How to update the creative process in your animation studio with AI

They say robots are about to take out our jobs. They say Dall-E 2 and MidJourney can do a better job than most of us. Many professionals are frightened and yet feel strange excitement.

We say, use these AI machines as a way of updating the creative process in your team.

Yes, there is a sense of change — recently, we see a major shift in the paradigm. But since we have got more and more reasons to worry about the future of creative work, we decide to step in a different direction.

Think about it as a way of making the whole creative process easier. AI shouldn’t take over your job, and it actually can’t do this right now. There is no way AI would replace the whole team of professional animators, designers, scriptwriters, etc. But it can do some time-consuming parts of a job better than you think. And better than you.

That’s not a bad thing. If you are using AI for tasks that don’t require much creativity but can sparkle your own, do it.

“Generative AI can already do a lot. It’s able to produce text and images, spanning blog posts, program code, poetry, and artwork (and even winning competitions, controversially). The software uses complex machine learning models to predict the next word based on previous word sequences, or the next image based on words describing previous images. LLMs began at Google Brain in 2017, where they were initially used for the translation of words while preserving context. Since then, large language and text-to-image models have proliferated at leading tech firms including Google (BERT and LaMDA), Facebook (OPT-175B, BlenderBot), and OpenAI, a nonprofit in which Microsoft is the dominant investor (GPT-3 for text, DALL-E2 for images, and Whisper for speech). Online communities such as Midjourney (which helped win the art competition), and open-source providers like HuggingFace, have also created generative models”.

Harvard Business Review 

How to integrate AI into the creation of animated video

Let AI do the time-consuming job. Honestly, we never thought of AI as someone – or something? – that could replace us. But its ability to gallop through the images for a mood board is uncanny. Just ask yourself, how many times, how many projects went longer because you or other members of a team had to do a time-consuming job? Right, days or even weeks for researching or creating a mood board that will fit a client’s vision. AI can do it much quicker.

Use it to improve communication. No-no, you don’t have to redirect your clients to chatbots or something. But Ai can help you find images to be closer to a brand’s voice and its guideline. Besides, AI enables you to help clients visualize the results and adjust for better outcomes.

On second thought… you can use chatbots, too. For example, to receive orders and give a client a bunch of options.

Train it for a repetitive task. 

Harvard Business Review wrote on the subject: 

“Once a generative model is trained, it can be “fine-tuned” for a particular content domain with much fewer data. This has led to specialized models of BERT — for biomedical content (BioBERT), legal content (Legal-BERT), and French text (CamemBERT) — and GPT-3 for a wide variety of specific purposes. NVIDIA’s BioNeMo is a framework for training, building, and deploying large language models at a supercomputing scale for generative chemistry, proteomics, and DNA/RNA.OpenAI has found that as few as 100 specific examples of domain-specific data can substantially improve the accuracy and relevance of GPT-3’s outputs. To use generative AI effectively, you still need human involvement at both the beginning and the end of the process”.

This is the thing: you will have to “teach” AI to understand the required tone of voice and follow it or work with certain objects by using your inherent approach. Its abilities are great, but AI also must “understand” your work.

Let it find the targeted audience. AI can easily find your audience and explain the specifics. It will help you to understand better what you should give at the end of the creative process. Finding the precise audience will help you address them almost directly.

Let it improve your content quality. AI-generated content can be of higher quality for a very simple reason: AI models learn from a large amount of data, literally running through thousands of things. Thus, it can find patterns that we people might not see. It is a very subtle way to improve the quality of your content – by looking at the options AI team member can offer to you.

Use it for data visualization. Every project will demand from you at least some data visualization. AI is perfect for providing it. Machine learning algorithms have made it easier to understand big data, and what is more vital — is to turn these numbers into insights.

Remember that it is 10% of AI, the rest is you. These are the words of Kris Ruby, the owner of public relations and social media agency Ruby Media Group, who is now using both text and image AI. She says that they are good to use for search engine optimization (SEO), and in PR. We think the same. Yes, let it do the job of searching and generating things, but it is not enough. Without your involvement, it might not be that good.

Last but not least: stay at the forefront of the changes in the AI-related industry. It is going to be a definitive and entirely vital process for all of us and our creative endeavors. The best thing you can do right now is not fear artificial intelligence will replace you or something, but learn how to work with it, and how to make it provide the decisions you need.

As you see, all of these things just take you one step further: saving your time for more creative inputs without doing too many time-consuming jobs for one project. By providing deep insights into customer needs, AI can make every single animation project more fast and more efficient. But that’s not all. How would you measure success? Yes, you get it: AI can glance at your goals, and results by providing actual numbers.

Right now, all the studios have to work in the direction of changing their creative workflows. More creative work is yours.

“The creativity of the human mind is a uniquely powerful resource but one that has historically been difficult to harness effectively. With the aid of AI technologies, however, talent can be identified and nurtured in previously overlooked places, thereby opening new opportunities for creative professionals who once faced barriers.

Suppose these are indeed the early days of a creative renaissance driven by AI. In that case, it’s already clear that the changes brought about by this technology will extend far beyond how individuals work and collaborate. It will also revolutionize how we recruit and reward employees across all industries”.

Thomas Ai Nerd Helfrich

CEO of InstantlyRelevant.com

A glance at the future of creative processes

There are very big chances that in the future – maybe we can even say in the near future – AI will be present in all over creative projects. Its ability to analyze data and provide fast and ample options will be a part of the overall process of delivering a product or a feature. It is no wonder: the amount of information is multiplying, as well as a number of things one should be aware of when creating something.

Right now, AI can be applied to many parts of animation creation. For instance, in characters, animation can be used facial recognition to provide a better realistic look.

AI algorithms can run through thousands of a video’s content usage and suggest the best options for a certain video.

However, humans are still required: you must enter a prompt into a generative model. The art of creative prompts most likely is going to be a new art we develop.

“Prompt maker” is likely to become a profession, the vocabulary of prompts will be created, etc. At least we understand that a person that does creative work now has to be fluent in the language of prompts. The one that emerges right now.

Besides this, expect even more: after receiving content from AI, most likely you will have to edit it a bit. For example, Jason Allen, who won Colorado “digitally manipulated photography” contest by using Midjourney, actually spent more than 80 hours making more than 1000 versions of the art. Then he used Adobe Photoshop, tried to make the quality of the image better.

Summary

To have a deep understanding that is inherent to most animators and use consciously visual storytelling techniques is a task that is impossible to handle for any AI. Modern AI requires you to navigate it, to play a bit of gambling with its abilities. Not to mention that AI could not work with the scenes and arrange them.