Digital Storytelling - The Future of Learning

22/06/2025

As interest in AI storytelling grows, we're always on the lookout for new places to deliver our storytelling workshops. Watch this space!

28/08/2024

Hi everyone,

I'd like to make myself useful with the knowledge I've picked up from my recent research into generative AI, and more generally, support emerging storytellers develop their projects.

Some areas where I may be of assistance:

🤖 Teaching you, your staff or students how to use a suite of Generative AI tools in a practical one-day workshop.
(Remote or In Person)

🎞 Video editing your short projects. This could be anything from teasers, trailers, marketing material and explainers to home movies, holidays and field trips. Typically one hour of material, edited into a 3 minute piece.
(Examples of previous work are available)

✏ Developing your idea for a film or TV show into a logline, synopsis and treatment, using established storytelling structures and character development techniques. Script development services are also available.

👨‍💻 Developing pitch decks, proposals and presentation material.

👀Watching your screen production rough cut, evaluating it and then giving feedback for overall improvement, as well as specific edit recommendations (Especially for documentaries)

📆Event / project coordination including stakeholder and participant communications

🔍 Research and reporting including survey design, participant outreach, data collection and interpretation

📋Admin and contact database support

Feel free to reach out to me here, and I would be happy to chat about tailoring my services to your needs, with rates appropriate to your project and budget.

Hope to hear from you soon!

03/08/2024

Gen AI text-to-video has come a long way in the last couple of months!

To show an example of how quickly the technology is developing, I've updated my Dinosaurs Vs Aliens short video using the latest tech available.

You can watch the old version in the bottom right hand corner of the new video as it plays, so you can compare the quality shift scene by scene.
(I'll also put the old version in the comments)

Please do keep in mind, that to produce this, I used a specific methodology which I've developed to teach Creative Digital Storytelling to 8 - 17 year olds, through Digital Storytelling - The Future of Learning, and the video is not a reflection of the kind of short film that I would produce myself.)

This experiment took me about 40 hours to produce.

However, in order to lift it to a professional quality where:

*Opening titles / end credits are more professional
*Warping in background characters would be fixed
*The video quality would be upscaled and colour graded,
..it would be closer to 80 hours work.

Which means, at minimum rates for a video editor who is knowledgeable about AI generation, it would cost about $5000 to produce a 3 minute short, in comparison to about $20000 using traditional methods.

If you would like me to work with you or someone you know to make a 3 minute story like this, teaching the tools and techniques as we go, get in touch and we can work out a price.

In the meantime, please enjoy version 2 of:

REX AND THE DINOSAURS VS THE ALIENS FROM OUTER SPACE (V2)
Script: ChatGPT & OpenAI (10% human tweaks)
Voiceover Narration: ElevenLabs
Moving Image: 90% with 10% Runway
Music:
Sound Effects: ElevenLabs
Titles and Credits: After Effects (Not AI generated)
Video Editing: Premiere Pro (Not AI)
NB: Some manual adjustments to generated video included alteration of clip speed, frame size, reverse motion.

Tell me what you think in the comments!

Gen AI text-to-video has come a long way in the last couple of months. To demonstrate how quickly the technology is developing, I thought I would update my D...

18/07/2024

This month has brought some very welcome news for the Australian film industry, and the wider Australian economy.

Ausfilm announced that the Location Offset Rebate increase has finally been confirmed in legislation, rising from 16.5% to 30%.
In effect, this provides international film productions with more economic incentive to film on location in Australia.

And then last Thursday, The City of Gold Coast brought together organisations such as Ausfilm, Screen Queensland and Village Roadshow Studios for the Mayor's Sunset Networking event, where industry members heard about further developments and opportunities for interstate and international productions.

All of this is not just about bragging rights for having cool movies filmed in Australia, Queensland and the Gold Coast, although that IS pretty cool.
It also signals that there is about to be a greater return on investment for the country and region through screen production expenditure, which flows back into the Australian economy as local jobs, services and businesses are activated by large budget productions.

After a tough stretch over the last few years where screen production has slowed due to Covid, writers and actors strikes, as well as numerous issues affecting international supply chains, there was a noticeable sense of optimism at this event as these announcements were made.

And while Artificial Intelligence does look like it will be the next disruptive force on the horizon to deal with... a flourishing industry is an adaptable and resilient industry.

A massive congratulations to all of those who have worked so hard to secure investment in the sector in support of Australia's cultural and economic development, which is now inspiring new hope within the industry.

Thanks Gina Black for the invitation and Home of the Arts for hosting!

19/06/2024

It's been more than a month now since I completed my first Generative AI short film for kids: REX AND THE DINOSAURS VS THE ALIENS FROM OUTER SPACE.
Well, at least 80% of it was composed of elements generated by using AI tools, where I tweaked and cobbled in some places, and cut everything together using Adobe Premiere Pro.

