GenAI is coming for our jobs. This is what we thought before we gave it a look. For a long time, we viewed Generative AI (GenAI) with skepticism. Like many in the creative industry, we feared it might replace human ingenuity, compromise and artistic integrity.

However, once we dived a little deeper, we came to realise that AI isn’t quite the threat we thought: it’s an opportunity. Used intuitively, AI can be an incredible tool that streamlines workflow, enhances creativity, and allows us to deliver more dynamic and focused results for our clients.

That said, we’re not about to let ourselves go, start generating all our work on Midjourney and call it a day. Animation is an art form that thrives on human expression, and we believe that AI is most powerful when used to support creativity rather than replace it. 

By using AI intelligently, we can cut down on time-consuming tasks in the early stages, giving our artists more freedom to focus on crafting visually stunning, original content. 

Let’s Talk Previsualisation 

Before we begin animating, we need fresh ideas. Loads of them. Whether it’s whipping up new characters, environments, or entire art styles, the conceptual stage is crucial to developing a strong final product. This is where AI lends us a hand.

GenAI platforms help us take what was once an idea and transform it into a visual prompt.

By feeding our own written ideas into AI-powered tools, we can quickly visualise different aesthetics, compositions, and colour palettes to support us in generating imagery for our clients. 

So now, when sketching drafts from scratch, we can refine AI-generated concepts with our own burst of creativity. 

As we’ve mentioned before, AI is a tool, and it works best for giving clients options. By presenting a plethora of concept art for brands to choose from we can give them a taste of our visual ideas before we even start the project. 

2D or 3D? Characters or Infographics? Landscape or Portrait? We can now test them out and report back swiftly. This process allows us to explore more possibilities in less time, ensuring that we land on a direction so we can get on our way to begin animating the project’s vision ourselves.

It’s About Enhancing, Not Replacing

While AI plays a significant role in our pre-production process, it doesn’t stop there. However, let’s be clear: we’re not in the business of delivering AI-generated animation. What GenAI does is help us refine our vision early on so that when it’s time to animate, we can focus on creating something genuinely spectacular for your brand.

Venturing beyond static imagery, AI-driven tools also enhance our storyboarding process. Storyboards are the backbone of animation, setting the basis for movement, pacing, and narrative structure. 

AI creates great reference materials for complex movements, lighting scenarios, or physical simulations. This ensures that when we’re off animating, we work with realistic and visually compelling references that help ground our animations in truth. 

With GenAI, we can add visual detail right from these early visuals, making our work more well-rounded and easier for clients to interpret. This means that before a single frame of animation is created, our clients already have a clear and immersive preview of what’s to come, allowing for more intricate feedback and collaboration.

Respect The Balance 

The key to using GenAI effectively is understanding its role. We don’t rely on AI to do the work for us; instead, we use it to explore creative possibilities faster, refine concepts more effectively, and streamline tedious aspects of animation production.

We’ve been using AI-assisted motion tracking and in-between tools to help us out with character rigging and smooth transitions since before anything like Dall-E or ComfyUI ever showed their face on the scene.

AI has let us speed up production while maintaining quality. Different styles of AI software can also assist with matching voiceovers to on-screen dialogue or filling in colour within frames, reducing the manual effort involved. 

Or even to look up technical questions and understand techniques better. This can include AI helping out by writing up some code to animate a feature quicker. These efficiencies free up costs and time for our artists to add those unique creative flourishes and details that make an animation truly memorable.

At the end of the day however, animation is about storytelling, emotion, and expression. Qualities that can’t be fully captured by an algorithm. That’s why, while we’ve let AI help us in the background and picked it up to help in our initial briefings, the final work you see has the passion and originality of our talented London-based artists written all over it.

football animation

At The Animation Guys, we embrace technology, but we never lose sight of what makes animation special.  By combining GenAI with expert human craftsmanship, we can create stunning, custom animations that captivate audiences and bring ideas to life. 

If you have a project in mind, let’s talk about how we can make it a reality. Get in touch with us today and let us animate something extraordinary together.