@@average-wubbox-enjoyerAnd then they open it as their newest park and charge you 200 bucks per entry to stare at a bunch of miserable VFX artists and animators seemingly in their natural habitat *...* *I should be working for Disney-*
@@MuscarV2 wdym "that badly", it's literally just a singular where a plural should be (if you change "person" -> "people" it sounds fine). it's a pretty easy to make mistake
Turns out Disney is actually one of the worst customers to work for as a CGI artist company. They demand complete re-work of stuff in no time, don't understand the idea that good CGI takes time, etc. And with increasingly absurd demands and changes of direction on a dime the CGI quality has gone down and down and down.
This goes back to the very early days of Disney when Walt was determined to prevent 2d animators from unionizing. Side note: this is actually why people thought he was antisemitic since a lot of the animators were Jewish
I wonder why animators In general seem to get abused by large companies it happens in the anime industry it happens in Hollywood and I wouldn't be surprised if it happened in cartoons what is it about animation that makes it so easy to mistreat your workers?
it's a pretty notorious thing. I graduated design college and wanted to be an animator. A lot of people also tried to convince me that VFX was an 'up and coming' field and very good. I spent like 5 years wondering what to do after I found out that a) designers are paid like sh1t and the industry is dying b) animators are paid like sh1t and made to work obscene hours c) VFX artists are paid like sh1t and there's insane competition d) Media and advertising pay well but are incredibly high stress careers. "this is a 24/7, 365 days a year job" lmao For a society that consumes entertainment so ravenously, I always found it amusing how the people who paly such a big role in making games, movies, animation and film are often treated badly and most people will scoff at you because you don't have a 'real' job like programming and law. I'm not complaining, just thought i'd shed some light on your question. Actually talented people are in high demand and will make money, and some people do make a great salaries. *that's* why it's so highly sought after. But problem is, most people lack the skills or guidance or opportunities to get big. It's like any other aspect of entertainment. *To answer your question in short:* animation, VFX game design etc have become the new computer science. Due to the sheer explosion of anime, games and CGI in the last decade, a huge chunk of creative people want that job. But, since these are such new fields, most colleges and universities are really far behind. A vast majority of places which teach this stuff will teach you only the basics and fail to prepare you for the industry. High competition and lack of talent, skills or guidance. I don't mean to sound harsh, but a lot of people in design college...really weren't cut out to be designers. They just thought it was an easy path to success if you're mildly creative. College prepares you for nothing. Plus, and this may be the biggest one: creative people aren't generally aggressive. It's sad, but most people i've ever worked with were spaced out and just wanted to do creative stuff. They just did not have the tenacity to negotiate salaries, push back against mistreatment or ask for rights. Most were just happy they were able to make some money while making art, since you grow up being told that being creative will leave you broke. So people will say "i don't care about money, I'm just happy to follow my passion". An animator said that to me. The idea that creative people are not smart enough for a 'real' job or haven't gone to college also persists. Hiring managers, at times, have been surprised that I was actually a good student in school and actually have a bachelor's degree. It also does not help either, when our people live up to this stereotype. I've known some animators and artists who did not go to college, and you could tell. They lacked professionalism, they did not treat it like a real job, but more like a school project, and were taken advantage of accordingly. They were talented too, but at some point you have to throw out the weed and actually start thinking of it like an adult. Spaced out, weeded out dudes running animation studios, working 20 hours a day and leading those working under them into unimaginably hellish conditions. Yeah, no thanks. It's a crazy field. Crazy, assertive, hyper creative people with no sense of caution succeed. But most are not like that. All creative fields are: high risk, high reward. This means you have to put in consistent work without much pay for a long time, and then suddenly it'll pay off. But a lot of people seem to wish it was a desk job instead, so they'd rather just mass produce low quality work for a small, monthly paycheck instead. In that case, they really should have taken a desk job. You have to go the whole distance. This means unionizing. This means asking for more money. This means becoming so good that you can't be replaced. This means demanding respect, and also being respectable. I'm glad they're doing this.
Honest to goodness, AI art always looks so same-y that I much prefer this cute, polygonal snow man with two dot eyes and a cone nose over the hyper realistic one. It’s honest jank over artificial jank
This makes me even more confused about how guardians of the galaxy 3 cgi was actually great. Did Disney give the artists more time? More money? I have no clue.
James Gun personally had more creative and execute control over GotG, since he was the one to really create their current interpretation. This did not and will not happen with the other stuff coming out.
Allegedly the big issue is that artists are constantly asked to revise work they’ve already completed, at the digression of the director/producers working in post production. Considering how much control James Gunn retained and the strong vision he’s always had, he likely knew what he wanted from the CGI department and wrote/shot around constraints in order to get what he wanted the first time.
James Gunn had a vision for what the effects should look like from the beginning, the artist knew from the very beginning what they all were working towards. This is not how most Marvel movies work, they have the artist make as many effects as possible without any direction or vision whatsoever, just explosions and crumbling buildings and stuff, and when they finally get an script they pick and choose which pre-made VFXs will go in the movie and have the artist's rework them if necessary. Marvel CGI has become so bland because the artist need to make shots that would go well in a great number of different movies, they need to be as versatile as possible and if they are like that they can't be unique and if they are not unique that makes them forgettable. Marvel's cutting room floor must look like a war zone with the number of casualties it had over the years, so much stuff we don't even know about.
I have an anecdote from someone I know who works at one of those VFX offices it's that they work so hard on that fight at the beginning of guardians of the Galaxy 2 with the tentacle monster only to find out that the editor went in your final production and just blurred all the action 🤣😂🤣😂
@JSSMVCJR2.1 Cynicism = Acknowledging bad things ever. Disney is almost single-handedly responsible for the complete destruction and rebuilding of copyright law entirely in their favor and to the detriment of every American Citizen.
That's what I find funny about AI. People will call 300 completely different images in the space of 10 seconds an "animation" but lose their minds if the framerate or resolution drops for a nanosecond.
I think it's more the fact that AI can draw what you ask, so it feels magic. I lost interest playing with it and I don't think artists are going anywhere tho
Are you in the right place? That's more true of gaming, than movies. UHD resolutions are largely marketing and many movies still release in 2k (part of why 8k is a joke). Also the frame rate in movies 24fps. There have been pushes for higher frame rates and TV can generate frames to make the motion feel more smooth. But in general you don't hear much about frame rates and resolutions in the movie industry.
The VFX "industry", Lucasfilm, and Spielberg, broke one of my dear friends. He tried to warn people about this in 2016 and was run out of the business. I can't even talk to him about Star Wars, shit, anything even the old old stuff, it just triggers him. He knew seven, eight years ago this shit was going to go down.
This has always been a persistent issue with the field. It's a tedious artform. I only began to notice it back in 2013ish when youtube animators were first hit in their livelihood so to speak, when watch time became king in the algorithm. But it goes back further. Nothing has really been done about the sustainability of this and business has just continued as usual while exploitation has continued to rise. This is the culmination of that. Ultimately something along the lines of puppetry motion capture mixed with AI style transfer will be the most practical way to look do special/visual effects, with touch up artists tweaking things here and there for that dialed in control.
