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
Drawing Towards The Future:Teaching Animation During The Surge of AI with Neil Hunter
As artificial intelligence seemingly spreads its self across all industries, is animation next? But more importantly, what do you do when you teach animation that one day might be done without the need for artists? Do you change course or charge forward with what works? Do you adapt to the changing landscape or wait to see how things unfold? Can the craft survive in the face of advancing technology, or will it undergo significant changes? In this episode we talk to Neil Hunter, the co-coordinator of the Algonquin College Animation Program, on his career as both an animator and teacher. On the role of teachers in ever evolving format and what the future might hold for future students.Finally, we discuss the impact AI might have on animation,education and industry as a whole.
Animator vs the Machine Begin.
Speaker 2:Alright. So, with artificial intelligence seemingly inserting itself into every industry, we've discussed how it could possibly affect animators, to actors, to storyboard artists and other people in the animation industry. But animation also has a lengthy history embedded with technology, from Disney creating a division of chemists to make their own paints in the 1930s, to the Xerox era, to more modern day innovations like we can now draw on our screens and animate without paper. Given this deep rooted relationship between animation and technology, it's no surprise that some have connected the two. But what does that mean for schools like the Gawkin College that have been teaching animation to generations for over 35 years? Well, that's what we're going to talk about today. And who better than the co-coordinator and veteran animator, neil Hunter?
Speaker 1:Hey, neil, hey how are you Good? You, I'm doing good thanks.
Speaker 2:So let's tell the Phantom listeners a little bit about yourself, who don't really know who you are.
Speaker 1:I imagine that's most of them. So I started off in animation. I went to Sheridan in 1981. And I went there because I wanted to do graphic design like our graphic novels they were just called comic books back then and I had seen a couple of people that I liked and they all had animation experience and I thought, oh, maybe I should do this. So I went and I applied and the hallway, the coordinator, flipped through my stuff and I went yep, you're in. And I got in in July or something.
Speaker 1:I wasn't the most organized student and I really liked it and I liked telling stories. I found that that's what I liked doing. I wasn't the best draftsman or drawer or anything like that, so I really liked that. So that was all paper and cells and all that kind of stuff. And the people I was at school with were great and many of them are still working in the industry now.
Speaker 1:And I think I just started off and I didn't know what to do. So I started a company with a friend and we did some commercials and I ended up coming to Ottawa for a six month job to work on the raccoons and I stayed. Well, I was still here. So that was a while and I got to work on the raccoons, which at back you know, and when I started you worked from kind of February to September in your animation job and then you had a job pumping gas or I worked in a studio that was doing commercials. That was more year round but it was hard to find year round work and back then animation was just for kids and that kind of stuff and it was going through some weird phases. So when things like Ren and Stimpy and Beavis and Butthead and the Simpsons all started up in the early 90s, late 80s, that sort of opened the door in North America for adult animation and that lifted everything up a little bit and there was a lot more work. It was a bit of a boom. Disney was back with feature films and that kind of stuff and doing well.
Speaker 1:So I think I just happened to be in the right place at the right time. I just managed to ride that wave. I did a lot of storyboards for studios in California because FedEx started flying into Ottawa and I could live in Canada and do these storyboards and get an extra 25 cents on the dollar, which was awesome. So I did that, started directing, started, did a bit of producing and stuff. I was going to go down to California and my dad moved up to Ottawa and I thought, oh, I can't. We haven't lived together in the same city for so many years who knows how long I have he's still alive and I decided to stay in the next day A friend of mine said they're looking for a full-time teacher at the animation program Metalgonquin.
Speaker 1:So I applied and I got in with that and that was 20 years ago and I thought I'd do that for three years too. So not very good managing my time, apparently. And then we went from two years to a three-year program and Paul and I kind of share a brain as far as what we want out of the program and how we wanted people to be treated within the program, and we worked very hard with the studios to make sure we have. I think Jefferson at Mercury says you know it's a closed circle kind of thing. We're not just dumping students out into the market, but you know they're coming back and being teachers. So they're coming back and being mentors and the studios are trying to, you know, work with it.
Speaker 1:We do a lot of work with studios where they come in and talk to students, to master classes, all that kind of stuff. So I think we've got a very good circle and we've built a pretty good system and I think you know we've we're ranked within the top 10 usually schools. We've got great studios here, partly because I think of all of Algonquin, but I think it's not just one, pardon me one thing, it's the whole way everything kind of came together. So it's pretty. I've been pretty fortunate and pretty lucky and a teaching is is a lot of fun. It's pretty awesome.
