A production and criticism course treating AI-generated video — the six-fingered ad, the uncanny history explainer, the product demo nobody filmed — as a genre with its own aesthetics, economics and ethics, taught the way film school teaches melodrama.
Twelve weeks, four acts
The syllabus lists twelve separate lectures, but they resolve into four movements, each closing on a lecture that folds the previous two back together.
Tells & taxonomy
Weeks 1–3 — naming the genre, the anatomy of a tell, and prompting as direction.
The vocabulary the rest of the semester assumes: what counts as slop, how to point at the specific frame that gives it away, and why a prompt is closer to a shot list than a wish.
Economics & genre
Weeks 4–6 — the economics of volume, genre and pastiche, and four lenses, one argument.
Why slop gets made at the volume it does, what it's actually imitating, and a synthesis lecture that puts the first five weeks' tools side by side.
Systems & production
Weeks 7–9 — systems thinking for slop, scheduling and scale, and the business case for slop.
The pipeline mechanics behind a single artefact, what changes when you're running hundreds of them on a schedule, and the costing that turns both into a case someone could actually pitch.
Coherence & capstone
Weeks 10–12 — sustained coherence, the director's statement, and slop as a genre, restated.
Holding one visual language across five sustained minutes instead of four seconds, arguing for the choices behind it in writing, and a last lecture that checks the semester's opening claim against everything since.
What you will do
Each week runs a Set against a Screening. The Set has you producing a slop artefact to a brief: a rebrand trailer whose logo cannot hold one shape for four consecutive seconds, say, or a testimonial ad delivered in the too-smooth cadence no real vocal cord produces. The Screening supplies the aesthetics, economics or ethics behind why the artefact looks and sounds that way. Assessment mirrors the split but weights it toward making. There is one close reading of a real slop artefact, one automation pipeline costed out like the business it would actually be, and a capstone slop feature — three to five sustained minutes, one visual language held across every linked cut — backed by a director's statement that argues for the choices, tells included.
Spot the tell: Radiant Smile Dental Co.
Its logo resolves correctly in the ad's opening shot and drifts, by the closing one, into a plausible four-letter shape that isn't a word — one of three stacked tells, none of them alone enough to notice on a distracted scroll. See the full breakdown, and the other five specimens.
Who it is for
SLOP2758 is a 2000-level course for students who already have a working relationship with at least one generative video or image tool and are ready to stop apologising for it. You should be able to read a prompt template as a script and a workflow diagram as a shot list — the course supplies the film-school vocabulary, not the production basics. What it actually demands is nerve: the willingness to defend the ugliest four seconds of your own footage in front of the class, and the patience to run one pipeline nine times before it stops looking like a festival reject.