ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE INDUSTRY
O nce upon a time, creating frame by painstaking frame. While CGI accelerated this process immeasurably, AI is taking things to another level by mastering storytelling’s core movement, emotions and visuals, thereby ushering unprecedented creative innovation. Take Kartoon Channel, a kids’ channel and on-demand service which embraced AI in February, producing Fast Facts , a series of interstitials for YouTube and its own platform. ”We chose short-form content animation was a laborious task for artists who drew characters due to its potential for educational entertainment, focusing on three popular kids’ subjects: science, maths and history,” says president of Kartoon Channel Paul Robinson. ”Our objective was to explore AI’s capacity to enhance production – aiming for shorter timelines, increasing effectiveness and efficiency. Scripts were generated through ChatGPT and thoroughly vetted by our producer across three different sources. Both character design and animation were executed using AI.” Robinson states Kartoon Channel’s AI adoption is experimental at this stage, but expresses admiration for its empowering impact on animation houses, enabling creative breakthroughs within consistent budgets. “You get more and better, but I don’t see this as cost-cutting,” he continues. “We all have finite budgets, but this is about using what we have to produce more volume and enhance the look. We know what really drives up the cost in animation and it’s not the characters; once created, the models for the core and recurring characters can easily appear in every single episode. Backgrounds drive up costs because they’re changed for different stories.” Animator and founder of Anachronistic, Christian Darkin, who is known for working on the CBeebies show Magic Hands , adds that matte painting and green-screen backgrounds can be generated and iterated at a level of quality and detail that would have taken artists weeks to create. “If you want a great-looking result, but don’t need a fine level of control over it, the new video to video workflows using Stable Diffusion can really shine,” he explains. “Every
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