Speaker 2:So yeah, yeah. So I'm curious, out of your you know, 20 plus years career, how has the industry changed and how do you prepare your students for these changes, like especially when it's like, oh, we're going to go from paper and pencil to, like, a digital format, or you know, 3d to 2D, or you know what I mean?
Speaker 1:Yeah, so I, I grew up working in paper, um, and I remember the seeing some of the first 3D and going, well, I don't know how, whatever that is, and I mean there's a lot of people screaming that 3D was the end of, you know, 2d, animation and all that kind of stuff. I've learned over the years that this, you know, doesn't usually workout, to be exactly the same as people fear Because it wasn't.
Speaker 1:It augmented it in some ways and changed, but it didn't kill careers and stuff. I actually did the first Photoshop painting for a series we were doing at Lacewood this was the name of the studio at the time and based on that Photoshop painting we managed to convince the guy who owned the studio to go into digital income paint, spent like a million dollars on SGI graphics machines and software and stuff and we ran the first. I was told it was the first digital income paint in Canada for sure, maybe even North America.
Speaker 1:And it was 1996, five, six, something like that, I think we did that. So that was, you know, you see these little transitions and see these things kind of coming in. So we couldn't draw on computers, we were still drawing everything on paper and scanning it in. And then, when you know, flash came along and tomb, boom and stuff. That was another big thing and it was interesting because I mean, it had to grow. It wasn't. It wasn't a huge threat in the beginning. It's like, well, this is cool if they can get everything to come back from the Philippines and Korea and be back in one studio. You can have that kind of control again. And if that can do it, it's not there yet, but it is now.
Speaker 1:I mean, it's clearly there now, but it wasn't in the beginning and then I just kind of threw myself into that and tried to figure it out, made friends with tomb boom and started getting trained. And I still work in studios because that's the only way. My first day working in, I was at Jamfeld and they gave me a scene and I'm like I don't know what I'm doing, I'll just move this I think, oh, click on that and move that. And you know, it took me three days to do a scene that should have taken 10 minutes or something.
Speaker 2:But you know, I had.
Speaker 1:I was fortunate enough to have those opportunities from and people let me do that kind of stuff and I figured it out and I think that's just good to. You know, keep going with the flow and not to block yourself out from things like that. So I think it's an interesting ride to see that. Right, and I think what I've distilled from all that, when I'm trying to teach and when we're thinking about how we're teaching at the college I think, like most places too, is when I try to teach a set piece of software, we try to stick to. We teach Tomb Boom, because that's what most of the jobs are. We teach Maya because that's pretty standard for most of the jobs, it's Photoshop, but we don't want to get into, you know, teaching different pieces of software and we really want to get into.
Speaker 1:You know, people say animation is like the Walt Disney thing with shaking Tinkerbell on the paper and it comes to life. Right, yeah, so it's bringing characters to life. It is, it's all that great stuff, but it's really problem solving. So if you can apply principles and solve problems, it doesn't matter if you're drawing on paper, if you're moving a rig around, or 20 years from now, if you're doing something like this you know, minority Report, computer type stuff and moving things around. You're still going to be applying those principles of animation and composition and design, and I think that's the human factor. Since we're going to talk about AI, yeah, we're getting there.
Speaker 2:So, speaking of AI, have you guys, have you guys has, like, the faculty, incorporate discussions about AI into the curriculum? And if so, like what do you guys cover? Just curious.
Speaker 1:So we're talking about it, we're talking to the studios about it.
Speaker 1:I personally believe it's not our position in the college to lead in something like this.