@@himan12345678 I wish I could go back to 1994, and talk to him, as he slaved over his Video Toaster+Lightwave making a demo reel to get a job at Lucasfilm or just about anywhere out west, with full knowledge of what went down, and warn him. Those early 1990s were halcyon days though...renting time on an SGI to do certain effects, until he could scrape together enough to buy one. God, I envied him! A real piece of SGI hardware! He and his wife are absolutely wonderful people, so dear to my heart, but what happened in 2016/17 wounded them so, so badly. I wish we were still in touch. Sorry, this is waxing personal.
@@himan12345678 Huh... Maybe that's why Rooster teeth insists on keeping episodes shorter like everyone did back on the '00s internet... Is to lower time needed to animate... which also means their stuff is hyper dense with content. And because their are 5th place in the streaming wars they don't need to worry about watch time just if a series did well on views or not.
I remember seeing that Love & Thunder scene in theaters and I just couldn't believe what the hell I was seeing. The entire movie is a dumpster fire, but I'm glad my friend paid for my ticket
The issue is at the end of the day, why do we have a system that punishes the average worker for technological progress. Having to do less work and have more free time to engage in your own creative passions should be the benefit of AI and technology. But instead we have wealthy executives laying off workers and forcing them into poverty and financial precarity
Because the elites only care about their own profits. Noble sentiments but if you didn't speak out about manufacturing jobs moving to China/Mexico/Eastern Europe effecting working/middle class folks in the now forgotten parts of Western world, then your display of empathy now rings hollow. As the host said, "learn to code" is what they said back then.
Infinite, unsustainable growth, the shareholders demand it, the ceo wants a bigger wage for sitting on his ass, so cutting jobs is the first thing they do, and then cost cut what made your products special in the first place.
I think one of the biggest things that's very obvious but never talked about by *anyone* is Sonic the Hedgehog. The original CGI design was teased and posted I'm pretty sure well over a year in advance, and notice how it's only trailer shots that are animated with the human-toothed blue dyed guinea pig. While I'm not saying they didn't animate the entire movie with it first, it's probably the case that those were isolated to drum up hype like "look at how bad this design is." After all, Hollywood is notorious for a "no publicity is bad publicity" mantra. Anyway, whether they animated the entire movie with the original Sonic or not, imagine the crunch time for meticulously having to reanimate all the original shots with the newer softer Sonic, which was revealed much closer to the actual movie's release. TL;DR, VFX Artist abuse is real, it shouldn't take Disney being Disney to figure that out. Sonic's original movie design and the backpedaling by Paramount, real or fabricated, is an example of that.
About it being fabricated. There was a shit ton of marketing, VFX stand-ins and what not using the old design. Not to mention an old poster eith an even earlier design. Meaning all that just for the sake of it would be a massive waste of money, people just gotta accept companies are out of touch a lot of the time.
The observation about the undo button and how AI takes that control away fucking slaps. I'm a hobbyist writer and i keep hearing about chatgpt's potential to help with making copy, but so often when i go to use it it's fucking boring and annoying cuz i'd rather just make the story myself!
Bing Bot only knows what the internet knows and really is more like a smart friend who seen every UA-cam video and read every wiki then a job replacer. Like for my many creative pursuits I only ask him stuff I can't find all that easly and it works so well!
AI art has only seemed like a different angle look at stuff. It can do landscapes. But all of them look the absolute same. Even Midjourney seems to always make a circle in like half the stuff it makes, I just attribute generated works immediately to it...
@@AshnSilvercorp As a fledgling game designer, Midjourney has helped me immensely at conveying an idea that I could not fathomably draw. Like, I've tried drawing, and most art, but it looks like a toddler made it, and any details or nuances are completely irrelevant. Midjourney allows me to get the basics on the paper for a character, scene, or idea. From there, playtesting makes immersive sense, instead of asking "What is a Qilu?" They focus on the rules, mechanics, etc. Once I've got the game functional, then I can look at my budget and start to compile actual artists who can make sense of the AI art and develop a nuanced take on it. AI art allowed me to make a dream come far closer to reality than I ever thought possible
@@AshnSilvercorp Exactly, many VFX artists are going to use AI in the future, not to DO their job, but to provide a framework in a much shorter amount of time
Not just in Hollywood but just in general entertainment CGI can be amazing. One of my favorite examples of great CGI in animation is Land of the Lusterous
I think most people don't realize how long these projects take. It's a shame you didn't include the time you spent on Husky because I imagine it was most of a day if not two. Scale that up to big budget CGI and most films have tens of thousands of hours poured into them. And that's without re-shoots.
Vfx unions have been trying to get started for as long as i’ve been in the industry (at least 6 years). It never got traction because people were always worried about getting blacklisted
the professional category of vfx work emerged when Neoliberalism (reagan-thatcher) was already the mainstream ideology, so social entitites like unions were on the decline and being extinguished if possible. Actors were around long before that, and socialism-communism-leftism was much stronger in the early 20th century and post-29 it was the keynesian welfare state , also favourable for unions and state regulation of private capital.
Those Mickeys that you had throughout the video were so creepy. I assume that they were made with AI and they spooked me so much each time one popped up.
CG and practical FX should work together and both kinds of FX artists shouldn't be frowned upon or underpaid for doing their jobs in utilizing FX techniques to the fullest.
Trying to use ai to replace people is like throwing hammers at a pile of wood expecting to get a house. Trying to use ai to replace specific processes or steps under the guidance of the creative is giving the construction crew nailguns.
Artist really deserve a solid union just as strong as the writers guild and SAG, considering how much they carry blockbuster movies it’s insane to me that we don’t get royalties which has lead to a lot of studios shutting down after wildly successful films or shows come out. I think a lot of people are dismissive of artists being paid fairly because they don’t see it as work or as skilled labor. But the amount of work that goes into even mediocre CGI is insane. The knowledge and skill required for modern VFX cannot be overstated. Have you ever sculpted realistic blend shapes for basically every pose? Idk it’s frustrating when people that don’t even consider how skilled and how much effort the people behind these projects are and put in. Also AI isn’t going to relevant at all in this discussion if it keeps going down it’s current trajectory. Even for stuff like concept art or backgrounds or any small part. It’s best use in the future would be a supplemental tool, ie coloring frames in 2D animation making and better optimizing UVs or getting a better first pass at weigh painting and rigging. Stuff that would save time in the pipeline but not something that’d really be on screen. Because no matter how good it does get their are decisions it just can’t make. Like using backgrounds as an example, think about some of your favorite cartoons as a kid, think about the shapes of those houses, those small details like what graffiti did they put on the walls, how clean is it, what pictures does X character have in their locker, what does the way Y characters room look like say about them? What’ve they left out. There are all these small details that while we as viewers don’t consciously recognize or think of, but were deliberate choices that still influenced how we saw those worlds and the people in them. And you need someone with lived experience making those small choices, hiding those call backs and Easter eggs, deciding why X persons room looks like that. Idk I have more to say about Ai but tbh, I just don’t think of it as much of a threat anymore. Companies will use it, I won’t work for them, people won’t vibe with Ai generated content. And either it’ll die out or all our content will become exclusively mediocre eye trash and I’ll be out of a job.
its gonna be like that one onion short where they said that marvel has just given up making cgi and the characters are just gonna move around a giant green room
I would think the arguments against AI would be more defensive than offensive. Its not that big companies would fear their ability to make profitable works, its that they would lose control over otherwise protectable elements of their works. For instance, if the main villain in an animated movie is completely AI generated, there is a fair argument that although the movie is copyrighted, the villain character is not and other people can freely use the character in their own works with the company being powerless to stop them.
