
Donna Mitchell is joined by Emmy award-winning television producer Erich Archer, who shares his journey from traditional TV production to exploring the creative possibilities of AI in film and video. Erich discusses the transformative impact of AI platforms like ChatGPT and Mid Journey on the creative process, allowing for faster pre-production tasks and the generation of compelling visuals. He discusses both the advancements and limitations of current AI technology, such as issues with realism and character consistency, as well as the industry's ongoing challenges around diversity and bias. Erich also projects a future where AI democratizes creative storytelling, enabling not just professionals but individuals across the globe to harness their latent creativity through accessible AI tools. Tune in to discover how AI is reshaping the landscape of visual media and learn about Erich's innovative projects that blend history with modern technology.
About Erich Archer:
Erich Archer stands out as a pioneering force at the confluence of creative media, AI strategy, and storytelling innovation. He consistently pushes the boundaries of traditional content creation, leveraging the latest in AI and digital media to craft compelling narratives and strategic content solutions. His work, characterized by a unique blend of creativity, strategic acumen, and technical expertise, positions him as a leading figure in the evolving landscape of digital content and AI integration.
Archer's journey from a freelance video producer working with notable names like NBC, FOX, and MTV, to 1623 Studios' Executive Director driving strategic content development, showcases his ability to adapt and innovate within the dynamic media landscape. His role in the inception of Mashlink, a mobile video application, shows his entrepreneurial spirit and willingness to explore new frontiers in digital communication.
In an era where AI's role in creative industries is celebrated and scrutinized, Erich Archer embodies the harmonious integration of artificial intelligence with human creativity. His work not only advances the field of digital media but also serves as a compelling narrative for the potential of AI to enhance, rather than supplant, human ingenuity in storytelling and content creation. Archer's forward-looking vision and innovative use of AI in media production set a benchmark for professionals navigating the intersection of technology, creativity, and strategy in the digital age.
Connect with Erich Archer:
Website: https://www.cgacreative.com
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ericharcher/
Connect with Donna Mitchell:
Podcast - https://www.PivotingToWeb3Podcast.com
Book an Event - https://www.DonnaPMitchell.com
Company - https://www.MitchellUniversalNetwork.com
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/donna-mitchell-a1700619
Instagram Professional: https://www.instagram.com/dpmitch11
Twitter/ X: https://www.twitter.com/dpmitch11
YouTube Channel - http://Web3GamePlan.com
What to learn more: Pivoting To Web3 | Top 100 Jargon Terms
What to learn more: Pivoting To Web3 | Top 100 Jargon Terms
00:00 - AI Tools Transforming Creative Work
00:00 - Balancing Benefits and Risks
03:42 - Home Image Creation Revolution
09:37 - Favorite Creative Tools and Platforms
11:00 - Navigating Aesthetic Inspiration Legally
16:09 - Creative Freedom in Digital Media
18:09 - AI-Fueled Film Dream Realized
24:16 - Excited for AI Advancements Ahead
26:19 - Creating Custom GPTs in ChatGPT
31:15 - Balancing Benefits and Risks
Welcome to Pivoting to Web3 podcast where experts break down AI, blockchain and tech, shaping our future. I'm Donna and today's guest has insights you won't want to miss. Let's dive in. Welcome, welcome, welcome, welcome to Pivoting to Web3. And today I have a treat. This is the first time I've got somebody who's in the creative space with AI and doing some exciting work on the video side, probably on the film side in time. They're Emmy award winning, they've been directors, they've been with smarty pants, they've been a lot of great places and I'm not going to go on and on like I normally do. I'm going to introduce you to Erich Archer.
And Erich, I want you to say hello to your audience and ours and give us some background exactly who you are and how you got where you are today.
Well, thank you Donna, that was a kind introduction. It's nice to talk with you today. My name is Erich Archer and I've been a television producer for over 20 years and got my start in New York where you are and loved living there. Lived there for five years, Got my start at a great company there and doing a lot of sports and music and reality TV stuff and just learned a ton, had a great time and then moved out to LA and did some bigger studio stuff and then moved back to my home state of Massachusetts about like 15 years ago. And at the time there weren't a lot of opportunities in television in Massachusetts and I found my way into this small non profit community television space that I've been in ever since. So by day I run a little cable access TV station in on the coast of Massachusetts and it's fantastic. And I've been doing that for 12 years and I've always kind of freelanced and done personal projects and stuff along the way.