Speaker 1:Yeah, but we meet with the studios through the college twice a year and of course we're all friends and stuff, so we talk and have a beer and all that kind of stuff. Anyway, at the moment, I think we're not. We're looking at maybe teaching something that's more of an AI awareness kind of thing how to use it properly, what's acceptable use of it in the academic terms of you can't hand in something that you've created using an artificial intelligence program and saying it's yours because it's not and that would be in our world plagiarism and you wouldn't get the marks for that and all that kind of stuff, which is a little different than studio. The studios have to be able to still prove. My understanding at the moment for most broadcasters is that they own everything that is being put on the screen. So I know that they're using AI for mood boards and developing things and scrounging the internet to get all the information, which I think is a great tool. It's like using chat GPT to check your grammar.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:It's not really, or maybe develop the check marks or checkpoints for your talking points or something, but you still have input. And I think, until we get to how it's Seeing how it's being used in a studio, we're just gonna sort of see where what we need to do just to make sure the students aware of it academically, and then we'll see how it gets implemented. And I have it be interesting to see how it gets implemented because there's all different kinds of takes on it and fears and hopes and all that kind of stuff. So it's interesting, you know.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's a very unique time. I would say yeah it's like okay, this thing can do weird shit, interesting things, but it's also like there's some ethical problems here with how it's. You know sources of stuff. Yeah, it's just a tiny bit.
Speaker 1:And now I mean you've got Disney that's creating their own virtual using all Disney stuff and that takes away some of the ethical question of who owns it. I mean it comes. I've heard people say well, the whole thing is gonna come down to like Napster and the music world right, like they're gonna have to give some royalties and I don't know how the formula for that would work.
Speaker 1:I guess they're gonna have to keep track of what they strip data wise from the internet and stuff and just pay everybody zero, zero, zero or point zero, zero, zero, one four cents every time someone makes an image or something I don't know.
Speaker 2:Yeah, no one's gonna get rich off it, that's for sure. No, well, like I know, you created it. Yeah, I've also heard like they're like they're using AI for like lighting and different stuff like that. I'm like, oh, that's kind of neat, but I don't know how that necessarily works. Like I said, like board and stuff like that.
Speaker 1:As a tool. Um, you know, I can see like if tombom incorporated AI to make Better in between. Like you know that your hand goes from here straight down to here doesn't do an arc and drag. I mean, I can see things like that where it makes tools more intuitive or tries to read what you're doing, but I think there's still gonna be some person sitting there.
Speaker 2:You know, adjusting things.
Speaker 1:Maybe it's gonna be more like you know, like the green screen stuff where you've got the balls on the actor and stuff and you ever seen one of those clips? You know, every once in a while there's this huge triangle that goes off into space somewhere and someone's gonna sit there and move it back into place and yeah, and still adjust the animation sometimes. So Maybe quotas will go up because animation will be easier.
Speaker 1:I don't think it's an animate button where you just push it and you know, are you driving to work in your car and going? You know, siri, I need a TV show for 10 year old kids and it's got A bulldog and a cat and they're in peril and get it on my desk by the time I get to work.
Speaker 2:To work, yeah, kind of thing right, yeah, it's not that the infamous animate button or just it's done. You're like, all right, great, it's looking to me, that human fact.
Speaker 1:Oh, even series listening series series now trying to make a show for me. So perfect. I may be richer after this, oh perfect.
Speaker 2:So what ways do you see AI possibly impacting future job prospects for graduates entering the workforce?
Speaker 1:Yes, I mean. I mean they're being impacted right now for sure, with everything slowing down and all the reasons behind that need to get sorted out. So that's I guess it depends. The bottom line is always money, right, like I mean, no matter how a studio feels about their people and how much they love their crew, they can afford what they can afford. And since covid it seems that the pressure is on to reduce the amount of budgets and there's competition from third world countries, like there was at the end of the 90s and 80s and stuff. We're back to potentially shipping stuff overseas and that kind of stuff. So I think that's affecting things.
Speaker 1:If AI comes along and does take jobs and I can see that eventually that will be the case and that the number of people required to create a show could be reduced, but I don't think it's ever going to be like Katzenberg numbers where it's gone from. I had a thousand people made this movie and I can do it with two. You know kind of stuff, but I think it's going to be something where it's enhanced from what we have at the moment. Just like you know now drawing from paper, now we can move things around in color. When we did stuff in paper. You had to kind of figure colors going to slow it down, to kind of animate in your head a little faster, and then when you saw it in color, you're like almost, and now you can see it for real right in front of you and you go, oh, this is how it's going to look, I can change it. That's a great innovation and I hope that the innovations that come out of something with AI would be productive Not only in reducing the amount of time that it takes because it's still a long process to make an animated film, but also to help improve the quality and to, you know, keep people working as well, that there needs to be that, that input, even if it's lessened.
