Animator vs The Machine
With the explosion of AI, looking at what people in the animation industry think might occur in the future. Then talking to experts in artificial intelligence to help ground what this new technology is. Skynet or a tool? The downfall of animation or is this a possible new renaissance?
Animator vs The Machine
Bird is the Word: A talk about AI and Animation with David Fortier from PIP Animation Services
Discover the captivating journey of animation with David Fortier, the studio director and head of production at PIP Animation Studios. Together with David, we navigate the intricate relationship between artificial intelligence (AI) and animation, uncovering the nuances that distinguish AI from machine learning.
Embrace the intriguing exploration of AI's role in the animation industry. As we compare the advent of AI to the impact of 3D software and motion capture in the 90s, we delve into the potential perks and pitfalls of this new technology. Understand the significant influence human creativity has on AI, and how it's necessary for achieving the best results. Ponder how AI can be harnessed in pre-production and development phases, and the potential it has to birth a hybrid between live action and animation.
Engage in a stimulating dialogue about the future of animation and AI. We debate the ethical considerations surrounding AI use in animation and consider its potential to cut costs and amplify artists' work. As we envision the future of the animation industry, we question whether AI's capacity to recreate existing artworks could potentially stifle creativity. We wrap up by addressing the need for fluidity in animation software and how the industry's constant hunt for cost-saving measures impacts the way animation is produced. Join us on this riveting journey into the future of animation, fueled by AI's transformative potential.
Animator vs the Machine.
Speaker 2:On today's podcast we have a very special guest. He is the studio director and head of production of Pip Animation Studios. You may not have heard the studio outside of Ottawa but you've definitely seen all the shows they've worked on, from ripping friends in the 90s, Katie O'Doreby, Cat in the Hat, Tom and Jerry in the 2000s, and they even worked on feature films like Pirates Passage for CBC. So today I want to welcome David Forze. Hey, David.
Speaker 1:Hey, nice to be here. Thanks for asking me to be a part of your podcast.
Speaker 2:Hey, thanks for joining me. Did I miss anything? For your history of Pip Quick, no, that's pretty good.
Speaker 1:Pip started in 1998 as a Compatent Compositing Studio when animation was still being done overseas. So quick history. I started in animation back in the mid-80s. Everything was done on paper and acetate. So you had key animators in betweeners and cleanup artists. That would all go into a photocopy machine, get put on acetate and then opaqueers would be painting all of this material and getting it ready for camera. Very expensive process. It took about 400 people to do a half hour show in the three month period going through the various stages.
Speaker 1:So overseas became a go-to place for that dollar figure. So where we're making, I guess, minimum wage. It was probably like four or five dollars an hour back then. But somebody overseas could make a really good living. It's not like these people were starving. They could make a really good living making half that in their countries China, philippines, places like that. So all that work was going overseas as a money saver.
Speaker 1:So when we started up Pip and Pip's owned by Dulce Clark, our founder and CEO. When she started Pip she wanted to help fill that niche of this new digital era. So companies we worked for were still sending all of their paperwork overseas. They do layout and posing go overseas get completed. Then they would ship back all these drawings, approximately 18,000 drawings for 22 minutes. We'd scan them all, we digitally can paint them, we'd composite them with the backgrounds. Do any kind of visual effects move on from there? So we did that for a few years and then our first full animation production was Carl Squared. So we started working on that. We did it soup to nuts, from the concept designs all the way through to mastering, and our client portfolio entertainment was the ones who supplied the scripts and dialogue. We've more or less kept that going all these years. So Pip is now over 25 years old We'll be 26 in March and what that digital era did is it kind of made a level playing field for animation companies around the planet.
Speaker 1:They all needed the hardware, they all needed the software, and then there was the hourly wage. That became the big decider. But once you have animation happening in the Philippines and now in India and in China for many, many years, they develop such a strong industry. They're like yeah, we're not working for $4 a day anymore, you have to pay us more. And so prices were already going up overseas. And then the software and the hardware became a bit of a leveler for us in the playing field. But in addition to that, with, in particular, the South Asia, they have their own viewership. They don't need our shows, they don't need our Katie and Orbi because they have all of their other things. So they really just said OK, if we're going to start losing work, we're just going to be producing this for ourselves.
Speaker 1:Of course, everybody knows anime, which has been around for many, many years. Funny, I grew up on the Quebec side and we were watching anime when I was a little kid and I'm going to be 59. So it came to Quebec really early on. So anyways, with all of that stuff, I've been in the industry for about 35 years, working with Pip Again. Now we're currently doing full animation and, yeah, we've got two features under our belt.
