With AI visuals and old-school technique, film student tells American immigration story for 250th anniversary

COM: The New Colossus has been invoked in immigration debates for decades. How did you navigate making a film that’s clearly in dialogue with current political tensions around immigration, while still keeping it a celebration of America’s 250th?

Owen Logan: I love hearing what one person has to say and how they perceive the world, and then another person’s lens. I think that goes into storytelling in general — you need to be empathetic, you need to place yourself in someone else’s shoes in order to tell their story.

Where the endeavor began was more the idea of how you can make an artistically authentic, ethical AI short film. Does that even exist? That’s kind of where the journey stemmed from, and that’s why Professor Tunji and I pursued it.

For me, I wanted to make a short film that I could show to all Americans: liberal, conservative, and independent alike. All of these people live in the same big tent we call the United States. What was it like to leave China behind in hopes of gold in California in 1850? What was it like to seek religious freedom from dominant European dogmas of their respective times? What was it like to leave Cuba floating by currents in hopes of prosperity? There are shared ideals of the American dream, of what it means to be an American despite the oceans that had once separated us.

Part of including that Ronald Reagan quote was to demonstrate our big tent. Ronald Reagan shares ideals with a Jewish woman from the 1800s, who was very progressive for her era, and wrote a fantastic poem of American identity.

I wanted to frame this poem within the historical lens of 250 years of American experience and identity. Instead of showing the future or the present, I wanted to show the past and maybe by looking at our history, we all take a breath to reflect.

It is important for us each to remember where we came from. My great-grandparents were from Italy, and my great-great-grandparents Ireland, and it can be easy to forget your heritage once you take on the American experience. If we can acknowledge we all come from somewhere, maybe it’ll help us have a little more empathy and perspective as we move into the future.

COM: For Mother of Exiles, you used AI only for visuals, while working with a human editor and a voice actor through traditional methods. Why did you settle on that division of labor, and what did it teach you?

Owen Logan: The grand fear of AI and the critique of AI is that it’s going to become the creative mind, and the filmmaker is the tool that’s prompting it.

I wanted to delve into these concerns with Professor Tunji. Part of the motivation came through informational interviews with people in the industry throughout my time in school. Something professionals kept bringing up when I asked how I should spend my final semester was: make a short film with AI, and learn how to use the technology.

Of course, I had apprehensions about it. I went to film school, I had a traditional education at BU, and I enjoy the physical process of making films. I like the physical art of storytelling, and I don’t want a desk job just crunching numbers into a computer that does it for me. However, I took these critiques to heart and took a kind of Sun Tzu “know your enemy” approach. Afterall, this is the world I’m stepping into, so I’ve got to learn how to walk in it.

I approached Professor Tunji about how we could make a short film that still incorporated traditional storyboarding, shot listing, and the traditional aspects of a pre-production process, while also using AI as a tool.

One major requirement was that you need collaborators. This isn’t a solo, Ed Sheeran singer-songwriter deal — we wanted a band. As for the video generation, we approached it in a very technical way. There’s a world where you can just type in “show me a cat running across the screen” and platforms will generate a pretty cool cinematic sequence. However, if your story and approach has no heart, then the outcome will reflect that. So we shot-listed, inputting very technical cinematographic and blocking information, really trying to approach this as if every department wrote a prompt. We created a mega-prompt, put that into the software, and tried to see how it could handle it. Sometimes it handled it very well, oftentimes it did not.

There is a real process to prompt engineering. Learning how each of these different video generation platforms interprets and translates that data is genuinely a skill. We would work with language models to reinterpret the prompts we created, tell them the outcomes we were getting versus the outcomes we were desiring. It was a fascinating process, and I actually came out of it more secure in the essential nature of physical production, just because the technology is still imperfect.

COM: What’s the single most surprising thing you learned — something you think other film students would need to understand before using these tools?

Owen Logan: Using the technology can be like trying to nail jello to a wall. It’s super hard to mold into what you want, and even if you type in every detail, you’re not necessarily going to get the result you’re after. It’s incredibly probabilistic, which is part of the reason why I feel a lot more secure coming out of it.

As a student, if you go in thinking the AI is going to make the film for you, that’s where it becomes a problem. But if you approach with an understanding of storytelling,  traditional filmmaking, a shot list with a director’s vision of what you want — then I think it opens wide doors for what’s now possible for the creator. It will be difficult to use the tech to mold into what you want, but that’s the reality when you are using it as a tool for your vision, instead of AI using you to generate content.

COM: You’ve mentioned potential collaborators — educational institutions, nonprofits, museums. What kind of conversation might Mother of Exiles start?

Owen Logan: I created a civic and classroom discussion guide about both the materials used in the film and the film itself — the New Colossus poem, Ronald Reagan’s quote on civic nationalism from his farewell address, and the film as a whole.

This film sits literally at the intersection of immigration, America 250, and the use of artificial intelligence. It offers a modern launching point for those conversations. That was the hope — to have conversations come out of the story, to prompt reflection. I’m not trying to push any particular conclusion. It’s intentionally very open-ended. It doesn’t tell you what to think, in fact it asks you, what do you think? In an age where everyone seeks to offer an answer, both factual and incorrect, sometimes the best we can do is offer a question.

For classrooms, my hope is that the film can be used to talk about American history and American identity — a very gray, complex subject.

I also want it to spark conversation around AI use in film specifically. A lot of AI use comes from a load of shock and awe, you know, “oh, this looks really cool.” But is it possible to use AI as a tool to have a really complex, nuanced conversation around something that’s incredibly sensitive to people? That was the experiment.