Category: Film

I had the opportunity to participate in the STAR (Students Tackling Advanced Research) program at Drexel University, where I explored how AI can be used to bring history to life through animation. My project focused on recreating Charles Willson Peale’s 1801 mastodon excavation and the assembly of the first mastodon skeleton displayed in the United States.

Before I could begin generating any visuals, I spent time researching Peale’s letters, autobiography, and historical paintings to better understand the people, locations, and events I wanted to recreate. The narration in the film comes directly from passages in Peale’s own writing, allowing the story to be told using his words.

One of the biggest things I learned was that creating AI-generated video involves much more than simply writing a prompt. I spent a lot of time experimenting with prompts, testing different descriptions, and using reference images to guide the AI toward more historically accurate results. Even then, the AI frequently changed characters’ faces, clothing, and environments between shots, so a large part of the project involved editing, refining, and finding creative ways to maintain consistency throughout the film.

To improve historical accuracy, Charles Willson Peale and Rembrandt Peale were based on their self-portraits. Since no known portrait of Moses Williams exists, his appearance was created using a historical silhouette, a painting believed to depict him, and a 3D character model created by Tyrone Bullock in collaboration with my project mentor, Professor Glen Muschio. The waterwheel scene was also inspired by Peale’s painting Exhumation of the Mastodon.

This project changed the way I think about AI as a creative tool. Rather than replacing artists, I found that AI works best when combined with research, traditional digital art, and careful editing. It still required a significant amount of creative decision-making, but it also made it possible for me to produce a project that would have been difficult to complete on my own in a single summer.

This film was produced as part of my STAR research project under the mentorship of Professor Glen Muschio. The experience gave me a much better understanding of both the possibilities and the current limitations of AI, and it showed me how these tools can be used to create more engaging ways of sharing history.