So while doing the projects, you're in AI and I was really curious when I started looking at your work and all the experience that you had, how did you end up coming into the AI space and how does the AI end up working in film and video to actually, you know, do motion and everything? I'm really curious about that. Can you paint a picture for us for those that are just starting to look at AI and use it and trying to figure it out?
Yeah, it was really two platforms that came out around the same time, ChatGPT that you've probably heard of and the other was Mid Journey, which a lot of people have probably heard of and that's the image generator. And they came out around the same time. And both kind of struck me similarly that they were going to profoundly change my world. Because with chat GPT and Perplexity, I was able to just do a lot of that pre production rigor stuff faster, like research and ideation, treating chat GBT like a. Like a strategic thought partner, you know, like, okay, I have this project coming up, let's plan it out, make outlines, make scripts shot lists, all those sorts of things were able. I was able to do those faster. And that was evident pretty quickly. But also being in a visual medium like film and tv, when it was clear that I could now generate any kind of image, that was a profound shift where, you know, until a couple years ago, you had to go shoot it with a camera or buy it from someone who had.
And so to be able to now generate an image is. It's a complete paradigm shift. You know, I can, I can make things from home that I could never make before. And so that's all I started doing was like, okay, well, the technology in the beginning is really simple and like, doesn't do much. And so what's the simplest kind of production? And so I started with something that was modeled after the way Ken Burns makes his documentaries that are like very simple, just pictures with a little bit of movement and storytelling behind them. And that was that. And as the technology's gotten better and better, my ability to do it and tell stories and do more interesting camera moves and stuff like that has improved also.
So what limitations have you seen? You've seen a lot of great advancements, but what limitations are? Let's say maybe something like you have to do a workaround or what's your wish list, I guess is what I'm asking. In reverse order.
Sure. I mean, it's still very limited. It's very limited in terms of the length of the shot that you can get out. So, you know, when you take. You can go from image to video now, which is primarily how I work. So I work hard to get the image I like and then I bring it into a program that can turn that image into a video clip and. Sorry, I lost my train of thought.
So when you, when, when you have an image and you bring it into a video clip, everything right now, what, what are your limitations? What happens? Like, everything sounds fabulous and great. I didn't even know you could do some of the things that you mentioned and some of the things that I realized that you were working on. But while working in the advancements of technology, what limitations do you kind of see?
Right. Well, so there's things like realism is probably 90 to 95% the way there, there. But that extra difference can be that uncanny valley and really turn people off. So you have to be very careful.
Yeah. Because I didn't think I seen a little bit of something, something and I didn't like the way it looked.
Yeah. Then that's people.
Especially seeing people of color. African Americans. Let me just go there. It was kind of icky.
Yeah.
Or you don't get it at all. And it's really hard to work and get the look that you want. Is that still happening?
It is, yeah. It's getting better. The consistency around character consistency and things like facial features and skin tone and hair color and those kinds of things are getting better, but they're still very difficult. I've tried to get character consistency in a few projects and it's still very difficult to do. There are some very technical ways you can achieve it, but for the individual creator, it's still pretty challenging. You can do it, but it's.
Do you see any biases in there like you have in the digital apps? Like when you do the digital. Oh, I can't remember what a colleague of mine showed me. And it was really hard to get a lot of characters in various tones. They seem to naturally appear in certain populations and missing in others. Has that advanced in any way?
I think that's also getting better. And these models are getting more and more training imagery from different sources. So they're getting better at that, getting access to more. More looks, basically. But all you have to do is go into one of them and type something. That would test its bias and you'll see the bias. You could say, you know. You know, give me an image of a doctor and see, you know, do that 10 times and see what you get back and see if it's diverse across those 10 outputs or not.
I bet it won't be, you know, or like, I was working on a project for a company in Argentina and so they wanted sort of a. They wanted the people to look Argentinian. And so that was kind of an interesting thing. Like, well, how, you know, how do I even approach that? Exactly. You know, I have to go get Google Image. Google Images and. And. And try to figure out exactly what that means and be culturally sensitive.
