Filmmaker Statement

CAPTCHA offers viewers a continually evolving and personalized experience with each viewing. The core objective was to allow audience members to attribute varying cognitive and emotional significance to different elements, fostering individual perspectives. This is achieved through intentional choices, such as the creation of a characterless character, a recurring plot structure, and unfamiliar, symbolic locations. Every design decision reflects a search for escape from suffocating surroundings, including through the use of music, characters, cinematography, sound, and locations. Written in mid-2021 with partial input from primitive artificial intelligence, CAPTCHA predates the advent of more advanced chatbot software like ChatGPT by a full year. Against the backdrop of the subsequent Hollywood writers' strike, it stands as a poignant reflection on the swiftly evolving landscape of AI, underscoring the considerable advancements the technology has taken since its inception, and the accompanying anxiety it causes for practitioners within the industry.