Copyrights and trademarks are not the same thing. Copyrights cover the reproduction of physical artifacts. Trademarks cover the use of intellectual property. A villain's design and identifying character elements would fall under a trademark. The actual movie the villain is from would be covered under copyright. I don't know what the law says about AI-generated character designs being trademarked. But if AI art can't be copyrighted, I'm not sure it would be allowed to be trademarked either.
Really great video my guy! I've been working in Technical Art for about a year now and and the shift in the industry already is massive, but instead of losing jobs, people's jobs seem to be changing. E.g. Most our concept artists are moving into storyboarding and production. And most relevant to this video, a lot more people are moving into CGI from these other fields.
It’s crazy that the Pinkerton are still around. Seriously Magic the Gathering hired them to seize some unreleased cards they accidentally gave to someone instead of the cards they ordered.
hopefully it comes full circle and we can have hand drawn animation back. Stuff like the Thief and the Cobbler are so visually pleasing. Its hard to compare to anything created recently
That wouldn’t solve the underlying issue. Disney was infamous for overworking their traditional artists well before CGI was anything more than an outlandish sci-fi writer’s idea.
Hand Drawn animation never left and its still being used in stuff whether or not you consider those "real" hand drawn, beggars can't be choosers. And Hand Drawn 2d animation can mean anything from digital /flash, rigs. Not everything or everyone can practice older methods. And Thief and cobbler was fine, but the original director was a pain in the butt perfectionist who couldn't make the film in 20+ years and constantly kept firing artists left and right, many works of now can exceed and surpass his stuff.
I just found your music because I liked the end credits beat and OH MY GOD this dude could 100% only do that and be successful it’s insanely good. Your Spotify album is nuts
I just hope that these unionization efforts happen and something good comes of it. It doesn't seem like anyone really knows exactly what direction this is all heading in, which is why I'm happy that the industry is finally standing up to make things happen. Marvel and Disney in particular I have a very mixed relationship with; I was there for the midnight release of Endgame and everything after has just been bittersweet memories and mediocre products that really only serve the express purpose of allowing my brain to shut off when I watch it. Now, because of my solidarity with the writer's strike and other adjacent movements, I can't really have that without feeling some semblance of guilt for doing so. I would love for one of two things to happen: either Disney crashes and burns so I can get some amount of closure out of what feels like a decaying relationship, or a deal is struck that allows production to continue whilst also giving writers, cgi artists, ect. The ability to make what they love and were trained to and be able to live off of it, y'know, as a job.
I hope the writers and Vfx union will get everything they want, because all the added expense will force companies like Disney to be more careful when deciding what movies to make.
Just an artist perspective it can be really discouraging to learn actual animation and art now especially with the use of AI which big companies are firing real artists and sinking money into AI so they don’t have to pay people… we are not slim chillin’
I agree unions are contentious. In this case a union is good to negotiate fair pay from studios already able to deny hiring them. Some unions are just as corrupt as bad leadership but most of the time it's really bad to be anti-union. AI isn't replacing well thought out effects for their high budget movies, it's still a novelty and can barely write. Better yet you need a human handler more so with effects than a quick script and an editor. Algorithms are getting better which are a useful tool for a static image or a model, it aint doing the whole scene.
I welcome them to IASTE. I have been a member since 2021, working in lighting control. Before that I worked in live entertainment lighting for 20 years. We work with vfx a good bit on set. They deserve more, and the IA will help them.
For a generation raised on the internet, a community that enjoys reusing and reposting and modifying content, it’s embarrassing to see how many people believe that copyright works can never involve AI, as well as believe that AI will replace these vfx artists and writers. But what’s even weirder here is the fact that there are also a large subset of people that despise vfx/cgi/whatever, all because it isnt some $10000000 hand drawn film.
What's sad is that AI animations (especially those 'dancing' videos) are becoming a staple kind of style, like people making bad phone videos in portrait mode.
I'm surprised you didn't bring up that video from a few years ago, it's a video where CGI people talk about the industry and admit that there are only 7 clients, if 1 client is unhappy all of them retract and that can bankrupt the CGI company. I forgot the title but there is a part in it about the titanic where they had to redo a whole scene because the director wasn't happy with the seagulls. Very eye opening video into the Hollywood CGI situation right there.
I actually have an answer for "What will replace A.I artists in 20 years?" other forms of entertainment. the market will become so bland and over saturated that nobody will want to consume it anymore.
Union jobs pay on average 20% more than non union jobs. Higher unionization also raises the floor for wages in the industry because non-union shops have to at least pretend to compete. Not to mention unions have better benefits. I’m a union worker and my health insurance(medical, vision, dental) is 100% employer covered. I don’t pay a dime. Plus I’m building a pension so I’ll actually be able to retire
To expand a bit on AI and VFX. Control is indeed the huge thing. And that applies to concept arts and models too. AI generated stuff, while good in isolation, can't generally take into account things like actual location specifics, DOP/Directors artdep visions, etc. At the very least you have to chug through hundreds if not thousands of iterations before you get what you want with AI and this, realistically not going to change (because diffusion models are inherently inprecise). So you'll always have the artist there chugging through prompts, refining, retouching etc. It's ultimately not that different from current pipeline. It's not even faster per say. Level of quality is higher, but it doesn't necessarily speed the job up. Most of vfx/cgi job time is spent in iterations, addressing feedback, squashing bugs anyway. And Ai not going to change that. It might make chugging out new versions faster, but all it does in real world - creates choice paralysis for the creative who then have no idea what they want and keep asking for more version. The cycle lasts until the deadline. Always. Be deadline tomorrow or in a year. And then finally even if/when AI becomes good - using it already isn't all that much easy than a professional software. Sure you can learn it with chatgpt help. But you could do it before with youtube and Google too, yet not many ppl did bother. Because learning to use Ai, even if it's all capable and advanced, going to be a skill. Not just "prompt engineering" but weight adjustments, custom models, heck, even just putting in the right resolution for it to render at is smt that no studio exec knows a first thing about. So, to cap. VFX jobs are as safe as ever and no lvl of generative Ai advancement going to change that unless they figure out a general Ai
Humans will always be part of the cycle. The question really is, how many are needed. Efforts that took a few hundred people could one day be done with a dozen or even one. Honestly, I think that's a net good, but getting there might be messy.