Speaker 1:But I feel like, if you know Netflix or whoever you know they, they want advertising dollars, they're gonna want more shows, and and if you have Studios that are halved in their population In in Ottawa at least, generally, when a studio went down, two more popped up out of the you know, out of the leaks that were kind of inside, kind of thing, right, so I can see that happening too, where there's suddenly there's more studios, maybe not employing as many people, but still producing content for people that need to show up because they're there. People are gonna want things faster, you know. So I can see. I can see it changing. Yeah, but it's good. I don't know if it's a bad, it's just different, I hope.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's my thing too. I like that's why I did this. I was like, okay, how do people feel? And what is the? What do people think is gonna happen? Versus with the reality of what's gonna happen. Right, like, I'm the same, but we're like I hope it's used as like an intuitive tool, like to make you better in between. So, or you know, you're still at the helm. It's just you have a little. You have like essentially a smarter clippy that's helping you guide you along.
Speaker 1:Yeah, like there's jobs that are our time consuming and technical Rimm lighting. Getting you know some of that on a character is a difficult task for a composer, a special effects person or animator, depending on how the studio splits it up to do it, and it takes time. If something Could say there's light source here, everything's here, and teach it how to do that, I'm okay with that. Yeah, that's not gonna that's. That's an impact to compositor's day. They hate that stuff anyway.
Speaker 1:They'd rather be doing the cool stuff. So, yeah, that AI can't do and I think that maybe isn't a bad thing, that's just. I Remember reading an article in the. It was from the 70s and computers were just coming into the business workspace and they were saying that you know, People will be able to do a week's worth of work in a day. Therefore, they're gonna have so much time off in the future. You know two-day work weeks and all this kind of stuff and yeah, you know.
Speaker 1:We have the same number of people working. They're just doing, you know, a Week's worth of work every day for five days now. And yeah, you know there's also that if, if, if studios get more work in at a faster pace, then then maybe you can keep the number of people that you have. You're just going through more Product faster, or something too.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah. So have any of your students brought concerns by AI to you or faculty and how do you address these Concerns or anxieties about you know going to workforce that you know AI is impacting?
Speaker 1:I slap them. No, no, no, no, a few, especially a third years, because that's what I'm mostly teaching. But there have been people who have. We've had conversations about it and it would be scary to think you're getting an into an industry that may not exist In five years or something which I. I don't have a magic ball, but I don't think that's the case.
Speaker 1:When I graduated, disney had made the black cauldron. There'd been the strike and it looked like animation was it's just for kids. It was. You know, disney was over kind of thing, and I thought that was the be all and end all, but it was pretty much the only thing you know. There wasn't a lot of other stuff going on and it looked pretty bleak then too, and we came out of it into all this other stuff.
Speaker 1:So I think I Think the audiences are sophisticated enough that animation as a storytelling tool has interest and will be around. So it's not gone, 3d hasn't gone, 2d hasn't gone, like it's still gonna be there. So it's just a matter of how does that sort of settle? And I think too, if you've got people who have to correct Work that's been generated Within parameters, they need a pretty good eye and they need a pretty good skill set to be able to do that. So I think maybe, from an education point of view, we might have to see the level of the talent of the students that are graduating Be raised to be able to enter a studio.
Speaker 1:It used to be an in-betweener, right, like, yeah, hey, you on the street Can you hold a pencil, come here, kind of stuff, and it's like sure I can. I'm not an artist, you know, and People did that. I mean the stories that people started their animation careers, like that, and that's not gonna happen anymore. It's like, you know, maybe you don't need to know how to code for some jobs and stuff like that. So it will be different. But yeah, I think some of them are very nervous about that and I kind of tell them you know, at the moment it seems that everything's in flux, right, that it's going to be different, but it's not necessarily going to be the worst case scenario that everybody hears about or thinks about and all that kind of stuff. I think it's going to be a little bit softer of a landing in general, I think, but I do think it's going to separate the wheat from the chaff in the sense that for the last 10 years the animation industry has been booming and basically anybody that could animate when they graduated got a job.
Speaker 1:Now that wasn't like that before and I think it may go back to being like that where you have to be in the top 30, 50% to even get into a studio and we may have to look at eventually we're going to have to teach some kind of AI, probably some skills around that, at least software knowledge kind of thing. If that's again it's not our place to lead, that I don't think the studios have to set the pace for that and we'll work with them and fulfilling that need If that's an industry need, that's kind of our job right and it gives people a chance to find employment and what we're looking at, our kind of motivation, is to get people in the studio with a skill set that once they're in the studio they can go. You know what?