And, you know, so it's an interesting set of new challenges in that regard.
Yeah. And there's a guest I have coming up in time in February that I think has the platform that you might need so we really need to stay in touch. It really goes to where they are so you can see for yourself. I think I'll leave it at that. Okay, so to. So when you working and everything in the AI, do you see differences or do you have other favorite AIs that you want to share with the audience? If somebody wanted to really look at this and see what they could or could not do, is this something you could do in Canva? Let me just go on and say it. Everybody's using Canva. Does Canva have this technology as well?
Canva's great. Canva is adding more tools and AI things all the time. They seem to be really invested in in AI. I find Canva to be a helpful tool. I did some titles with it for a recent project and it can be even helpful for visualizing ideas at some levels. Especially if there are things that are sort of either text heavy or sort of look very social media. Like you need them to be very infographic or something like that. You might lean on Canva more.
My favorite image generator by far is Mid Journey and my favorite video generator is Runway. And then I just still edit in Adobe Premiere like I always have. And then for audio, my favorite tool is 11 Labs, which is a really. I think audio is a very underestimated component. And you can go to 11 labs and get things like sound effects and voiceovers from all different voices. And there's some platforms like Udio, where you can get music generated now. And so very quickly you can go to these sources and pull in these assets and make things almost like a music dj, you know, kind of like just pulling in different elements, whether it's a Google image or a generated image or a generated sound effect. And you have an idea and you mash it up and you can blend images now and like all kinds of fun stuff.
So it's got a little bit more of that feel to it.
So with that feel and you have all that fun and the world is changing. Where does governance fit in or. There isn't any governance. You don't have to worry about any rules or copyrights or. We talked about some of the good and maybe some of the bad. So can you share a little bit of the ugly? I always like to talk.
Yeah, well, I mean, it's certainly easy.
Is there any ugly to this?
Yeah, it's. It's very easy to steal an aesthetic. You know, you can now literally pull in an image and utilize it in ways that are, I guess, more direct than they used to be. But I think the same rules kind of apply. You have to use things according to fair use, which is not always easy to figure out, but has some sort of common sense to it. Like nothing should ever be a one to one replacement. You shouldn't be, you know, stealing copyrighted material in, in all the same ways you shouldn't have before. However, you can now take inspiration in those same ways and level up some of your ideas and projects through some of these new techniques.
That's really interesting. Like I can, you know, in the past I might have been inspired by a magazine cover and then gone and tried to make my look look like that. And now I can literally take a picture of that magazine cover and pull that in and be like mid journey, describe this look for me and generate me a photo of what I want in that look. And you know, it's kind of amazing in that way. It's a similar process of being inspired by something, pulling that into your process and making something new. But it's actually, you're literally doing that now a little more than used to. That makes sense.
Yeah, it does. So at the end of the day, what types of businesses beyond your film and those that are into the video business does this end up moving towards anything in other areas in media?
Well, I certainly think that any organization that decides to lean into video as a mechanism for their business can do a hundred times what they could have a couple years ago. Whether that's develop their own original content or make a hundred little videos when they needed, when they used to be able to make one or just go faster with the things that they make or analyze them better once they're made. You know, there's so many different ways that these tools can level up your whole, your whole game at different points along the, along the chain. So it's hard to see where they wouldn't be useful if you were trying to, you know, use video at all.
So what's on your wish list? What do you want to, what do you want to work with now that you really don't see the technology there yet? What do you see coming? What kind of trends or what type of applications or observations or functionality that you've experienced and utilize? Where, you know, if technology continues in this direction, where is it going to lead us or intersect? What do you think?
Well, I think it'll be really interesting to see agents and how agents that are starting to be here, like operator in open AI, like that type of agent, how it could be applied to production. You know, like if I have an AI agent that can help me at the pre production stage, production stage, post production stage, what are the types of things it can do? And between that and automations which really haven't entered into my work a whole lot yet, like automate, like I met a guy over the weekend who can automate in and out of mid journey. So that's interesting. Like okay, how, how far am I from automating an entire storyboard right out of the gate as opposed to like you know, one shot, two shots, you know, things like that. So I think right around the corner is like that next leap up of like either telling an agent to do it for you once you figured out some parameters or, or just having a lot more automated so that you can have all this spinning kind of around you.
