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

[GiorgioG]

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

[JBits]

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.

[altdataseller]

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

[TuringNYC]

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

[tbrownaw]

How long does it take to learn? Are other jobs that draw from the same talent pool becoming more efficient?

[strangattractor]

Hayao Miyazaki's thoughts on an artificial intelligence.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ngZ0K3lWKRc&t=47s

[drivebyhooting]

Baumol cost disease

[aceazzameen]

It's 100% this.

[HackerQED]

That's right, straight to the point.

[DevScout]

Cost reduction is a major focus

[misterflibble]

lol "Tackle Rising Animation Costs"

[MattGaiser]

To say this is to argue there is never a shortage of anything.

[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

[shiroiushi]

This is great news! I look forward to seeing new Sony animated movies with the human characters having eyes on the sides of their heads, 8 fingers on their hands, and 3 legs.

[userbinator]

It's not like a lot of animated characters are realistically human anyway.

[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. :)

[deisteve]

tweening is indeed a fundamental concept in animation, and it's great to see you're nostalgic about the early days of Macromedia Shockwave.

I think you're onto something with the idea of software that can automatically animate entire frames with tweening in between. This could potentially revolutionize the way we create animations, especially for tasks like data visualization, scientific simulations, or even video game cinematics.

There are already some tools that can generate animations using tweening, such as Blender's animation tools or even some proprietary software like Adobe After Effects. However, I'm not aware of any open-source tools that can do this on a large scale.

That being said, there are some interesting projects like OpenToonz, which is an open-source 2D animation software that uses a tweening-based approach. It's not exactly what you're looking for, but it's a good starting point.

I'd love to see more open-source tools that can automate the animation process using tweening. Do you think this could be achieved using machine learning algorithms, or would it require a more traditional programming approach?

Also, have you explored any of the newer animation tools like Houdini or Nuke, which have some impressive animation capabilities? Maybe we can learn from their approaches and apply them to open-source tools

[politelemon]

If you take a look at crunchyroll today you'll see this push already happening. A flood of low quality light novel adaptations has appeared and is seemingly overtaking their front page. Light novels because there are so many now, and in one place for producers to sort by popularity rather than quality. The animation is often poor and I won't be surprised if it's already the result of assistive genai tech. The combined factors must make it simpler for then to try and see what works.

[arealaccount]

So will they be able to copyright their output?

[protocolture]

Why wouldnt they?

I mean theres been a few articles on this very site that dispel the nonsense hyped up over the Thaler case.

Its really become a meme at this point to fud about AI copyright.

[jalapenos]

Are people actually going to pay to watch AI slop though?

[GaggiX]

Yes, but people would probably not realize that it was made with significant assistance from AI.

[musicale]

It isn't made for humans anymore.

[elphinstone]

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.

[krapp]

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?

[dgfitz]

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.