Undergraduate students at the University of Mary Washington completed a project called “Cameraman vs. Machine,” in which they assessed the value of artificial intelligence (AI) in the process of filmmaking.
Junior Owen Wheeler and senior Chloe Adler created a film in which 2025 graduate Alanah Cleare starred as a college student who fell asleep while studying in UMW’s Hurley Convergence Center. An AI-assisted dream sequence shows Cleare awaken on UMW’s Campus Walk surrounded by talking pineapples and combustible berries swirling up to the sky and exploding in a rainbow of colors.
The film was one of four presentations in June at Mary Washington’s Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences Summer Institute (AHSSSI) Symposium. Wheeler, Adler and Cleare’s project was led by UMW Assistant Professor of Communication and Digital Studies J.D. Swerzenski.
“When we’d run into issues, Dr. Fallon would remind us that we were undergraduate students doing graduate-level research,” UMW senior Michael Boehmcke told symposium spectators in UMW’s Combs Hall of the trials, tribulations and triumphs of projects.
The fourth annual symposium, which consisted of five weeks of scholarly summer work for students, also explored AI’s potential in creative writing, the role of eye movements in memory and the evolution of phonological features.
Boehmcke, a creative writing major, joined senior Bex Colley and junior Ainsley Graf for “Atoms of Sound: An Encyclopedia of Phonological Features,” led by UMW Associate Professor of Linguistics Paul Fallon.
“They’re getting close mentoring, plus research, writing and editing, and technical skills. I think this is why they came to Mary Washington. This is the type of experience they were looking for,” Fallon said of his group, who catalogued abstract components of speech sounds used by more than 7,000 languages.
The symposium provides resume- and career-building opportunities along with a personal touch: plenty of access to teammates and professors. Participants also receive a paycheck, strengthen critical thinking, analytics, data literacy, website design, teamwork and public speaking skills.
Senior English major Asunta Ross, junior Kenzie Lotz and sophomore Cory Wagaman-Eure paired AI-training frameworks with classic literature, including “A Christmas Carol” and “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” in “Experiments in Generative AI, Literature and Machine Learning for Creative Writing.” They were led by UMW Associate Professor of Communication and Digital Studies Zach Whalen.
“We researched different ways AI can pick up on the stylistic choices of authors. Working with AI is an entirely new concept for me, so I learned a lot,” Ross said.
Senior Loren Osborne dove deeper into cognitive psychology by studying how rapid-eye-movement warmups might provide memory benefits for individuals who are mostly right or left handed in “Warming Up: Eye Movements May Improve Recall in Consistently Handed People.” She and teammates seniors Avery Gallahue and Nyah Speicher, and junior Morgan Crabtree, also psychology majors, were guided by UMW Assistant Professor of Psychological Science Marcus Leppanen, who also led the 2025 AHSSSI.
The students ran trials in Mercer Hall’s Eye Tracking Lab with the help of the psychology department’s Tobii Pro Fusion Eye Tracker, explored concepts like Saccade-Induced Retrieval Enhancement and used tools like the Edinburgh Handedness Inventory.
“This program has allowed us to build our method and test it on a small scale, so we may now look forward to refining it further and gathering data from a larger sample,” Osborne said. The group hopes to continue their work next summer.
Models like Sora and Firefly were used in “Cameraman vs. Machine” to examine AI’s ability to translate speech, generate images and understand filmmaking terms such as “close-up” and “tilt.”
“Can these AI tools work for us or do they take away from the creativity of filmmaking? That’s the spirit of AHSSSI. We get to really dig into these things,” Swerzenski said.
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Rebecca Barnabi
