Dragon Con 2024 in Atlanta: The High and Lows of Film School

By Caroline Cao | September 5, 2024 | Celebrity & Culture

At Dragon Con, I majorly attended the film panels, including “Film School 101.”

I’m sad to report some negatives from the panels. For starters, one screenwriter spoke about his terrible experience with Harvey Weinstein, who phone-called him and asked him to “find white characters” — for a Compton setting, no less! After making some effort to add minor white characters, Weinstein called him back to entirely reject the script on the basis that no one wanted to watch a film about Black vampires (ha, ha). It nearly got the screenwriter to quit the business. This is a compelling story about perseverance that he unfortunately capped off with a tasteless quip: “I wished he touched me,” referring to Weinstein’s serial sexual abuse of women in the film industry.

The second negative regards generative AI. One filmmaker dropped some good advice: Prep the storyboards so that everyone knows your vision. This is good and all until he mentioned that he advocated for generative AI for storyboarding and scriptwriting. “Oh, I actually got a good script out of this [generative AI] and only needed to change like two things.” This is a red flag and horribly detrimental to the artist’s work.

I say this not because these are terrible men. I feel that they have good hearts, but I find this to be a reflection of poor training and awareness according to the current events.

On the lighter side, I found more stimulating filmmaking through the Museum of Animation Workshop. Generative AI can’t design this.