Speaker 1:Animation is also allowed a variety of other fields. So when I speak with students, there's things like if you go to your app for your bank, there's probably animations in there. Sure, there's all the little games and everything that we play. But we've done medical animations for part institute and places like that. At Pip we've redone all of the St John Ambulance illustrations for their book, but also they had to go online with their courses when COVID hit, so we created all of their courses online in animation. So animation isn't just for television anymore, it's really everywhere we can think of, and I mean I think it's great. I graduated as a fine artist and did not necessarily intend to be working in animation, but they were hiring painters, so I became a painter and 35 years later I'm still here.
Speaker 2:Perfect. So the question I ask everyone on this podcast is like a warm up question is what is your definition of AI?
Speaker 1:So I guess I'm more of a clinical thought on that. Ai is something that, of course, is man made. We program it, but then from that point on, it can learn on its own, it can go on its, it can do just about anything we can do. It's meant to mimic the homo sapien brain so that it's free to go in thoughts all over the place, unlike machine learning, like there's a lot of people think, machine learning is AI, and it's really not. It's, you know, a chess game that you play against to have my little Casper off, a digital chess game here, and it can only do chess, but it can't drive our car, it can't do any of these other kinds of things. So when we get into AI, if it's a matter of it, it needs to be able to Experience something, process it, get a conclusion and move on from there. So it's so much more than we have currently. I know AI.
Speaker 1:The fear of AI is out there and and probably rightly so. Since 1984 with Terminator, it's been everybody's, it's been in everybody's minds. But that's one of those things where Can it be a beneficial Element, can it be detrimental? But I think it's like all tools, like everything from from the wheel and gunpowder, and you know they all have beneficial sides to them in, in particular, with AI. If AI could, you could stand in front of it and it scans you and let you and it'll tell you exactly what's wrong with you. Well, you've got a little spot on your lung, but you don't have to worry about it because that's a this, that and the other thing, but your liver, on the other hand, has a lesion that you should be concerned about. Yeah, then, ai is a good thing. It does not take jobs away from people absolutely, because now all these doctors hey, you don't need doctors anymore, but I Think you will always need the personal side of things when it comes to AI.
Speaker 2:I think they can be and I think we should be developing them to be hand-in-hand right so it's no, it's no secret that it's getting harder and harder to make animated shows, with the cost of cost everything, cost of everything going rising and but also the demand has like increased tenfold with, like you watch everything from television to you know Netflix, to anything on your phone. People just want it everything like there's like CBC has CBC television, cbc web, cbc you know they had their own app. They want, yeah, they have everything. So some view this, some view AI is like the golden ticket, like this could help alleviate with like things like image generative Software is like stable diffusion or dolly or mid-journey.
Speaker 2:Some people say like, oh, we can use this for pre-production or development phase. We're not talking about that because that's a whole other thing. But as someone who's been in the business, who's seen these trends of transitions from, like, the introduction of 3d software in the 90s to Digital, the digital phase of, you know, harmony and W flash, do you see, do you see any parallels between this AI crisis or does this field new?
Speaker 1:No, I think it's totally paralleled and I think it goes way back. You know, if you think about when the Nobody today in our city pretty much owns a horse, but back in the day horses were everything, cars got introduced, people lost their jobs because he didn't need ferriers anymore, you didn't need stables downtown, you didn't need all these kinds of things. But so they either close their business when did something else or adapted their business. I remember in the 80s, when it was towards the we were just finishing I was working at Hinton and we had just finished the nutcracker Prince feature film with Keith was Sutherland and Megan follows, and there was these other companies doing this.
Speaker 1:Oh, did you hear about 3d? Oh, 3d is coming. You guys are obsolete. So there was that big panic about you know when, like, we're looking at the Pixar stuff and and all these things and at first like, if you, if you have the opportunity to pick up the Pixar shorts and watch them, they're horrible. But I remember back in the day being blown away by them. Oh man, look at, look at that baby. It's so realistic. And now, if, if you were, if one of those things was in my house, I'd throw it out as quickly as I could. They're quite no well they're. They're not to the polish that they are today for sure.
Speaker 1:No, they're also their time right, exactly so, with everybody pushing 3d back then, when Dulcy decided to open pip, that was one of the big things is why are you going to 2d? It's dead, but it isn't dead. So there's there's still a lot, still a lot further to go, and with 3d, that was one of the things I think with made 3d very Approachable to mainstream was give it the software does most of it, and then you know you could just do everything through motion capture. So you had things like the backyard against which my kids loved, and I was like it just has a certain look that we could do so much better in 2d. That's come a lot further now. I mean you look at things like Pirates of the Caribbean. Is that an animated show or a live action show? It's both.