It really irks me that ppl just see the current paradigm of diffusion and transformer based models and their limitations and apply those to AI as a whole for some reason. Neural rendering has much much more potential than diffusion models. You get PBR quality for the "price" of matcaps. And neural rendering has been around longer than diffusion. Diffusion is technically at its best in earlier iterations like DallE 1, when it was most creative. Diffusion isn't good for refined ideas or details. But it has its place in a system or workflow. It's like that spark of creativity before you then form it into a concrete idea that you can then work to bring into fruition.
From the outside looking in I've seen it compared to what cgi and digiatal did to hand drawn, 2d animation back in the 90s. A new skillset was needed for it to be faster, and the technology was initially too rough to replicate the fine details.
On top of the threat of AI, its an extremely dark time for the VFX industry, mass layoff and projects falling due to the domino effect the writers and actors strikes are are affecting everyone. Its great to see videos like this to help remind people the hard work that often goes unnoticed. Thank you
The same goes for video game developers as well. I feel like they are even less appreciated than animators. At least animators GET awards, programmers have to deal with the same working conditions and then are blamed when a game is bad because of a tight deadline set by their bosses or because of predatory microtransactions put into the game because of their bosses. You think most game developers went into the industry because they wanted to make money? No, it’s because they wanted to make fun games! So when they’re blamed for a game being underwhelming when it’s the fault of their greedy boss, it always gets me mad. Yes, this is a lead-in for me to tell people to _stop saying GameFreak’s coding is bad and that the programmers are lazy._ The *higher-ups* dismiss a game’s quality to push it out the door quickly, hungry for short-term money and profit. Don’t blame the employees. But SV is only the worst recent example of this phenomena, by far not the only one. There are so, so many examples of this that it makes me think people have shut their brain off
I have no opinion about uninions in general but when writers and actors started striking i remember thinking that if anyone deserve to be threated better it's CGI artists
I think you've nailed the point I've been trying to take through so many smooth brain's heads for the past few months with that last couple minutes; Yeah, AI can make art, it can make movies, it can make scripts. But until you can control and edit every aspect of the end product, until you get the same tools to use on the AI generation that you get when you make something manually, it's not gonna replace jack shit, because whatever it produces will be shit.
Technically, from what I hear, Disney is just the producers and commissioners up top who ask for their products to be delivered on time and on schedule, Marvel is the one who says yes to it and crunches and pulls around their VFX artists like Rag Dolls. As for the A.I. piece, don't underestimate what a motivated and dedicated intelligent mind can accomplish. Someway, somehow, there's going to become a rift between Artists and Corporate companies and once that happens the Artists will be glad to no longer work for anyone but themselves.
On a strictly personal level, I just find it sad that technological development keeps trending towards what (to me) is less satisfying work. Manipulating a model on a computer screen is less fun than drawing frames by hand, and tweaking AI images to look the way you want them to is less fun than creating images from your own mind. There’s just something about creating tangible things from scratch, ineffective as it might be, that is particularly attractive. And considering stop-motion (extremely time-inefficient but also incredibly tangible) is still being made, I suspect I’m not alone.
How did the artists escape their cells to complain in the first place? As a Disney shareholder I'm pissed!
now im just imagining all the disney artists in literal zoo enclosures (tbh this seems like something they'd do)
Have you considered electrifying their cages? That could help.
@@average-wubbox-enjoyerAnd then they open it as their newest park and charge you 200 bucks per entry to stare at a bunch of miserable VFX artists and animators seemingly in their natural habitat
*...*
*I should be working for Disney-*
Let’s motivate them with a controlled shock
He already said: they stopped using cell animation
No surprise, they seem like the only person to be actually putting effort into disney products, and they've been carrying Disney for the past decade
"Like the only person"....
How did you mess up that badly?
@@MuscarV2 How did u get such a boring life for a typo to be worth commenting about
You know that's a lie
@@MuscarV2It’s a simple mistake. Take your Grammar Nazism to Grammarny.
@@MuscarV2 wdym "that badly", it's literally just a singular where a plural should be (if you change "person" -> "people" it sounds fine). it's a pretty easy to make mistake
Turns out Disney is actually one of the worst customers to work for as a CGI artist company. They demand complete re-work of stuff in no time, don't understand the idea that good CGI takes time, etc. And with increasingly absurd demands and changes of direction on a dime the CGI quality has gone down and down and down.
This goes back to the very early days of Disney when Walt was determined to prevent 2d animators from unionizing. Side note: this is actually why people thought he was antisemitic since a lot of the animators were Jewish
@@Gnomezonbaconshame the movies he makes are cr*p
@@GnomezonbaconWhen you care about your things and not the money!
The money comes after you put your all into your work!!
What about the value of having Disney on your resume? That’s payment in of itself (I’m being sarcastic)
@@radicalfishstickstm8563 Payment in exposure is just as good as paper money!!(I’m being sarcastic)
I wonder why animators In general seem to get abused by large companies it happens in the anime industry it happens in Hollywood and I wouldn't be surprised if it happened in cartoons what is it about animation that makes it so easy to mistreat your workers?
Faceless
Maybe it's cause it's a job no one "needs," but unlike sports and celebrities, people don't follow the artists but the studios?
it's a pretty notorious thing. I graduated design college and wanted to be an animator. A lot of people also tried to convince me that VFX was an 'up and coming' field and very good. I spent like 5 years wondering what to do after I found out that
a) designers are paid like sh1t and the industry is dying
b) animators are paid like sh1t and made to work obscene hours
c) VFX artists are paid like sh1t and there's insane competition
d) Media and advertising pay well but are incredibly high stress careers. "this is a 24/7, 365 days a year job" lmao
For a society that consumes entertainment so ravenously, I always found it amusing how the people who paly such a big role in making games, movies, animation and film are often treated badly and most people will scoff at you because you don't have a 'real' job like programming and law.
I'm not complaining, just thought i'd shed some light on your question. Actually talented people are in high demand and will make money, and some people do make a great salaries. *that's* why it's so highly sought after. But problem is, most people lack the skills or guidance or opportunities to get big. It's like any other aspect of entertainment.
*To answer your question in short:* animation, VFX game design etc have become the new computer science. Due to the sheer explosion of anime, games and CGI in the last decade, a huge chunk of creative people want that job. But, since these are such new fields, most colleges and universities are really far behind. A vast majority of places which teach this stuff will teach you only the basics and fail to prepare you for the industry.
High competition and lack of talent, skills or guidance. I don't mean to sound harsh, but a lot of people in design college...really weren't cut out to be designers. They just thought it was an easy path to success if you're mildly creative. College prepares you for nothing.
Plus, and this may be the biggest one: creative people aren't generally aggressive. It's sad, but most people i've ever worked with were spaced out and just wanted to do creative stuff. They just did not have the tenacity to negotiate salaries, push back against mistreatment or ask for rights. Most were just happy they were able to make some money while making art, since you grow up being told that being creative will leave you broke. So people will say "i don't care about money, I'm just happy to follow my passion". An animator said that to me.
