The Refuge of Failed Artists

Synopsis

This film asks what's left of being an artist once a machine can produce something close enough. It draws a parallel with painters in the 1830s, who faced something similar when photography was first announced and many genuinely believed it would make painting obsolete.

The film doesn't try to resolve that fear, either historically or in the present, it just sits in the discomfort of it. There's a sense throughout that failure, slowness, and human mess might be the things AI can't actually replicate, but it never commits to that as a conclusion, it leaves it open.

Process

All four shot on the Lumix S9 in opengate, mostly on the Helios 44M-7, edited in DaVinci Resolve. Two drafts went out for feedback. The second draft used a proper questionnaire instead, a QR code and URL shown at the end of the film, to get something more useful back. The clearest finding was that the monochrome painter sequence, featuring a 19th century painter character called Tiago, stuck with people the most, mainly because of how it contrasted visually with the rest of the film.

The Macintosh display itself was shot against a real, non functional Macintosh Classic shell. The image on screen came from screen recording the Infinite Mac emulator, then editing the screen content in Linearity Curve to build a custom interface called "Pixl AI," named after Ash's black cat, Pixel. All of that got composited in DaVinci Resolve Fusion: a rectangle mask rounded the digital screen's corners to match the real display, and vignette, flicker, scanlines, and lens distortion were layered on top to sell the look of a real convex CRT, finished off with a screen blend mode merge. The art gallery scene was originally meant to be a physical set, but got rebuilt virtually once time ran short. It was modelled in Roblox Studio, then several screenshots at different lighting states got composited together using different blend modes and opacity levels, with the painting image laid over the top.

Tiago's outdoor painting scene was planned from preproduction to stay monochrome everywhere except the paint itself, which stays blue. That came from duplicating the clip, fully desaturating one layer, boosting saturation on the other, then isolating just the blue paint using the qualifier tool rather than a Magic Mask, since the mask had caused some glitchy colour bleed onto his hand and brush. For the walking shot at Brixham, near Thatcher's Rock, the footage was shot in Log and graded warm to match the original mood board. There's a moment where Ash walks left then immediately right, which broke the continuity of some on screen text, so the clip got duplicated and split top and bottom, with only the bottom half flipped.

Nominations

• WinnerBest Film EditorSouth Devon College Film Festival
• Runner UpBest ConceptSouth Devon College Film Festival
• Runner UpBest CinematographySouth Devon College Film Festival
• Runner UpBest Prop and Set DesignSouth Devon College Film Festival