Speaker 1:I'm an animator but I really want to be a storyboard artist. I want to be a character designer. So it's like, well, there's a storyboard people there, go have a coffee with them. There's the character designer people go have a coffee with them, go talk to them and that kind of stuff and that's how they'll get to where they want to get, hopefully, but they're not going to get there if they're not in the studio. So whatever way to get them into the studio works is, I think, the best way to go about doing it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's an interesting point of view. Yeah, you're like animation as a platform, like a platform to propel them wherever they need to go.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean, that's how a lot of jobs don't make it to the studio sites and a lot of internal hires. Or yeah, I need someone to clean up storyboards for a month because we're behind.
Speaker 1:Oh you know a lot of that stuff happens, right, so, but you're not going to get those jobs if you're not in the studio and aware. So it's important to get in the studio and, yeah, that may be more difficult for the next little while, but that's that really has nothing to do with AI yet. That's still all the other stuff. We may just come out of this in time for the other shoot and drop. Yeah, yeah, that's just that's unfortunate, and hopefully it's not going to be that way, yeah hopefully not All right.
Speaker 2:So, as we wrap things up, finally, what are some misconceptions about AI and animation that you think are important for your students to know as they enter the industry?
Speaker 1:Well, we kind of joked about the animate button, but I think that's one of them. You know that they're not going to need to know how to animate because AI is going to do it for them. I think it's actually going to be the opposite. I have a feeling that we're going to have to restructure what we do, maybe even add another year if we have to do something like that, because I think the level of people going into the industry is going to need to be at a higher level than people now. So that's to be determined, I think, but I think that's something that's a possibility that is going to happen, I think.
Speaker 1:I mean I've at the animation festival there's a lot of talk about AI and stuff like that. I think treat it like in my brain I'm kind of treating it like 3D right, like they are going to take some jobs away from what would have been the traditional animation process or something. And some studios are going to. I mean there's some kid shows where the backgrounds are basically shaped, and why not? If you're a studio, the temptation would be there to be able to do that, but at the same time, if it's that simple, you're probably only employing one person to create those, and now that person is probably overseeing what AI is doing. So hopefully it goes that way. So I don't know, and if studios do let people go, then hopefully that do-it-yourself spirit is still very much alive and some people just I mean I did it because I didn't know any better, as I was at a college, but I mean smarter people than me have done it and done very well on it.
Speaker 1:So I think there'll be room for that as well. Content will drive the product and hopefully there'll be another balance where every you've got 3D, you've got 2D, you've got AI, purely generated stuff or whatever, you'll have AI filtering in through other tools. But everything I've heard, I've played around with it a bit and say, oh, type in this, oh that's cool. But it's like, well, can I see that from a slightly different angle? Can I place the camera up here? Can I, if I'm making backgrounds or something, how can I control all that stuff? And that's not quite there from what I know, and I just I don't know a lot and I've seen some simple animation done with it, but it's very simple animation done with it and that means that it will get better. I mean, but how it grows and how it becomes detrimental or an aid.
Speaker 1:I think is always a risk, but I think that the smart money would be on it becoming an aid for animation and then maybe doing something else down the road, and I can see styles of shows being more requiring fewer people because they can do more with less kind of thing. But you're going to always have those kinds of shows anyway. But yeah, I think it's going to be different, but it may be a good different. Make it more animation done, nicer animation done. It may be like chat GPT, but it's like hey, ai, check my animation. Your arc on the left hand is too flat, oh, okay.
Speaker 2:Yeah, man, that wouldn't be too bad. Yeah, that'd be interesting.
Speaker 1:Nice yeah, well fix it Faster.
Speaker 2:Come on, it's all perfect. Awesome, neil. That was a great conversation and very interesting and insightful. Thanks again for doing this. My pleasure, nice talking to you. Thanks, neil. All right, there we go. Another one of the books we're contributing on the subject of AI and animation and hopefully you get something out of it. Here's hoping the more conversations we have, the more clear the future will become, and hopefully, the more we talk, the less we demystify AI and show the realities of it.
Speaker 2:But again, no one has a crystal ball, so that can all change in a matter of seconds, but all we can do is hopefully shape the future that we want. Check in for our next episode, all the books that we talk about and the next episode. Goodbye, a working transmission.