The idea that creative people are not smart enough for a 'real' job or haven't gone to college also persists. Hiring managers, at times, have been surprised that I was actually a good student in school and actually have a bachelor's degree. It also does not help either, when our people live up to this stereotype. I've known some animators and artists who did not go to college, and you could tell. They lacked professionalism, they did not treat it like a real job, but more like a school project, and were taken advantage of accordingly. They were talented too, but at some point you have to throw out the weed and actually start thinking of it like an adult. Spaced out, weeded out dudes running animation studios, working 20 hours a day and leading those working under them into unimaginably hellish conditions. Yeah, no thanks.
It's a crazy field. Crazy, assertive, hyper creative people with no sense of caution succeed. But most are not like that.
All creative fields are: high risk, high reward. This means you have to put in consistent work without much pay for a long time, and then suddenly it'll pay off. But a lot of people seem to wish it was a desk job instead, so they'd rather just mass produce low quality work for a small, monthly paycheck instead. In that case, they really should have taken a desk job.
You have to go the whole distance. This means unionizing. This means asking for more money. This means becoming so good that you can't be replaced. This means demanding respect, and also being respectable. I'm glad they're doing this.
Workers who are passionate about their work are unfortunately less likely to quit.
Please use commas...
That Husky the Snowman work you did was actually really charming, even if you'd call it 'amateur' or unimpressive.
Especially compared to the AI versions, those shorts are what I imagine a snowman themed horror movie during a bad trip would be like.
Yeah, it’s impressive. It’s hilarious looking too.
It gives me very early Pixar vibes
Honest to goodness, AI art always looks so same-y that I much prefer this cute, polygonal snow man with two dot eyes and a cone nose over the hyper realistic one. It’s honest jank over artificial jank
People that know nothing of 3D are easy to impress.
And that fills me with hope 😅
This makes me even more confused about how guardians of the galaxy 3 cgi was actually great. Did Disney give the artists more time? More money? I have no clue.
James Gun personally had more creative and execute control over GotG, since he was the one to really create their current interpretation. This did not and will not happen with the other stuff coming out.
Allegedly the big issue is that artists are constantly asked to revise work they’ve already completed, at the digression of the director/producers working in post production. Considering how much control James Gunn retained and the strong vision he’s always had, he likely knew what he wanted from the CGI department and wrote/shot around constraints in order to get what he wanted the first time.
James Gunn had a vision for what the effects should look like from the beginning, the artist knew from the very beginning what they all were working towards.
This is not how most Marvel movies work, they have the artist make as many effects as possible without any direction or vision whatsoever, just explosions and crumbling buildings and stuff, and when they finally get an script they pick and choose which pre-made VFXs will go in the movie and have the artist's rework them if necessary. Marvel CGI has become so bland because the artist need to make shots that would go well in a great number of different movies, they need to be as versatile as possible and if they are like that they can't be unique and if they are not unique that makes them forgettable.
Marvel's cutting room floor must look like a war zone with the number of casualties it had over the years, so much stuff we don't even know about.
I have an anecdote from someone I know who works at one of those VFX offices it's that they work so hard on that fight at the beginning of guardians of the Galaxy 2 with the tentacle monster only to find out that the editor went in your final production and just blurred all the action 🤣😂🤣😂
All of these reasons actually make lots of sense! Another reason that I love James Gunn.
Another note on the 'ai creations arent copyrightable' - if anyone is going to change that, its gonna be disney the king of copyright shenanigans
That mouse is still theirs despite turning 100 years old, that should tell you everything.
What a couple of cynicists we have here.
@@JSSMVCJR2.1 That's not being cynical, that's noticing the company has a pattern of behavior and stands to benefit from continuing it.
@JSSMVCJR2.1 Cynicism = Acknowledging bad things ever.
Disney is almost single-handedly responsible for the complete destruction and rebuilding of copyright law entirely in their favor and to the detriment of every American Citizen.
@@kingofhearts3185 Mickey is gonna be public domain next year
That's what I find funny about AI. People will call 300 completely different images in the space of 10 seconds an "animation" but lose their minds if the framerate or resolution drops for a nanosecond.
*inconsistent
I think it's more the fact that AI can draw what you ask, so it feels magic. I lost interest playing with it and I don't think artists are going anywhere tho
Are you in the right place? That's more true of gaming, than movies. UHD resolutions are largely marketing and many movies still release in 2k (part of why 8k is a joke). Also the frame rate in movies 24fps. There have been pushes for higher frame rates and TV can generate frames to make the motion feel more smooth. But in general you don't hear much about frame rates and resolutions in the movie industry.
If you're comparing movies to games it's apples and oranges because motion blur and what not make 24fps feel more smooth than it actually is.
@vcxvcvxbthe chronically online are less human than the AI replacing them.
The VFX "industry", Lucasfilm, and Spielberg, broke one of my dear friends. He tried to warn people about this in 2016 and was run out of the business. I can't even talk to him about Star Wars, shit, anything even the old old stuff, it just triggers him. He knew seven, eight years ago this shit was going to go down.
This has always been a persistent issue with the field. It's a tedious artform. I only began to notice it back in 2013ish when youtube animators were first hit in their livelihood so to speak, when watch time became king in the algorithm. But it goes back further. Nothing has really been done about the sustainability of this and business has just continued as usual while exploitation has continued to rise. This is the culmination of that. Ultimately something along the lines of puppetry motion capture mixed with AI style transfer will be the most practical way to look do special/visual effects, with touch up artists tweaking things here and there for that dialed in control.
@@himan12345678 I wish I could go back to 1994, and talk to him, as he slaved over his Video Toaster+Lightwave making a demo reel to get a job at Lucasfilm or just about anywhere out west, with full knowledge of what went down, and warn him.
Those early 1990s were halcyon days though...renting time on an SGI to do certain effects, until he could scrape together enough to buy one. God, I envied him! A real piece of SGI hardware! He and his wife are absolutely wonderful people, so dear to my heart, but what happened in 2016/17 wounded them so, so badly. I wish we were still in touch.
Sorry, this is waxing personal.
@@himan12345678 Huh... Maybe that's why Rooster teeth insists on keeping episodes shorter like everyone did back on the '00s internet... Is to lower time needed to animate... which also means their stuff is hyper dense with content. And because their are 5th place in the streaming wars they don't need to worry about watch time just if a series did well on views or not.
Are you okay?
_It’s almost like…treating your VFX artists with care and compensation, tends to mean they produce good content for the film_
_Shock horror I know_
BlackRock October 3rd 16:40
Bro too far, next your going to say that calling your fans racist isn’t a great money-making strategy?
@@Rar830and after that what next? Saying that if people don't like the way you write a story they are seixst is a bad thing?
I’d be angry too if I had to animate she-hulk twerking while my unqualified colleague got the job for that one scene Thor Love & Thunder.
what scene
@@Fapey101 the one with the floating head.