So do you think the storytellers. There's a lot of, there's a. It's big, storytelling is big and you have these, you know, concerts and then you have a lot of these speaker fests and you have these storyteller fests. Do you think it's going to be at a point where just about everybody's going to have it or be able to utilize it and it be. Go beyond the professional arena? I mean you've gotten awards and Emmys and, and now you're doing this. Is that something as it progresses that it'll be just like your iPhone, it'll be just like your, you know, your phone and everybody now can make a deep fake and they can, they can just do all these things and do a movie about their story themselves and you don't need to produce. Do you see?
Well, I think it'll be a lot.
Like you see it going there. I'm serious.
I think it'll be a lot like what happened with the music industry where a lot of individual creators became capable of breaking through through releasing songs that they made in their bedroom on their computer. I think that kind of thing will start to happen with video where individual creators that are legitimately talented and learn the tools will be able to break through with content that's incredible merit based, you know, if it's good enough. And the great like you know, traditional producers that have been doing it the old way, they'll, the good ones will continue to do well and adapt and use it in the ways that are really elevated and, and sophisticated and some of them will, will not make it because they don't figure out how to incorporate it, you know, so it's going to change a lot. It's going to change a lot. But I think it's going to unlock an unbelievable amount of latent creativity across the world. Because it's been so hard to access creativity for people, I think, in any like, meaningful, particularly professional way for most people. But most people have a creative side that's just untapped. And even though I was doing creative work, I wasn't doing it like this.
The, the technology came to me and allowed me to be able to tell stories that are bigger and faster and you know, and that's true for everyone. So I'm excited for everyone that they get a shot that they didn't have before. You know what I mean? It's exciting.
So on that note, you walked right into it. I'm curious to know what is it that you can share with us that you're working on that you would have never envisioned you'd have the opportunity to work on or do?
Sure. Well, I mean I, I did just have a dream come true just recently. You know, I got a film studies degree 25 years ago and have never to this point been paid to make anything original until late 24 when an AI, new AI company that was trying to be like a Netflix of AI content called the Dream dreamflare AI and said, you know, we'd like to engage you to make something original. And even though it was not a lot of money and only a couple minutes long, that was a dream come true for me. I mean, I felt very happy to just be working adjacent to the film industry, in the TV industry out here in Massachusetts, you know. So to be able to go home at night and on the weekends, make a film that a company wanted and was able to distribute is a very exciting prospect. And I made it inspired by a page in my kids history textbook. And that history textbook, each page was a different period of history and it would have pictures and some anecdotes about that period of history, but it covered like all of human history in this one book.
So each page was like this just two pager of history about whatever. And so that's like a creative brief on every page, you know. And so my first one was from one page about the first artist 35, 000 years ago drawing on cave walls in Indonesia. I just made that one and I can literally just go, you know, flip the page now and go all the way through human history. And I can make any, anyone I want. So right now I'm starting to chip away at one. I learned looking through this book that 3500 years ago in Mesopotamia the wheel was invented, but not the way that we think about it, it was a potter's wheel on its side. And 300 years later in that same area, the wheel as we know it attached to a cart and a donkey and everything was invented also.
But that innovation happened over 300 years in that area. So I was thinking I could condense that 300 years of innovation into one person's story of the inventor of the wheel, she was a potter, and then maybe it fell off and rolled away and you know, or something like that. But like I've been now making this Mesopotamian potter's home on mid journey and learning about history and it's just amazing, you know, it's like the coolest. Like anywhere you look now, you could find inspiration.
So you communicating that to me has inspired me to think about certain areas of life where people usually might write down in a journal or maybe through therapy, or maybe some foster children or people who are going through quite a bit with mental illness, or children who've grown up with parents that were a little off the charts and they talk about the writing and the creativity piece. Do you think the technology coming in play today could be utilized in the, in the medical arena, in the neuro arena in any way? I'm just curious. Now, the clinical, now my clinical background is like click and click, click, click. You know, I kind of was in that other area, you know, after, after the airline industry, that's what could you think it could work, you think?