Speaker 2:It's a hybrid right.
Speaker 1:It's very much a hybrid, and I think most high-end Pictures are always going to be hybrids moving forward. So in that case, where is a I beneficial? So, if you have, do you want to generate a crowd of Orcs running across the plains, or do you really need to hire 30,000 extras to do that?
Speaker 1:Right, yeah yeah or or even for simplistic things like Davey Jones, as the you know, the the octopus typeface yes, that's being animated, but a lot of that's going through interpolation and Machine learning how tentacles work. So if he moves, the tentacles have to move a certain way and then you you put muscles into them and then you can go in and adjust and tweak. But those are all things that I think enhance the quality. But I don't know if we as the people, want to have something that's 100% generated by AI. I Don't know if it's there and I know AI can. It's big thing is it can compute so quickly so it can do whatever 10,000 things in a second. So Can it present a white canvas with a red dot on it and hang that in the National Gallery, maybe?
Speaker 1:yeah but could it do a dolly? I don't know, maybe, but how much do we have to? How much does it have to get through before it can produce something like that? And Because it's all Programmed on existing material, where does it go like yeah, you need a new person, you need new minds in there, bringing it new life and helping it evolve?
Speaker 2:right because, like that's currently what's going on with it's the AI art that's out there right now is now referencing itself, and so now it's having these issues of just redundancies, of like, oh, and that's just producing the same things, because referencing Not other like, not human works, but now I, I works.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it falls into a loop.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so then do you see place for AI in studios or is it just like a niche thing, like augmented reality or VR or I Think they're always will be.
Speaker 1:It's like computers Again, back in the day I remember when we've got our first computers and they were those Apple bricks with the keyboard was attached in the three inch floppy and then somebody got a five inch floppy and you're like, well, how come they get the new computer? But I mean today I work in word and spreadsheets and and and producer, which is our tracking software, and we work in all these other kinds of things that have definitely helped simplify the process but also make it more Manageable so that again you can keep the cost down. Animation is an industry, so it's a, you know, an audio visual group of artists come together and they create their wares that are seen by the masses through our televisions and other types of screens. So in the end it's always a business. But I think you can draw the line somewhere where I mean we do it with clothing.
Speaker 1:This cheap clothing was made over here and these people are being treated poorly and their factory Caught fire and then fell down and so many of those people were, you know, injured and whatever. So we don't buy clothing from them anymore. We're doing that with food. More people are buying organic. I Think we get to a point where we want. Do we want fast food all the time or do we want a nice home cooked meal every once in a while?
Speaker 2:Right.
Speaker 2:Yeah so they that was my thing was like the whole point is podcast is I'm trying to figure out Where's that line, where's the line between one side is an asset and the other side is just automation, where it's like taking away from it and it's like, okay, where's this, where's this line that we're trying to figure out? So what's talking about that is I'm what do you feel are the ethical concerns and responsibilities for Studios to use AI? Like where should it? Should they disclose that? Like oh yes, we are using AI, should it be, you know?
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's a good question and I I Think, because it's a lot, it's deeper and it's multifaceted. So, right it my working in animation for so long. A lot of people don't even know where this industry lives. Is it all overseas? Is it all down in California? Well, no, there's six major studios and a dozen plus more minor studios here in Ottawa. People are like what? Well, where are you guys? Well, we're all over the city.
Speaker 1:So I think, in a lot of cases, we have to think of, well, what's fair to employees. So, you know, we have minimum wages in Canada for a reason. It actually just went up a couple of days ago. There's minimum, yeah, yeah, it went from 1550 to, I think, 1665 or something like that. I think so, yeah, yeah. So that's there for a reason because you want people to be employed, you want them to be able to make a good living. So, again, the computers help things out.
Speaker 1:But if you have AI now generating, the vast majority of it could be the writing, it could be the composing as well. I was listening to this thing on CBC and they had a song composed and sung by AI in the voice and talents of Amy Winehouse, and I thought, wow, that kind of sounds like her and okay, maybe the song is okay. But I think as a people we need to decide what we want and what we don't want. There's a company that came out with a series. This was two years ago or maybe three years ago. We sing in the car all the time.
Speaker 1:I love learning. Later on, we sing in the car all the time, I love learning lyrics, I'm always singing, and this song starts to come on and my daughter and I start to sing two different songs because it sounded that much alike. So I look it up, generated by the same company. So all of a sudden, that AI was like well, this is a really good beat and this is a good place for the harmony to come in. And this is and it was almost the same song with different words put to it. So that could become very much an issue with visually generated AI. Anime has that certain look and feel to it for cost saving measures, for the most part for cost saving measures. So is anime better than anything else out there? It's just this different, it's just another thing. So I think, on a moral sense, if the AI is not overshadowing the creativity of the people involved again, from writers through to composers and final mastering animators, everybody in between, and it's enhancing their abilities, then that's one thing, but it shouldn't replace their abilities.