I remember seeing that Love & Thunder scene in theaters and I just couldn't believe what the hell I was seeing. The entire movie is a dumpster fire, but I'm glad my friend paid for my ticket
@@GoodlyPenguinRIP that specific part of your friend's wallet. It was completely wasted
The issue is at the end of the day, why do we have a system that punishes the average worker for technological progress. Having to do less work and have more free time to engage in your own creative passions should be the benefit of AI and technology. But instead we have wealthy executives laying off workers and forcing them into poverty and financial precarity
Because the elites only care about their own profits. Noble sentiments but if you didn't speak out about manufacturing jobs moving to China/Mexico/Eastern Europe effecting working/middle class folks in the now forgotten parts of Western world, then your display of empathy now rings hollow. As the host said, "learn to code" is what they said back then.
in praise of idleness
Infinite, unsustainable growth, the shareholders demand it, the ceo wants a bigger wage for sitting on his ass, so cutting jobs is the first thing they do, and then cost cut what made your products special in the first place.
one word: *Regan*
Ai will never benefit anyone in the long run, it only adds more to the corruptive practices of those in posession of such technology
Husky the Snowman looks fucking cute and we need more of him
I think one of the biggest things that's very obvious but never talked about by *anyone* is Sonic the Hedgehog. The original CGI design was teased and posted I'm pretty sure well over a year in advance, and notice how it's only trailer shots that are animated with the human-toothed blue dyed guinea pig. While I'm not saying they didn't animate the entire movie with it first, it's probably the case that those were isolated to drum up hype like "look at how bad this design is." After all, Hollywood is notorious for a "no publicity is bad publicity" mantra. Anyway, whether they animated the entire movie with the original Sonic or not, imagine the crunch time for meticulously having to reanimate all the original shots with the newer softer Sonic, which was revealed much closer to the actual movie's release.
TL;DR, VFX Artist abuse is real, it shouldn't take Disney being Disney to figure that out. Sonic's original movie design and the backpedaling by Paramount, real or fabricated, is an example of that.
"we could have danced around a dumpster fire. Instead we got wet trash and merely walked by."
i've heard this talking about multiple times, you didn't just come up with this idea from nothing :p
And then Hotdiggitydemon came along and did a superior version of that trailer. With _2D_ animation!
A ton of people said the exact thing you did here. Years ago. When the movie came out.
About it being fabricated.
There was a shit ton of marketing, VFX stand-ins and what not using the old design.
Not to mention an old poster eith an even earlier design.
Meaning all that just for the sake of it would be a massive waste of money, people just gotta accept companies are out of touch a lot of the time.
All the unions and strikes. If people start getting fair wages and time, how are CEOs supposed to keep the other 99.999999% of money
The observation about the undo button and how AI takes that control away fucking slaps. I'm a hobbyist writer and i keep hearing about chatgpt's potential to help with making copy, but so often when i go to use it it's fucking boring and annoying cuz i'd rather just make the story myself!
Bing Bot only knows what the internet knows and really is more like a smart friend who seen every UA-cam video and read every wiki then a job replacer. Like for my many creative pursuits I only ask him stuff I can't find all that easly and it works so well!
AI art has only seemed like a different angle look at stuff. It can do landscapes. But all of them look the absolute same.
Even Midjourney seems to always make a circle in like half the stuff it makes, I just attribute generated works immediately to it...
@@AshnSilvercorp As a fledgling game designer, Midjourney has helped me immensely at conveying an idea that I could not fathomably draw. Like, I've tried drawing, and most art, but it looks like a toddler made it, and any details or nuances are completely irrelevant. Midjourney allows me to get the basics on the paper for a character, scene, or idea. From there, playtesting makes immersive sense, instead of asking "What is a Qilu?" They focus on the rules, mechanics, etc. Once I've got the game functional, then I can look at my budget and start to compile actual artists who can make sense of the AI art and develop a nuanced take on it. AI art allowed me to make a dream come far closer to reality than I ever thought possible
@@edwardsantiago9109 and that's how I thought it would stabilize. Not as a replacement, but an efficiency tool for making certain things happen.
@@AshnSilvercorp Exactly, many VFX artists are going to use AI in the future, not to DO their job, but to provide a framework in a much shorter amount of time
Not just in Hollywood but just in general entertainment CGI can be amazing. One of my favorite examples of great CGI in animation is Land of the Lusterous
I think most people don't realize how long these projects take. It's a shame you didn't include the time you spent on Husky because I imagine it was most of a day if not two. Scale that up to big budget CGI and most films have tens of thousands of hours poured into them. And that's without re-shoots.
Solidarity Forever mate, good on em for the union.
Im wondering why the VFX people werent unionized in the first place.
Because many vfx people work for small companies and only get work if they get contracts from big studios.
Also, vfx started to become big when there was a downturn and more crackdowns on unions, at least in the states
Vfx unions have been trying to get started for as long as i’ve been in the industry (at least 6 years). It never got traction because people were always worried about getting blacklisted
the professional category of vfx work emerged when Neoliberalism (reagan-thatcher) was already the mainstream ideology, so social entitites like unions were on the decline and being extinguished if possible. Actors were around long before that, and socialism-communism-leftism was much stronger in the early 20th century and post-29 it was the keynesian welfare state , also favourable for unions and state regulation of private capital.
I thought it was because studios would just go overseas and get workers there.
I like how the Mickey in thumbnail resembles MickMick and True Mickey from the Five Nights At Treasure Island series.
True
As a 3D animator this is very comforting
Husky the snowman needs his own video
Those Mickeys that you had throughout the video were so creepy. I assume that they were made with AI and they spooked me so much each time one popped up.
CG and practical FX should work together and both kinds of FX artists shouldn't be frowned upon or underpaid for doing their jobs in utilizing FX techniques to the fullest.
I love how Husky the Snowman bounces to the music. :)
"Husky the snowman", best short film of the year.
Trying to use ai to replace people is like throwing hammers at a pile of wood expecting to get a house.
Trying to use ai to replace specific processes or steps under the guidance of the creative is giving the construction crew nailguns.
Art always seems to be under valued but is one of the most important parts of a film.
Artist really deserve a solid union just as strong as the writers guild and SAG, considering how much they carry blockbuster movies it’s insane to me that we don’t get royalties which has lead to a lot of studios shutting down after wildly successful films or shows come out. I think a lot of people are dismissive of artists being paid fairly because they don’t see it as work or as skilled labor. But the amount of work that goes into even mediocre CGI is insane. The knowledge and skill required for modern VFX cannot be overstated. Have you ever sculpted realistic blend shapes for basically every pose? Idk it’s frustrating when people that don’t even consider how skilled and how much effort the people behind these projects are and put in.
Also AI isn’t going to relevant at all in this discussion if it keeps going down it’s current trajectory. Even for stuff like concept art or backgrounds or any small part. It’s best use in the future would be a supplemental tool, ie coloring frames in 2D animation making and better optimizing UVs or getting a better first pass at weigh painting and rigging. Stuff that would save time in the pipeline but not something that’d really be on screen. Because no matter how good it does get their are decisions it just can’t make. Like using backgrounds as an example, think about some of your favorite cartoons as a kid, think about the shapes of those houses, those small details like what graffiti did they put on the walls, how clean is it, what pictures does X character have in their locker, what does the way Y characters room look like say about them? What’ve they left out. There are all these small details that while we as viewers don’t consciously recognize or think of, but were deliberate choices that still influenced how we saw those worlds and the people in them. And you need someone with lived experience making those small choices, hiding those call backs and Easter eggs, deciding why X persons room looks like that. Idk I have more to say about Ai but tbh, I just don’t think of it as much of a threat anymore. Companies will use it, I won’t work for them, people won’t vibe with Ai generated content. And either it’ll die out or all our content will become exclusively mediocre eye trash and I’ll be out of a job.
