Slop Teardown

The one assessment in the course that asks you to explain a slop artefact instead of making one — a rigorous teardown of its tells, its economics, and who it is built to fool or flatter

Due: 29 March 2027 · Weight: 25%

The brief#

Take one slop artefact apart in public and show your work.

Every other assessment in this course asks you to make something that commits to its own fakeness. This one asks you to do the opposite: find something that is already trying to pass, and explain exactly how it fails, for whom, and at what price. That is the point of keeping one analysis piece in a production-heavy course — a director who cannot diagnose a six-fingered hand, a morphing logo, or an affectless narrator in someone else’s footage is directing blind in their own. Do not let this drift into a making exercise: no clips, no remixes, no “here is my version” — the deliverable is the argument, not a production.

Pick one artefact: a real ad, explainer, or product demo you suspect (or can show) is synthetic, or a specific invented one described in enough detail that a reader could picture the exact seconds you mean. Vague genre gestures — “AI videos often look uncanny” — do not count as an artefact. One artefact, named or precisely constructed, taken apart in detail.

A strong teardown does three things a plausible-sounding one skips. It locates the tells instead of gesturing at them: not “the movement looks off” but the specific frame where a hand gains a finger, or the second where the voiceover’s cadence goes too smooth to be a read take. It follows the money: what this artefact replaced, what it cost to make this way instead, and who is better off for the substitution. And it identifies who the artefact is actually for — a product demo built to be skimmed past, not scrutinised, is aimed at an audience with a specific tolerance for wrongness, and naming that tolerance is half the argument.

What you submit#

A written teardown, 1000–1500 words, structured however best serves the argument (a running commentary keyed to timestamps works; so does a thesis-led essay with evidence folded in). If the artefact is publicly available, link it and cite the specific timestamps your argument depends on. If it is invented, describe it precisely enough at the top of the piece that the rest of the teardown reads as an analysis of a fixed thing, not a moving target.

The marking: block above is weighted: it rewards specificity of evidence and the strength of the economic argument over polish of prose.