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Sony Turns to AI to Tackle Rising Animation Costs and Animator Shortage

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Re: Sony Turns to AI to Tackle Rising Animation Costs and Animator Shortage

#21

Post by magicmicah85 »

krapp wrote: post #18
elphinstone wrote: post #14

I see this as one of the few legit use cases for current tech so far. The animators can draw key cels and the ai can do inbetweens.

Isn't drawing inbetweens one of the ways a lot of animators break into the industry? Key animation is usually an expert position for lead animators, but how will anyone become a key animator without being able to learn the process?

I would think the software with AI becomes available to the students for learning and starting with key animations becomes the thing you learn how to do as a novice. I don’t know how feasible that is, but in my experience software and techniques become more obtainable over time.

Re: Sony Turns to AI to Tackle Rising Animation Costs and Animator Shortage

#22

Post by dgfitz »

elphinstone wrote: post #14

I see this as one of the few legit use cases for current tech so far. The animators can draw key cels and the ai can do inbetweens.

If I stubbed out, for example, a Java or c++ class and gave “an ai” a well-crafted prompt to write the guts, it would go like this: either spend an absurd about of time writing and rewriting prompts to get a garbage result that needs re-writing/debugging, or spend the same amount of time writing the code myself.

Edit: I forgot the important bit: why is animation any different.

Re: Sony Turns to AI to Tackle Rising Animation Costs and Animator Shortage

#25

Post by Nursie »

altdataseller wrote: post #15
GiorgioG wrote: post #2

There is no animator shortage. They just don’t want to pay up.

Its the same thing as people claiming there’s an “accountant shortage”. Both are nonsense. There’s a shortage of people who want to do the job for pennies

Same with tech worker “shortages” in places like the UK and Australia.

No, what you have is a shortage of people willing to fill your vacancy at those prices.

Particularly in Perth there is a whole shadow economy of people working remotely for overseas firms, because local positions don’t pay the bills. This doesn’t say “shortage” to me, it says “cheap”.

And in the UK most small/medium businesses seem stuck in a vicious cycle of low pay, low productivity and low expectations.

Re: Sony Turns to AI to Tackle Rising Animation Costs and Animator Shortage

#26

Post by jalapenos »

JBits wrote: post #11
GiorgioG wrote: post #2

There is no animator shortage. They just don’t want to pay up.

There really is an animator shortage in anime. There's a popular blog with multiple articles on it: https://blog.sakugabooru.com/2022/08/05/the-layout-crisis-th... Though simply paying more sounds like it would fix the issue.

Yeah the shortage is because the pay is shit and the companies don't want to have any training burden. Self-created shortage.

Re: Sony Turns to AI to Tackle Rising Animation Costs and Animator Shortage

#27

Post by JBits »

jalapenos wrote: post #26
JBits wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There really is an animator shortage in anime. There's a popular blog with multiple articles on it: https://blog.sakugabooru.com/2022/08/05/the-layout-crisis-th... Though simply paying more sounds like it would fix the issue.

Yeah the shortage is because the pay is shit and the companies don't want to have any training burden. Self-created shortage.

I think plenty of companies would like to spend time training but aren't able to because the budget is too small. Still makes Sony reasonable for the shortage as you say.

Re: Sony Turns to AI to Tackle Rising Animation Costs and Animator Shortage

#28

Post by ReleaseCandidat »

TuringNYC wrote: post #23
GiorgioG wrote: post #2

There is no animator shortage. They just don’t want to pay up.

There is also a huge shortage of BMWs in the $5000-$7000 purchase price range.

That's just a local problém, there's no such shortage in Europe. Guess I'd just need a really cheap shipping option to the US to make some profits ;)

Re: Sony Turns to AI to Tackle Rising Animation Costs and Animator Shortage

#29

Post by johnnyanmac »

> “Whether it’s for games, films or anime, we don’t have that much IP that we fostered from the beginning,” the company’s chief financial officer Hiroki Totoki told FT. “We’re lacking the early phase [of IP] and that’s an issue for us.”

I read this from Playstation before, but the quote makes 1% more sense when it's expanded to anime and films.

It's still stupid because they are doing the exact same thing in film as in games these days: relying on Spiderman (among other 3rd party franchises) to basically carry their portfolios with some of the best talent in the business. It seems like their narrative doesn't match their actions.

(I won't be too harsh on the anime sector, because being realistic: 90+% of anime are adaptations of something else and manga/ln properties do tend to actually stay in ownership of the author).

>with costs ballooning 40-60% due to growing budgets in Japan and a limited number of animators in the anime industry.

One look at the budget of an anime and the compensation of an animator and these claims instantly shift to "animators finally getting tired of being abused". Even the games industry can't compared to how utterly grinded the animators are, while paid even worse to boot. That's a very deep topic to go into itself so I'll just say that the structure of the anime committee needed to die yesterday. It's a borderline cabal.

Someone wanting a deeper dive into the structure can watch this video as an introduction: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iExwO1v_V-s

Re: Sony Turns to AI to Tackle Rising Animation Costs and Animator Shortage

#30

Post by magicmicah85 »

I remember animating things years ago when I used Macromedia Shockwave. One of the first things I learned about was tweening, where you had a start frame and end frame and the software just animated the gaps for you so your animation worked. If there were software that animated whole frames with this in betweening process, I foresee that becoming the new way to do things. Hopefully software like this makes its way into open source tooling where others can take advantage of it. Maybe it even already exists by now. :)
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