009. Human-Made Animation
I went to art college to study animation because that’s where animation was being taught.
Animation = Art.
But when visiting colleges with my eldest for open days, I noticed how animation was being subtly labelled as a technical skill, rather than an artistic one. It worried me that, as far as animation goes, the method now outweighs the message - it's less about what you say, more about what tools you use to say it.
To me the two are inseparable: the method should meet the message and elevate it. But new technology has driven down the importance of communication in favour of ‘show-off’ skills. Of course I'm talking AI, but I think this transformation has been happening for much longer than the emergence of AI video.
To be fair, I can't remember the last time I made animation without the aid of a computer. It's long been the animator’s tool of choice. Understanding software, pushing a PC to its limits, and fixing its code when everything goes awry is all part of animation production. But that doesn't make animation solely a technical exercise. The choices we make in design, gesture, timing, volume, weight, physics, and choreography, all come from an artistic brain. In fact, I would argue animation is the de facto artistic medium because it combines so many artistic endeavours. The mix of art and tech is what makes it uniquely wondrous and magical - it has a bit of everything.
The art in animation comes from us humans. We are the ones who value it, understand it, and speak its language. We create it. You cannot ignore the art in animation. If you do, the result is, well, no better than AI slop.
That's why I'm making a pledge that all animation made at my studio will continue to be human-made.
And that’s regardless of whether computers are used. Let me explain…
I would argue AI is a technical tool, like any other computer application we animate with on our computers. But if the tool begins to do more of the work than the animator, we start sacrificing intent, along with authorship. And we definitely give up control of the message, which is what animation is best at, whether that's a daft video about a cat falling off a sofa, or a campaign video raising awareness of diabetes.
Recently I had a debate with a passionate LinkedIn commentator about why animation made with AI is any different from animation made with a computer. Set aside the uptick in environmental cost and job devaluation that comes with AI, it's worth mapping out where the real difference lies, and I think it comes down to human interaction, intent, and authorship.
I see it as a sliding scale. On one end is pure generative AI, where you punch in some text and out pops a video. On the other is animation made by a human using a graphics tablet and Photoshop. Between the two sit all kinds of interactions between human and AI - from the simplest, like asking a chat tool for help scripting an expression in After Effects, through using generative AI to rough out a turnaround of your 2D character, to applying AI motion capture to a 3D character, or teaching a proprietary tool how your character moves and rendering it from a handful of key pose sketches.
The further you move toward the generative-AI end, the more steps the computer is taking on your behalf, and the less human originality survives the process:
I'm certainly not looking to devalue the skill of anyone using AI tools. My argument is that using them involves more technical skill than artistic - whereas human-made animation, even when built using computers, is fundamentally an artistic skill. And as I've illustrated above, every mix of these extremes is possible; it's rarely a straight either/or.
Which is exactly why I've made that pledge for Beakus.
Not because computers are the problem - in 16 years we've rarely made a frame without one - but because somewhere on that scale, the tool starts doing the talking instead of us, and the message gets lost. Animation only works as a medium because a human being decided what it should say and how it should feel to watch. That's the bit of animation art I’m not willing to hand over.
Image from CBBC Lifebabble