Speaker 1:Right, yeah, I totally agree, I think so that's the moral part I think is most important.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I totally agree. Yeah, so at the end of the day, animation is a business and the AI Genie bottle, or whatever analogy you wanna use, is out of the bag and it's not going. It's here to stay. But what I find people tend to forget is we've had small forms of AI used in the animation software we use all the time, from Harmony and Adobe Flash, where they have the in between, like the tween function is a form of artificial intelligence where it analyzes the two points and tries to determine which is the fastest, depending on where you put the peg or not the peg, but the slider and then it's your job to actually animate it, versus letting the computer just go A to B. Or you have Harmony's lip sync function, where you can analyze the sound file and give you the approximate mouth shapes based on what the tool, the library, you have Granted. It's usually pretty shitty because it doesn't understand lip syncs.
Speaker 1:But it like That'll improve, that'll only get better. But that's the thing.
Speaker 2:So my question is if AI can lower the cost and possibly help make artists stronger by allowing them to focus more on specific scenes or better mentorship, would it be foolish to not use these technologies, or would relying on these softwares dilute and stagnate the talent?
Speaker 1:There's not that bar. Yeah, yeah, that's true. So with, like you're saying, with auto in-betweening and things like that, it's sort of doing what we're asking it to do, and for it to improve you need a programmer to go in there and bang away at the keyboard to make things even more fluid. Like the, harmony 22 has just incredible features, but so does Maya and so does FlashAnimate. We were a Flash Studio for many, many years, so I guess it's one of those. I've lost your question. Yeah, no problem.
Speaker 1:Feel free to edit this out and leave it in, I don't care.
Speaker 2:Oh, and leave it in, it's all fine. My question is more by using these big technologies that help make things faster, lower costs and possibly help us get better as artists than what we're doing would be foolish not to use it. Or by relying on it so much, you're just now becoming so dependent on it that you lose that skill set.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So I think there's that balance in there. So animations in industry, like any industry, the cheap you can produce it for the best return is the way to go. So broadcasters want to give you whatever. It is $100,000 per episode, but you need $300,000 per episode and you have to go find these other investors. So anywhere you can save money, the industry will tend to go that way. Again, fast food versus organic, organically grown. So there's a variety of cost saving methods.
Speaker 1:When COVID hit, everybody had to go home and all of the actors, all production and everything shut down. So the government said well, you know what? Animation is an essential service, so you guys have to keep working. Like what? How are we supposed to keep working? We can't go into the studio. You'll find it's $3,000 a day. So we quickly learned and this is like right across the board, from definitely across Canada all the offices or all the studios quickly recompose themselves as virtual studios and most of us are still the same way, like I'm working from home. Today I'm in my office in the basement. So when you have a studio that has, say, 25,000 square feet and they're paying $30,000 a square foot on that, well, if you can drop that down to a 3,000 square foot office where your mainframes are and your administration people are. That's a huge savings. So, right there, I would be surprised if studios go back to fully in-person. So, when it comes to software, why are we using Harmony over Animate? We used Animate for many, many years and then Harmony just it gained, and it was they were really putting in the effort to make it a better software for animators. So we adopted that.
Speaker 1:If AI comes in and does something similar and I'm sure it will then it would be adopted. But I think it's always with that it has to be a balance between the two. When you have AI coming in, like you had mentioned, do you then give scenes to some senior people? That gives them time to do that. You might be able to build a very strong pipeline with fewer people relying on more of these tools. But I think the caveat is also you're only as strong as the programmer. And how good can the program be until you get into actual AI and then it doesn't need people anymore and it's doing its own thing.
Speaker 1:So when 3D came out, I had mentioned the back yardings, but there's a whole bunch of them. They looked and moved the same way and they were all motion capture and then, well, we'll introduce some people back into it to try to tweak it a little bit. And then you get things like Golem from Lord of the Rings, which is outstanding, but it's still all based on the individuals doing all of that work. Like Golem was designed on paper and then he was created in a 3D program and tweaked and built and whatever and then lit. And then, after Andy Circus did all the motion capture, then animators went in and they tweaked it all again and then the lighting department came in and then Peter Jackson said ah, that's a good start, let's give it a few more passes.
