CREATIVITY AND COGNITION CONFERENCE WORKSHOP
DISTRIBUTED CREATIVITY:
INDIVIDUAL AND COLLABORATIVE IDEATION
IN A FILMMAKING PROCESS
JUNE 23, 9.30am – 12.30pm
– Online via Zoom
– In Person at Creative Computing Institute, University of the Arts London, 272 High Holborn, London WC1V 7EY
Many of the excellent workshops on offer at the 2025 Creativity & Cognition Conference concern filmmaking, but this is the only one being offered by organisers who are, primarily, filmmakers. (For more on our multi-award winning, formally inventive and fiercely feminist films, visit www.physicaltv.com.au or come to the workshop – we will play some there!)
Join us for this experience of coming up with ideas for films and developing them in a playful, low pressure, highly interactive discussion process where we will create and collaborate, and then reflect on the experience, noticing our own creative cognising and how it is distributed.
ACTIVITIES
Ideation: individual responses to prompts
This workshop is designed to provide participants with an experience of some of the range of creative processes – individual and collaborative – involved in coming up with ideas for a film and developing a shared understanding of the ideas and intentions behind a film.
Manifesting “Vision”: collaborative responsiveness
Through a series of exercises modelled on the tasks that filmmakers do at the start of a filmmaking process (development and pre-production) participants will experience some of the cognitive challenges of responding to prompts to generate ideas, and then collaboratively responding to each other to articulate and manifest what is commonly known in the industry as a director’s ‘vision’. Following each task, the ideas will be presented and discussed first as filmmaking ideas, and then as experiences of creative cognising.
Noticing Cognition: recognising the entanglement of brains, bodies, and world in ideating
The workshop leaders, themselves experienced filmmakers and scholars, will guide the discussions to create opportunities for participants to discover the nuances of process and collaborative creativity on film for themselves and to consider: what is distributed creativity in filmmaking? Through what kinds of embodied, embedded and enactive cognitive processes can ideas be developed and articulated?
Checking in with widely accessible generative AI: what do humans bring to process?
As the workshop progresses, each task prompt in the workshop will also be put to a generative AI platform that is widely available to the public, e.g. Chat GPT. Participants will work together to compare the responses the AI generates with those humans generate, not so much to ask which is better, as to try to understand what is uniquely human in a given creative process.
Putting it to the test: filmmakers reconstruct their processes
Finally, screenings and discussion of the workshops leader’s films, will reverse the questions of the workshop, demonstrating where the embodied, embedded and enactive cognitions can be seen in a finished film, if you know where to look for them.
To join us for this workshop you’ll need to:
Register for the conference and pay an modest additional fee ($10) for each workshop in which you want to participate.
Link to register for the conference and any workshop: https://cc.acm.org/2025/registration/
Then you also need to sign up for this workshop specifically, so we know who is attending!
Link to enrol in this workshop: https://forms.gle/oCXf49hvaYaMbPVv5
ORGANISERS
Associate Professor Karen Pearlman, ASE, writes, directs and edits screen productions. She researches creative practice, distributed cognition and feminist film histories. Karen is a deputy director of the Creative Documentary Research Centre with a portfolio in Creative Practice and Screen Culture. Karen’s trilogy of short films about historical women editors (2016, 2018 & 2020) have won 34 highly competitive national and international awards from peak industry bodies and film festivals, including 3 for best editing, 3 for best directing and 6 for best documentary. Her latest film, Breaking Plates won Best Short Documentary at the 2025 Antenna Documentary Film Festival. Karen is a leading theorist, speaker and writer on the art of film editing, she is the author of the widely used textbook Cutting Rhythms, which has a third edition out in 2025 and translations into Chinese, Korean, Turkish and Arabic.
Karen will lead the workshop, designing prompts and activities and facilitating the discussions of process.
Dr Richard James Allen is a multi-award-winning Australian filmmaker, choreographer, poet and a performer in a range of media. A founder and co-artistic director with Karen Pearlman of the multi-award-winning Physical TV Company, his work has been screened, broadcast, published and presented on six continents. Richard’s thirteenth book, Text Messages from the Universe (Flying Island Books, 2023) reflects a lifelong engagement with Buddhist and Yogic philosophies. It was a finalist for three international awards. A film adaptation won six awards and was nominated for Best Narrative Feature Film at the ATOM Awards. In an earlier incarnation, his novel, More Lies (Interactive Publications), was shortlisted for the Griffin Award for New Australian Playwriting. An audiobook version, which he narrated with Jadzea Allen, is releasing internationally on Spotify, Audible and other platforms in 2025. Richard lives in Sydney on the unceded lands of the Gadigal People of the Eora Nation.
Richard will bring his filmmaking experience to the tasks of responding to participants ideas, and leading discussions about processes of developing creative responses. Allen will also bring a ‘beginner’s mind’ to the task of prompting Chat GPT to generate and articulate ideas.