It does feel like we're still a long way off from typing a premise for a movie into a prompt engine, and a high quality, nuanced 100 minute piece of engaging cinema is quickly pumped out the other end.
In fact, I don't think that will happen any time in the near future.

Any kind of video content creation, let alone cinema has so many complex, creative and technical moving parts to it.
It is the blend of art and science and relies on the collaboration and contribution of hundreds of skilled, experienced professionals.

However, I do see the production of the individual components being sped up and guided by human experts, which will bring down budgets and production time, and radically alter the production landscape, as well as the economic and cultural benefits associated with the screen industry.

Before making the decision to release REX here, I wanted to document my learning journey, because in the future, this time period will be looked back upon in the history of movie making in the same way as the early black and white silent movies, where filmmakers astounded audiences with in-camera 'magic' editing tricks.

And, with the recent release of Runway AI's next gen text-to-video platform, it seems appropriate to show how far I got with my efforts using a previous version of their text-to-video technology.

Please do note that this short was an experiment, using a very basic story format to test the tools of script generation, narrative voice generation, still image generation, moving image generation, music generation and sound effects generation.

You'll be able to see that it the final product is still clunky AF, but if you can imagine someone trained on a reel to reel editing machine learning to use Adobe Premiere in one week, I'm sure you'll appreciate there is room to grow and learn.

Side note: In my Gen AI learning journey, I discovered that there is a HUGE gap in the availability of stylised / themed opening titles and end credits. Someone should really take advantage of that!

NB: This is NOT my best effort at making a short film for a target audience haha.

However, if Runway AI would like to sponsor me to create a new improved version of this short film using their latest generation software, my new improved knowledge of the platform and other gen AI tools, as well as my actual nuanced storytelling skills, I'd love to take up that challenge.

I'll explain my experiences with the earlier version of Runway in another post, but for now, please feel free to watch, like, share, subscribe and comment on REX AND THE DINOSAURS VS THE ALIENS FROM OUTER SPACE

This is Matthew Donaldson's first attempt at producing a story using AI Generated components.Lots of trial and error, lots of shortcuts, lots of finding the ...

05/06/2024

After deciding to pause my attempts to do a complete 'one prompt' script-to-video AI generated short film for kids, I continued looking at alternative workarounds for making the story come to life, by focusing on the individual production elements.

So I started searching around for tools to create AI generated voiceover narration and character voices.

It seems that text-to-voice gen AI has been RAPIDLY evolving while everyone has been busy looking at text-to-video.

I found a number of text-to-voice generators such as:

ElevenLabs (which was my preferred choice and which I'll cover in more detail in my next post)

https://www.topmediai.com/app/text-to-speech/
that pretty accurately generates narration using the voices of Morgan Freeman, Donald Trump, Snoop Dogg and others

and

https://www.tryparrotai.com/ which does the same but ALSO generates short, 'shallowfake' videos of your chosen celebrities saying whatever you want them to say with a text prompt, albeit with some pretty bad lip sync.

While I was on this last site, I decided to take the opportunity to do a little experiment to generate some free celebrity endorsement for Matthew Donaldson Workshops.

Even though doing this raised some serious questions for me about how governments, industry, and social media platforms would be handling the very real potential for malicious misuse of this kind of technology, and what this would mean for the value of video evidence and testimony in the future, I could feel myself being dragged down a very deep rabbit hole!

But now that I had the endorsement of some high-profile celebrities 😂 I felt motivated to re-focus and carry on with my research into how to make character voices and voiceover narration for my own Gen AI short film.

Next post: Elevenlabs.ai for Voiceover and character voice generation

23/05/2024

In pursuit of the idea of copying and pasting the original short film script about Dinosaurs vs Aliens that ChatGPT & OpenAI had written for me (with lots of flowery language), into some sort of magical AI video making software, I googled around to see if there was some lo-fi version of OpenAI's Sora AI Video that I could use to experiment with.

In a hopeful turn, I found invideo, and started looking more closely into what it did. With little bit of charming, optimistic naivety I thought that I could just copy my script into its text prompt area, and my Gen AI short film masterpiece would be pumped out the other end within minutes.

Disappointingly, but hilariously, this was not the case.
It seems that Invideo trawls through all stock footage available within its dataset, and ASSEMBLES existing stock footage clips rather than GENERATING new clips based on a script to make a short movie.

This was not what I was looking for.

(I did however note it as a useful way to find archive footage for documentaries without time intensive archive searching across multiple libraries.)

For some reason, Invideo also decided to make the already-over-the-top flowery language in the script that I'd given it, feel like it was trying really hard to get itself beaten up by high school bullies.
(Did it want to show that it was smarter than me? Did it want to impress me? Why all of a sudden was I worried that someone was going to try to take its lunch money?)

What did impress me though, was that it generated its very own voiceover based on the script. Which got me curious about what text to narration AI tools were out there.

I decided to pause my text-to-video experiment for the moment, and go looking for other Gen AI tools to start building the individual audio-visual components of my story, while continuing my search for text-to-video workarounds.