Absolutely. I mean, I'm, I'm seeing it more and more, how to use it with my own kids and my kids are 2 to 11, I have four of them and you know, I can use it just, just calling up ChatGPT, particularly the voice. There's so many things they don't want to hear from me, you know, but they need.
Yeah.
You know what I mean? And so very often I'll call in ChatGPT to help me, you know, it like, oftentimes it'll be like, expl. Like we were going to the Museum of Science a couple weeks ago and my kids were like, oh, you know, they didn't want to go. And I'm like, would you please explain to them why it's so cool, you know, at the Museum of Science and it listed off the most amazing description of the Museum of Science and they were pumped to go after that. Or like, you know, my son, my youngest son stole a candy or something like that. So I asked Chat GPT for some resources on honesty and he gave me some tutorial videos that he could watch and hear it from someone else other than me, you know, and it worked.
Because you're not dead. It was GPT. You don't know him.
Yeah, it sent me to some child psychologist on YouTube who was showing superheroes and you know, it's like great. So there's a lot of low hanging fruit there with that. I was giving a demo one day and gentleman with a, a service dog, he was trying to retire it but was worried about separation anxiety. Perplexity was able to make a step plan with all kinds of resources for his dog, him and his dog. So I mean it's a general purpose tool. We all have general purpose needs and, and ideas and you know, I don't know about you but I've always wanted to have a thought partner available 247 for whatever I want to, you know, explore and that's what we all have now. It's just, it's pretty, pretty powerful stuff.
So it really enhances who you are, how you think. A lot of people think it's going to replace you and who you are. It's really going to enhance who you are, how you think and what you do and really just give you more functionality and capabilities in production. In some ways, I mean I've been able to bang out work in some areas that I would never bang out that fast or have the information. But the way you prompted or communicate with it and if you communicate like a person, you'll get the responses that you're really looking for that would be helpful for you to take the next step. It seems to me no matter what discipline, industry or sector, so, so what do you want to do next? Now that you've got all this great information, you've got the experience now you've got your projects, what are you going to be working on next? What do you want to share with us that is going to pique our interest and want to make sure we follow you?
Well, I'm excited to build on everything from 2024. It was an exciting year where I, you know, the AI wave kind of lifted me up a little bit and I made a number of AI video projects and a custom GPT project and all of that work is exciting and I'm looking forward to building on it because AI has a way of kind of compounding as you figure stuff out, you can apply it to the next thing and the next thing goes faster. And so I'm kind of feeling that now going into what I feel is year two of all this. And so I'm excited to just keep pushing on the technology as far as video production goes and continuing to kind of learn what the state of the art is and how I can use it. And then also just exploring this whole new agent world that we're kind of entering into just now and thinking about. Okay, well, I've figured out a lot of this from a manual perspective, like, what about delegation now? Like, how could I. I'm 200amonth away from being able to tell Chat GPT to go do stuff for me. That's a pretty wild thing to think about, you know, like, book me a flight.
Or like book your flight, your calendar, you know, sky's the limit department, your accountant.
And that's, that's the first agent. Imagine when there's a hundred of those, there's the marketing one or the sales one or the whatever. Like what do you want to do for it?
I want a platform with that now that I'm playing with and it's working pretty well.
Powerful stuff.
Yeah, it really, it really, really is. So that's another one. We got a parking lot. Okay. I didn't finish vetting it yet, so that's. So there's two things. So I'd like to loop back to something you mentioned. For those who aren't aware you worked on a project with Chat GPT or you built a GPT.
Can you tell us a little bit about that process, if you don't mind, in building a GPT, what that means? Because that's going to be new for a lot of my audience.
Yeah, custom GPTs are within ChatGPT. And so you can, you know, ChatGPT is a large language model, right? Like it can answer a million things, about a million things, which is incredible. But what I like to do is go in. You can really easily go in and create your own custom GPT. And if you want to get kind of a primer on them, they have all kinds of third party custom GPTs in there that you can look at and play around with for any number of things. People build them and make them available so you can check them out if you're not familiar with them, but you can also really easily make them for yourself. And all you're doing is basically putting a little lens of whatever sort of size and scope you want onto ChatGPT. A set of parameters are going to sort of tell it how to behave, just like you would prompt ChatGPT, basically.