Speaker 1:So it was all the individual input into those and the computers were just used as a tool, and I think that's by far the way we should continue to go. Whether we do or not, I don't know, I'm sure there'll be some companies that are just there for profit, profit, profit. But I think the majority of studios want the individual input, what each person can contribute to the story, from interpreting the script into a storyboard, from interpreting the storyboard or timing out the storyboard into an animatic, then animators interpreting that into how I'm going to make the characters move, where I put the accents. I think that's what makes the shows what they need to be and why animation is so popular.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think you nailed the. I think you hit it right on the head where it's like. In the beginning 3D, at least Intelligent, looked all the same. It was like this weird like everything felt underwater and everything was like moving, kind of similarly.
Speaker 1:And it wasn't until gravity.
Speaker 2:you had these outliers like Gollum or Pixar that showed you like, oh no, you don't have to do it this way, this is how we do it. And then everyone copies that. And even recently, like you had, like everyone was copying Pixar, like you had all these clones and you're like, oh okay. And then you had something like the new Spider-Man movie, like the Into the Spider-Verse or those where it's like it shows you like, or even before that it was technically, it was the Peanuts movie.
Speaker 1:Oh yeah, yeah, that's great.
Speaker 2:Where you can do a cartoony but it's still 3D and you're like, holy crap, this looks great and it feels like a cartoon and it like it's flat and 3D at the same time. You're like what the fuck is going on? Yeah, I think you hit it right on the head that it just it, you it's. You need those, you need those programs to show you like things can be possible. And then you need these innovators. They're like all right, we're going to change it up, or this is how we should approach it through artistic vision and process.
Speaker 1:Yeah, they can be used to improve and bring it to a next level. Arcane, like everybody's. When Arcane first came out was like wow, it's, it's hand painted 3D. A lot of stuff in there, computer interpolation from here to there to there. But then having the I hate using the word human, having that personal touch of people coming in and tweaking all of those things. Like Jinks gets hit in the face and then slowly, over multiple scenes, that line starts to come into her cheek. So by the time she gets back to the layer, her eyes swollen. You're like wow, no, could I do that? Maybe, but would it think to do that? I?
Speaker 2:don't know, yeah, I like as yeah, as I stand right now, I'd be like no, that takes like a human to be like no, you got to think of this creatively. Be like no, this is what it doesn't, at least right now. Ai doesn't think, it just does what it's told. That's right, and I would. When it does what it's told, it's very straightforward. It can't think out the box, outside the box, it just does whatever you say it is, and it could be very specific.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah exactly. And it still requires people to be in, to be going in and improving the AI and recoding it and getting it to stop focus on its own work. But now pick up this, pick up that, go into other areas Like would it, could it have come up with arcane? Or imagine if you could do an animated feature like Picasso's work. That could be terrible, yeah it could be really cool.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it could be either or.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, like the movie that came out about oh gosh, what is his name? A painter who cut off his, your van go. So the film van go. You know, when I first saw that, I'm like it looks like they filmed it and then they just went over and Photoshop and painted everything over. And I mean, I did some of that back in the day when, when you could filter with Photoshop, and then I found out, no, each frame was an oil painting and they painted everything and then film those things separately.
Speaker 1:I thought, wow, like the effort that went into that. Do I think it's worth it? I don't think so, because it was like 150 animators painting every frame. It was an experiment and maybe I would think of that and in a millisecond, go, nope, but it might also get stuck in that loop and then just tell people this is what you're going to watch from now on. Exactly, I think we get tired of things very quickly. Toy Story was a beautiful movie. And you go back and you watch it now and you're like, eeh, yes, these are a little rough. You're like okay.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's aged. And then when you had things like Star Trek and whatever, who were starting to use more of the feature quality type visuals, and now you look at it back now and you're like you know what it looks aged. So will any of these new Star Wars series.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:In 10, 15 years we'll probably look back and go hmm, I don't know, isn't?
Speaker 2:that campy You're like okay.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, I know it'll have a dated look to it, but that's where I think it requires the artists to be able to constantly be enhancing what they're working with. So sure, if there's a new tool, absolutely they can embrace that tool and make it. Whatever the visuals come out of it, they can make them their own, as opposed to just letting the tool dictate, because then we just get, you know, jell-o-e type animation with no gravity and everything is very floaty.
Speaker 2:Yeah, well, that's been interesting. Thanks so much, dave. That was great, loved it Good.
Speaker 1:Yeah, Thanks for having me on the show.
Speaker 2:Well that's it. I want to thank our guests for contributing on our journey so far, and I want to thank you, the Phantom listeners from here. So Rammel around the water cooler, come check in next time as we talk more about the subject of AI in the animation industry. Let's find out together. Don't forget to keep your eyes on the horizon. Bye.