In my next post we'll look at text-to-voice for the purposes of simplifying voiceover narration and character voicing, but for the moment, please do go ahead and enjoy my first attempt at producing a Gen AI short film, which is hilariously bad - at least for my storytelling needs. 😆

Stay tuned though for future posts, where you'll see how my journey into AI storytelling makes huge steps forward for Digital Storytelling - The Future of Learning as I continue to work towards producing something closer to a genuinely generative AI short movie for kids.

22/05/2024

The first stage in any scripted production is coming up with an idea, and writing a script.

So of course the first thing I did on my Gen AI filmmaking journey was to put OpenAI's ChatGPT & OpenAI to the test, by asking it to come up with a script for my short film idea.

I could have tried using it to auto-generate story ideas before that, but I thought it would be a fun exercise to use the image of Aliens Vs Dinosaurs from my original post about Gen AI, as a starting point.

I also wanted to use the digital storytelling methodology and IP that I've been developing over the years, when delivering creative production workshops to school aged students as a way to teach them:

*Creative thinking
*Story structure and storytelling fundamentals
*Literacy
*Technology (now including Gen AI production)
*Creative production skills

Aliens, dinosaurs and space battles are pretty typical subjects in these workshops.

So in terms of script, I decided to keep it simple to start, to allow for manageable Gen AI production testing.

My prompt to Chat GPT was: "Please write me a story using 'The Hero's Journey' format, with only 3 sentences per page - 10 pages maximum - about Rex the Dinosaur having his planet invaded by Aliens from Outer Space.'

Within about 10 seconds, Chat GPT had given me a wordy script with lots of over the top flourishing language, as well as a ridiculous 'Deus ex Machina' (This is when a protagonist's problem is suddenly and unexpectedly resolved in an artificial or contrived way).

Having started my professional life as a TV writer, I am lucky to already be equipped with specialist knowledge of story structure.
It is worth noting though, that people starting with a blank page and no writing experience or training will likely have trouble generating quality scripts because they don't understand writing concepts and narrative devices such as 'Save the Cat' 'The Hero's Journey' or 'The Dark Night of the Soul'.

Chat GPT suggested that Rex and his dinosaur friends summon a storm to beat the aliens and their spaceships, because.... nature vs technology?

As the human in charge, I decided to step in and adjust the stupid plot point, because, well I'm the human in charge and I didn't want to waste my time explaining Deus ex Machina to a machine.

I did some bare minimum plot tweaks to stay on schedule, and asked Chat GPT to revise the script to fit the vocabulary of 7 - 11 year olds, in the interest of mirroring appropriately leveled language teaching for the age group.

Within 10 seconds it had revised the script appropriately for the vocabulary age level. I was pretty happy with it, but I still made a couple of final tweaks for accuracy of meaning.

Usually this scripting exercise for a 3 minute short film, would take about 3 hours when working with children to teach them creative writing.

Taking into account the script generation time with expert human tweaks, this 'first draft' process took 15 minutes total.

Next up: Voicing the script

19/05/2024

A few weeks ago, I was lucky enough to attend the Australian Film Television and Radio School's Digital Futures Summit on AI.

In the AFTRS online presentation, it was great to hear some robust, in-depth conversations about the likely impacts on art and commerce in the coming years. These discussions included a variety of perspectives, including ethical, creative, economic, logistical, vocational, political and cultural points of view.

It inspired me to work out for myself how easy (or difficult) it is to make generative AI content, especially short films, and get a better sense of how to pivot my business if necessary, as well as how this technology will impact the wider screen industry.

I'll be posting in the coming weeks about my learning journey, as I get to grips with how to use generative AI tools, and ultimately produce a short film.

Please do like and comment and share, and ask any questions you might have about the tools and my methodology.

Stay tuned!

14/03/2024

I’m really looking forward to attending the Screen Forever 38 conference presented by Screen Producers Australia and supported by Screen Queensland, Screen Australia, and the City of Gold Coast.

I'm particularly interested to hear what's on the minds of attendees and presenters alike, when it comes to their experiences and observations of recent successes and challenges, not only for the Australian screen industry but also the screen industry worldwide.

As my contract with the Screen Music & Sound Guild of New Zealand wraps up, I’m especially interested in networking and relationship building at the conference and beyond, with a view to finding permanent work in Australia, and setting up a place to live in Brisbane, Gold Coast or Sydney.

So, if you are attending, and your screen organisation is in need of a hard-working, personable, professional individual with good insights into production attraction, locations, production expenditure rebates and offsets, story development, industry and audience development, event organisation, festivals, SVOD streaming and general screen trends, I’d love to chat with you.

I’ll be around for at least the next five weeks, so there will be plenty of time to connect in person, either during or after the conference.

And, if you just want someone to sit next to and bounce ideas around with at the sessions, and perhaps have a drink with afterwards at one of the social functions, do feel free to get in touch with me ahead of the conference.

Exciting times! Let's get together and make the best of it.