So it can be as simple as like. The simplest, most powerful example I could give is at my day job we have all these documents that pertain to our organization, like our handbook, our brand guidelines, our, you know, maybe our policies and procedures, or like there's a number of our contracts. And so I made a custom GPT and I put five or six of those important documents in there that just uploaded, like you've uploaded a million documents, PDFs. I didn't do anything to them, just straight in. And the instructions for the GPT were just something like answer questions for our staff from these documents and nothing else. And so staff can go to this GPT and ask it things like what's our dress code? Or what's our strategic plan? Or whatever. And they answer them. It answers them by retrieving it from these documents.
It can go and do that. And the instructions are that simple. I mean, literally like one line. And. But that when I realized that that's the starting point, I was like, okay, well if I also have chat GPT to help me figure out how to use these things, like, hey, chat GPT, I want to make a custom GPT that helps me maybe organize my, my brain dumps in the morning. In the morning I wake up, have my coffee, everything's swirling around and I just want to speak it into a GPT and have that GPT put it into markdown for me. Stuff like that. Like, that's easy.
Like, okay, you are a custom GPT that takes in inputs that are my spoken brain dumps. And you are going to organize my thoughts and give them back to me formatted and marked down. And it, and then it'll do that for you. So you can find these little areas to create these little efficiencies for yourself that are very personal and you can start to figure out how to make them do more stuff. But it's essentially comes down to like, you can upload stuff, you can give it instructions and you can have it search the web and use Dolly also. So however you want to mix and match those components to do things for you, you can do.
Well, I'm excited about what I have been playing with with the GPT and thank you for explaining that to the audience because a lot of what we do on pivoting the Web three podcasts is a lot of education, which that seems to be a lot of the value right now in the academia space. But I'm envisioning going forward, especially with this one platform. It's got all these agents in all these different departments and all these functionalities and capabilities. You can get lost in there. But it works so well. There's a couple of platforms, there's one other platform that is built on a lot of the previous testing and, and behavioral, consumer behavior and everything. So. And that's really interesting because it kind of complements the other platform.
But now you start paying all this money for all these different platforms and like you said, 200 away, you know, but at the end of the day you just can't stop because it's like, oh, I didn't know that. Oh, this you over here. Especially if you're like me. I'm a learner. I mean, who else is going to school at this age? I mean, I'm not a young girl.
We're all in school now. Yeah.
So I'm like really digging. So at the end of the day, what I'm getting to is I envision this really being a place where people can make money if you've got the resources to do the platforms. I've got some other ideas, but I had to like put a lid on it. So yeah, I'm really excited for the future and AI. I know a lot of people have a lot of fear with it. There's good, bad and ugly and everything, but I see more good and I don't see as much ugly. And I think the higher power for that or my God. Or I don't know what to say on a podcast.
So. But at the end of the day, maybe I have to cut this because I try to stay real neutral, but I'm a godly girl. But. But at the end of the day I really think it's going to be a good time and there's a lot of benefits to it if you have it with the right people, the right organizations and in the right populations. And as far as governance and the different countries and everything else, I'm just hoping that everybody behaves with it because I can see the destruction side and it really getting out of control. That's my worst nightmare. I don't know if you have a nightmare, but that's my nightmare. Talking to each other and next thing you know, something is, let's set it off.
You know, is there anything you want to share about what you're doing or where we can contact you or how you can be reached or anything else you want to share with us. Sure.
Thanks. I'm pretty active on LinkedIn. You can find me Erich Archer, E R I C H archer. And my AI portfolio site is cgacreative.com and you can see all my video and custom GPT work there and reach out to me if you care to and I'll keep that updated.
Well, thank you so much for being on Pivoting to Web three and we're shaping tomorrow together. Thank you and have a nice evening.
Thanks for having me.
Thanks for tuning in to pivoting to Web3 podcast. If you're a developer, innovator or AI expert with insights to share, or if you're looking to partner, let's Connect. Visit MitchellUniversalNetwork.com and be part of the conversation. Want more content? Check out my playlist for more episodes. See you next time.
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