"Whos gonna replace the AI artists" is such a fun question
its gonna be like that one onion short where they said that marvel has just given up making cgi and the characters are just gonna move around a giant green room
I would think the arguments against AI would be more defensive than offensive. Its not that big companies would fear their ability to make profitable works, its that they would lose control over otherwise protectable elements of their works. For instance, if the main villain in an animated movie is completely AI generated, there is a fair argument that although the movie is copyrighted, the villain character is not and other people can freely use the character in their own works with the company being powerless to stop them.
Copyrights and trademarks are not the same thing. Copyrights cover the reproduction of physical artifacts. Trademarks cover the use of intellectual property.
A villain's design and identifying character elements would fall under a trademark. The actual movie the villain is from would be covered under copyright.
I don't know what the law says about AI-generated character designs being trademarked. But if AI art can't be copyrighted, I'm not sure it would be allowed to be trademarked either.
Really great video my guy! I've been working in Technical Art for about a year now and and the shift in the industry already is massive, but instead of losing jobs, people's jobs seem to be changing. E.g. Most our concept artists are moving into storyboarding and production. And most relevant to this video, a lot more people are moving into CGI from these other fields.
It’s crazy that the Pinkerton are still around. Seriously Magic the Gathering hired them to seize some unreleased cards they accidentally gave to someone instead of the cards they ordered.
8:39 Time stamping for artistic masterpiece of the long time channel staple, husky the snowman.
Disney needs to wait in line, I'm pretty sure that Wizards of the Coast/Hasbro and the president have the Pinkerton's next.
hopefully it comes full circle and we can have hand drawn animation back. Stuff like the Thief and the Cobbler are so visually pleasing. Its hard to compare to anything created recently
Have you seen Lackadaisy?
That wouldn’t solve the underlying issue. Disney was infamous for overworking their traditional artists well before CGI was anything more than an outlandish sci-fi writer’s idea.
Hand Drawn animation never left and its still being used in stuff whether or not you consider those "real" hand drawn, beggars can't be choosers.
And Hand Drawn 2d animation can mean anything from digital /flash, rigs. Not everything or everyone can practice older methods.
And Thief and cobbler was fine, but the original director was a pain in the butt perfectionist who couldn't make the film in 20+ years and constantly kept firing artists left and right, many works of now can exceed and surpass his stuff.
Who's gonna replace the ai artists in 20 year? The all consuming void of course!
I just found your music because I liked the end credits beat and OH MY GOD this dude could 100% only do that and be successful it’s insanely good. Your Spotify album is nuts
Ah, I remember making a snowman in Blender. Never animated it past 'translate from A to B', but it was fun.
I just hope that these unionization efforts happen and something good comes of it. It doesn't seem like anyone really knows exactly what direction this is all heading in, which is why I'm happy that the industry is finally standing up to make things happen.
Marvel and Disney in particular I have a very mixed relationship with; I was there for the midnight release of Endgame and everything after has just been bittersweet memories and mediocre products that really only serve the express purpose of allowing my brain to shut off when I watch it. Now, because of my solidarity with the writer's strike and other adjacent movements, I can't really have that without feeling some semblance of guilt for doing so. I would love for one of two things to happen: either Disney crashes and burns so I can get some amount of closure out of what feels like a decaying relationship, or a deal is struck that allows production to continue whilst also giving writers, cgi artists, ect. The ability to make what they love and were trained to and be able to live off of it, y'know, as a job.
I hope the writers and Vfx union will get everything they want, because all the added expense will force companies like Disney to be more careful when deciding what movies to make.
I love husky now and your animation was adorable. A million thumbs up to how much I was laughing at that part. The music was really funny too
Ya know. My one take away from this video
I want that dumpster fire figurine. I need that
@7:11 Corncob-pipe, clothing button, two lumps of coal... No skeletons! (I totally approve of calling three jigglebones a skeleton though.)
I haven't heard the "wow" sound effect in awhile haha, gave me a chuckle, thank you.
Just an artist perspective it can be really discouraging to learn actual animation and art now especially with the use of AI which big companies are firing real artists and sinking money into AI so they don’t have to pay people… we are not slim chillin’
What I have always appreciated about Husky is the deep lore.
Neither AI nor the unionizing artists could ever create something as beautiful as Husky the Snowman 🖤🖤⛄
It seems like we are headed towards a pretty large general strike with automotive also striking.
Ironically enough, the ad that played during this was the first I Am Groot short.
I like to see more with Husky the snowman in future video's. I personally don't care if it is low poly, it is your own creation.
I agree unions are contentious. In this case a union is good to negotiate fair pay from studios already able to deny hiring them. Some unions are just as corrupt as bad leadership but most of the time it's really bad to be anti-union. AI isn't replacing well thought out effects for their high budget movies, it's still a novelty and can barely write. Better yet you need a human handler more so with effects than a quick script and an editor. Algorithms are getting better which are a useful tool for a static image or a model, it aint doing the whole scene.
Happy to see the fan favorite mascot of the channel finally move in fleshed out 3 dimensions
So what im hearing is, the entire film industry is coming crashing down due to corporate greed, and its partially the fault of robots, greaaaaaaat
here's my other channel, I livestream sometimes there or make vids or something idk www.youtube.com/@Whimsu
"Husky, he's a beloved staple of the channel." Well he is now. :)
Thanks for being one of the few channels I've seen to put even a little thought into this discussion.
Yo that song playing while Husky was flopping around was a low key banger
That performance from husky was amazing, almost made me cry
That has top be one of the top 10 best short movies I´ve seen all year
I welcome them to IASTE. I have been a member since 2021, working in lighting control. Before that I worked in live entertainment lighting for 20 years. We work with vfx a good bit on set. They deserve more, and the IA will help them.
For a generation raised on the internet, a community that enjoys reusing and reposting and modifying content, it’s embarrassing to see how many people believe that copyright works can never involve AI, as well as believe that AI will replace these vfx artists and writers.
But what’s even weirder here is the fact that there are also a large subset of people that despise vfx/cgi/whatever, all because it isnt some $10000000 hand drawn film.
I had no idea that the channel had a mascot. Husky the Snowman is wonderful, I love him. I hope we get to see more of him one day.
8:42 Your short animation of the snowman is more entertaining than most YT Shorts that I’ve seen
1:50 this is an obscure clip, nicely done
"WHAT ABOUT THE SEQUEL! THE SEQUEL!"
-Rick Moranis
What's sad is that AI animations (especially those 'dancing' videos) are becoming a staple kind of style, like people making bad phone videos in portrait mode.
