Video transcript
ARTEXPRESS 2023 - Student interview - 08. Tom Buckingham Shum

TOM BUCKINGHAM SHUM: Hi, my name is Tom Buckingham Shum. I study visual arts at Turramurra High School. My body of work basically delves into the now very prevalent topic of AI art and how it's going to be affecting our futures and the future of creativity in the creative industry.

I chose an animation. It explores it, this topic, through a commercial-style video that sells AI as a product that you can buy in the form of a robot. It kind of shows this robot as something that solves all your problems.

It can make art with just the push of a button. That kind of touched on that perspective, in a foreboding but satirical way, just to kind of highlight the dangers that AI does possess, and how it's something that we need to be looking at so that we can use it in the correct way and it's not going to be putting millions of people out of jobs in the future.

I think I was mainly influenced by my dad quite a lot, because he works at UTS. He kind of investigates AI and how it interacts with humans and learning in education. He kind of brought me on to the topic of AI.

Because at the start of the year in 2022, AI hadn't really blown up blown up the internet. It didn't have as much exposure as it does now. I wasn't really influenced to go into it because it was a really hot topic. I went into it because I found it really interesting, as someone who wants to pursue a career in the creative industry.

I wanted to understand how it's going to be impacting me. I didn't choose the topic because everyone was talking about it, because it was amazing. I did it because I knew that it would impact the future. I wanted to form my own opinion of it.

The primary inspiration was Walt Disney, obviously, one of the greatest animators ever. I think I was mainly inspired to do animation and try animation for the first time at the start of Year 12, because in Year 11, I'd done a case study on him, where we basically just had to research an artist that we found inspiring and understand their process.

From doing that in Year 11, I kind of already had this interest in animation. I'd already learnt his techniques. And then, I basically just brought it into the contemporary digital form, rather than obviously doing it by ink and paint and using resources online, just to give me techniques help me along the way.

I hadn't done animation until the start of Year 12. But I chose animation because it just allowed me to explore my concept in a more sophisticated way than just plain digital art, which was what I was comfortable with. I guess everyone's process is different in time-based forms. But for me, I started traditional.

At the start of the year, I knew I wanted to do something with AI, but I wasn't sure how I was going to carry out. I just got any inspiration I thought could be useful. I printed them out, printed out images and put them in my visual art diary.

And then, I would annotate them, dissect any features that I found interesting. And then, from the inspiration on the next page over, I'd create a sketch. They were just really random sketches.

I think the inspiration that's exhibited in our gallery, in my visual art diary, it's a scene of a pig slaughterhouse and a scene from I-Robot, the movie. From there, I created a sketch of this factory scene with all these faceless robots. That kind of, I guess, reflected my idea of AI art, how it's all very the same. There's no individualism. It's quite an eerie, deathly vibe.

I'd start with inspiration, then create a rough sketch. From the rough sketch, I moved to digital. I had no idea, really, how to do animations. I started really basic. I just made very simple, choppy animations, loosely based off the sketch.

It started with just a single conveyor belt, very 2D, and then, a single robot kind of just chugging along. I wasn't focused on detail or anything. I was just trying to figure out my capabilities.

And then, I would just slowly take the first animation and then move on to-- I'd recreate it, adding a tiny bit more detail, maybe adding some more robots to make it a bit more fluid. That's basically how I made the entire animation. I was doing it on an app called Rough Animator, just on a school iPad.

It was very basic, but it allowed me to do what I wanted to do, just kind of doing each cel animation, changing it slightly each time to create the illusion of movement. I'd basically go through those stages, just adding a layer of detail each time, recreating it until I got to a point where I thought, this is a good level. I think I can do this quality throughout the entire animation.

Once I kind of got that first scene going and got to a point where I liked it, I'd move on to the next scene. This was all on the iPad. Once I'd done the entire animation, I brought it into iMovie, I think, where I put it all together, added the sound and the voiceover.

Once I'd done that, I moved it into Adobe Premiere Pro. I changed all the colours. I added a bit more detail, changed the levels of the sound, just because it wasn't quite right. I started just on pen and paper. And then, I moved into video software, software editing at the end.

Once I moved away from my visual art diary and I found that I couldn't really translate anything into a physical copy, I started uploading videos and clips of my animations to my Instagram account. I would show my teacher this Instagram account. That was kind of her way of keeping track of what I was doing, especially on the weekends and stuff when I wasn't doing work in class.

The Instagram account let her keep track of what I was doing, even when I'm not in school. Having that platform that allows you to showcase a time-based work in the most effective way possible, because obviously, time-based is all about cinematography, cinematic techniques and stuff that can't really just be captured in an image, having that platform is really useful. Even if it's not an Instagram account, whether it's a website where you upload links or whatever, or a private YouTube account, having a platform that lets you showcase what you're keeping up with is really useful.

One of the main challenges I faced was that I'd never done animation before. I was learning an entirely new medium. I had a tiny new medium. I had to learn new techniques throughout the space of a year and produce a work that I was happy with.

That was probably the main challenge that I faced, just because it's all very new. Because of that, I underestimated how long animation takes. I originally wanted to add line work and colour to the entire animation, but I only got through the sketching phase, because that took a lot longer than I was expecting.

Instead of just kind of cutting my animation short, cutting out key aspects of what I was trying to say-- which would allow me to add line and colour-- I instead decided to run with the sketched look. Instead of keeping it just blue sketched on just like white background, I decided to take it into Premiere Pro, Adobe Premiere Pro, and invert the colours to create this cyanotype aesthetic.

By doing that, that actually allowed me to expand my concept and see that AI is a sort of metaphorical blueprint for society, how AI and technology is embedded into everything we do. I guess the main challenge of animation actually ended up benefiting me in some way, because it allowed me to create a more sophisticated final piece.

ARTEXPRESS is definitely an amazing thing to be a part of. You see your work up amongst famous artworks that you've been studying throughout the year. Just for the theory side of things, it's a bit surreal, to be honest.

But you also get so many opportunities, as well, with ARTEXPRESS, ways to share your ideas and your processes. ARTEXPRESS is definitely an amazing experience to be a part of. With ARTEXPRESS, I got to do lots of case studies, which let me present my ideas to current high school students and help them as well, as well as meeting lots of people who create the whole ARTEXPRESS experience, as well as lots of other artists.

It's a really amazing opportunity. For the future, I definitely want to do something in the creative industry. I got into Bachelor of Animation at UTS. Although, I'm also considering other fine arts degrees. I'm not entirely set on anything right now, but definitely something in the creative industry.

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