understanding how to use many of the tools and AI workflows, my opinion of it has changed. I can see it have utilitarian use and can be beneficial to the creative process, if used responsibly and with proper guidelines and parameters in place. I think it is important to push the tool as far as we can, as artists, to see its breaking points and hopefully start further conversations on how we want to see AI influence our human existence in the future.”
Smiley said his biggest takeaway from the event was that a good film must be written by a creative team and not by AI.
“Both of our films we submitted were written by our team, as we believe that AI cannot truly be creative,” Smiley said. “However, we did use AI for numerous things that we would otherwise just not be able to do, let alone within such a short time frame. Some such uses included generative voice models to add more characters to our films. Another was generating custom music. My personal favorite was mixing a couple of AI tools together to animate an old photo of Bill Murray and have him give a testimonial in our commercial parody.”
Smiley said the AI Hackathon is a great place to experiment and learn.
“It’s a very low-stakes environment that is meant to be accessible to everyone, whether you have prior experience or not,” he said. “The professors are happy to help teach you how to use the AI tools, and with new tools coming out every year, most of the participants are learning new things from each other, too.”
Novy wants participants to become comfortable with the idea of working with machine learning.
“There are lots of other areas of machine learning that they can transfer to, ideally with things like data visualization or robotics or all sorts of other things that they can do once they understand how training models on custom data sets will work,” he said. “I would like them to recognize that their jobs in the future are safe, but also to be able to look at what’s coming down the pipeline and make it useful to them, not to shy away from new advances because they simply don’t understand how it works. Fear should not be a reason to not engage in something.”
Suing said, “It’s important to understand AI as a tool and not as a medium and find places to push it as creatives.”
Novy encourages anyone interested in learning more about this to participate in the AI Filmmaking Hackathon.
“Learn new tools, get access to hardware you wouldn’t normally get access to, and be able to experiment in a completely 100% supportive zone,” he said.