Honestly surprised with how fast these high-quality rants are coming out
Very impressed with your blender skills. Hope to see more🤓🙏💚😜
I'm surprised you didn't bring up that video from a few years ago, it's a video where CGI people talk about the industry and admit that there are only 7 clients, if 1 client is unhappy all of them retract and that can bankrupt the CGI company. I forgot the title but there is a part in it about the titanic where they had to redo a whole scene because the director wasn't happy with the seagulls. Very eye opening video into the Hollywood CGI situation right there.
0:01 The knuckles "oh no" voiceline got me.
Your ai images and animation are so scary but fascinating lmao
I actually have an answer for "What will replace A.I artists in 20 years?" other forms of entertainment. the market will become so bland and over saturated that nobody will want to consume it anymore.
Unionize or move abroad. Then their international operations also start to unionize.
Union jobs pay on average 20% more than non union jobs. Higher unionization also raises the floor for wages in the industry because non-union shops have to at least pretend to compete. Not to mention unions have better benefits. I’m a union worker and my health insurance(medical, vision, dental) is 100% employer covered. I don’t pay a dime. Plus I’m building a pension so I’ll actually be able to retire
8:40 after that master piece i demand a Husky plushie
To expand a bit on AI and VFX.
Control is indeed the huge thing. And that applies to concept arts and models too. AI generated stuff, while good in isolation, can't generally take into account things like actual location specifics, DOP/Directors artdep visions, etc. At the very least you have to chug through hundreds if not thousands of iterations before you get what you want with AI and this, realistically not going to change (because diffusion models are inherently inprecise). So you'll always have the artist there chugging through prompts, refining, retouching etc. It's ultimately not that different from current pipeline. It's not even faster per say. Level of quality is higher, but it doesn't necessarily speed the job up. Most of vfx/cgi job time is spent in iterations, addressing feedback, squashing bugs anyway. And Ai not going to change that. It might make chugging out new versions faster, but all it does in real world - creates choice paralysis for the creative who then have no idea what they want and keep asking for more version. The cycle lasts until the deadline. Always. Be deadline tomorrow or in a year.
And then finally even if/when AI becomes good - using it already isn't all that much easy than a professional software. Sure you can learn it with chatgpt help. But you could do it before with youtube and Google too, yet not many ppl did bother. Because learning to use Ai, even if it's all capable and advanced, going to be a skill. Not just "prompt engineering" but weight adjustments, custom models, heck, even just putting in the right resolution for it to render at is smt that no studio exec knows a first thing about. So, to cap. VFX jobs are as safe as ever and no lvl of generative Ai advancement going to change that unless they figure out a general Ai
Humans will always be part of the cycle. The question really is, how many are needed. Efforts that took a few hundred people could one day be done with a dozen or even one. Honestly, I think that's a net good, but getting there might be messy.
It really irks me that ppl just see the current paradigm of diffusion and transformer based models and their limitations and apply those to AI as a whole for some reason. Neural rendering has much much more potential than diffusion models. You get PBR quality for the "price" of matcaps. And neural rendering has been around longer than diffusion. Diffusion is technically at its best in earlier iterations like DallE 1, when it was most creative. Diffusion isn't good for refined ideas or details. But it has its place in a system or workflow. It's like that spark of creativity before you then form it into a concrete idea that you can then work to bring into fruition.
From the outside looking in I've seen it compared to what cgi and digiatal did to hand drawn, 2d animation back in the 90s. A new skillset was needed for it to be faster, and the technology was initially too rough to replicate the fine details.
On top of the threat of AI, its an extremely dark time for the VFX industry, mass layoff and projects falling due to the domino effect the writers and actors strikes are are affecting everyone.
Its great to see videos like this to help remind people the hard work that often goes unnoticed. Thank you
Probably in the near future, apps like Photoshop and 3DS max will include AI generators to be able to ask for a snowman and then move it yourself
I'd be tired as well if I had to animate she-hulk twerking.
The same goes for video game developers as well. I feel like they are even less appreciated than animators. At least animators GET awards, programmers have to deal with the same working conditions and then are blamed when a game is bad because of a tight deadline set by their bosses or because of predatory microtransactions put into the game because of their bosses. You think most game developers went into the industry because they wanted to make money? No, it’s because they wanted to make fun games! So when they’re blamed for a game being underwhelming when it’s the fault of their greedy boss, it always gets me mad. Yes, this is a lead-in for me to tell people to _stop saying GameFreak’s coding is bad and that the programmers are lazy._ The *higher-ups* dismiss a game’s quality to push it out the door quickly, hungry for short-term money and profit. Don’t blame the employees. But SV is only the worst recent example of this phenomena, by far not the only one. There are so, so many examples of this that it makes me think people have shut their brain off
Always love to see a cameo from Husky the Snowman. Easily the best recurring character on the channel.
This guy's sense of humor appeals to me on a personal level
Hope this works out of the VFX workers. It's been a hot year for organized labor. Join a union! Solidarity forever!
Finally, thank you for acknowledging this problem
Your last point is the most accurate. It won't take all of the job, just 75% of the workload.
That was a very classic UA-cam Poop you made there.
his vid really hits home after watching your early cgi vid, good work here!
I have no opinion about uninions in general but when writers and actors started striking i remember thinking that if anyone deserve to be threated better it's CGI artists
I think you've nailed the point I've been trying to take through so many smooth brain's heads for the past few months with that last couple minutes;
Yeah, AI can make art, it can make movies, it can make scripts. But until you can control and edit every aspect of the end product, until you get the same tools to use on the AI generation that you get when you make something manually, it's not gonna replace jack shit, because whatever it produces will be shit.
"It seems this animator doesn't want to animate today. Let's motivate him with a controlled shock"
Technically, from what I hear, Disney is just the producers and commissioners up top who ask for their products to be delivered on time and on schedule, Marvel is the one who says yes to it and crunches and pulls around their VFX artists like Rag Dolls.
As for the A.I. piece, don't underestimate what a motivated and dedicated intelligent mind can accomplish. Someway, somehow, there's going to become a rift between Artists and Corporate companies and once that happens the Artists will be glad to no longer work for anyone but themselves.
"Who's gonna replace AI in the next 20 years?"
That's the neat part: There won't be an entertainment industry in 20 years
By that time A. M. will have already taken over
i will expect that husky will return in future videos, otherwise i'll get out the guillotine
On a strictly personal level, I just find it sad that technological development keeps trending towards what (to me) is less satisfying work. Manipulating a model on a computer screen is less fun than drawing frames by hand, and tweaking AI images to look the way you want them to is less fun than creating images from your own mind. There’s just something about creating tangible things from scratch, ineffective as it might be, that is particularly attractive. And considering stop-motion (extremely time-inefficient but also incredibly tangible) is still being made, I suspect I’m not alone.
For a while i felt like learning to paint digitally. Now i think sticking to plywood is a better idea.
Remember the days of the art style of Atlantis and El Dorado? They should have stuck to that. It was a mix of 2d and 3d animation
Every
Industry
Should
Unionize.
Stop with the antisemitic remarks.
UNION FOREVER
This video was interrupted by a Disney ad for ELEMENTAL 😂
Always great to get some more Knowledgehusk in my video diet