Hehe, as an ex FX animator/TD, this sounds kinda funny to me, there’s likely more to the story. If they knew for sure the textures weren’t going to be shown, it’s a waste of time, not craftsmanship or attention to detail. But it’s plausible because often modeling & surfacing departments have to start work before the shots & camera are fully planned. And sometimes there are camera changes late in the production. It could be that someone’s shot that saw the inside of the dresser drawers got cut, that surfacing expected the drawers to be open in a shot, or that a scene inside the drawer was in storyboards but didn’t make it to layout, stuff like that happens a lot. But no productions are having artists work on stuff that they know will never be shown in the film.
I do understand it from an artistic perspective, and who knows when and how an asset will be used in the future; but the premise doesn't appear to hold water under scrutiny.
It's been a long time since there was an ink and paint department.
Saw folks saying it improves in each episode. Skipped to chapter 6. First shot shows a disjointed stairway. And then a boy coming skating into view in a different spot and picking up the board which flips in an impossible way.
There's interesting stuff being experimented on in the AI video space that I keep an eye on. The Naruto "live action" is an interesting experiment that pushes the boundary on character + scene control. It's obvious copyright to me and probably gets far purely because of the source material it can reference. Which means artists have done a lot of the visual hard work already. But it's still a good example of where the frontier could be if piloted carefully. This kono express however, is in fact, slop.
[0]https://www.wired.com/story/the-future-of-ai-media-parody-of...
Episode 1 is. He's getting better at this. By episode 3, the characters have come alive and the scenery is really good.
I’ve never seen a Disney animation where they focus on the character’s shoes so they can magically tie a shoelace that is already tied, then put on a jacket through the sleeve, then walk a boring long time with bad cuts and choppy frames so the character can put on another jacket from the front which morphs into a onesie.
I disagree it gets much better after episode 3, as you claim in other comments. Gave episode 4 a shot and it’s still full of stiff movement, bad faces, bad pacing, bad dialogue.
That anyone thinks this looks like professional animation is the reason professionals are struggling. Let’s stop devaluing the craft and start paying attention to what goes into it. Details make the piece.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ikm5lP0zsi0
Yeah... no. Not at all. It's just classic AI slop.
Just the first two shots alone are full of horrible, stilted and morphing animation, no consistency between shots, no particular art style at all.
This is not a creative work or art in any form I recognise.
A lot of AI content is better than human slop.
Gossip Goblin is fantastic.
Some people are making absolute banger content with AI. It's all in who's at the helm and what their storytelling capabilities and taste/aesthetics are.
Personally, all the Harry Potter AI shorts recently have been rather amusing, although they also vary significantly in detail and wit.
In some instances, it's even engineered to be broadly appealing. See Disney and Marvel.
On the other end of the spectrum, we have niche-specific creators who appeal to specific genre fans and can package their own tone and taste. That's actually really cool.
It's kind of like what happened to music. Electronic music, the DAW, and home recording opened the avenue for indie artists and all of the various genres.
Whether it's better is personal preference. And many find it so bad/soulless it makes anything around it impossible to enjoy.
Feels like going from artisanal sourdough bread to factory-made wonderbread. Sure it's "cleaner" looking... but that doesn't make it immediately better.
No, even one of the human worst human slop is still more enjoyable than whatever polished AI slop. In China the Niu Lai Film is way more successful than many AI slop.
Niu Lai is maybe more like Outsider music. The movie equivalent of "My Pal Foot Foot" by The Shaggs. They tried their best without knowing what they were doing, and ended up influencing artists like Frank Zappa & Brian Eno:
I haven't watched content for a long long time before AI slop started appearing, because the topics and the stories were boring and repackaged thirty times and ultimately very safe (need to be profitable).
AI has enabled small creators with new ideas and people with nothing but love of storytelling to be competitive with corporate slop.
Yes most of it's bad, but some of it is very innovative. No Hollywood slop has been innovative for a long time.
No, this is not only my opinion. Like i said, that human slop movie is way more successful than many polished AI movie in China.
I've been seeing some of the lengthier AI films on X (i.e. the one about badgers vs. rats that looks like Lord of the Rings), and there is certainly a lot of work put into them. However the type of work that goes into them is substantially different than what is shown in this article about Zootopia. There are a lot less decisions made by humans. AI is driving a lot of the creative decisions. In the end you get something good, but is it still riding on the decisions of the training data that came from humans like the ones who made Zootopia by hand crafting every element of it? I think this is an interesting question.
Not something that can be automated away assuming you still have preferences at all.
How could it not be? Even if AI spews out a bunch of stuff that humans end up tweaking this limits future human creative output to modifications of whatever AI has already been trained on. It can only lead to a homogenization of art as AI regurgitates past works over and over again, only to be further distilled as new models are trained on little else but it's own slop or variations on it.
What makes animation interesting are the creative decisions. Character design. Prop design. Background design. Story. The more companies choose to use AI instead of letting artists make those creative choices, the more derivative and less interesting animation will become.
I understand that it is harder to do 2d than 3d, but may be with LLMs, it is possible again now...
PDI’s toolset was pure magic for it’s time. When I joined, I was in heaven with how easy it was to make procedural animation, build new effects that crossed pipeline stages, render anything you could imagine… I wished I could share it with researchers and hobbyists.
Custom vs. commercial was a constant issue. Were you around for the whole NextGen effort? DWA spent a fortune on some custom tools that only were used on a show, or maybe just a few sequences, before they were replaced with commercial tools.
2022 (276 points, 167 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30241966
2024 (118 points, 22 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41204228
i’m convinced this is where much of the magic comes from.
it’s the same as why often music written and played by an group of musicians who specialize in their instrument is often so much better than the music from a solo who records each instrument themselves.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/entertainment/wildwood-review-laika-...
Is this training material for LLMs?
This comment (c) copyright by amelius, not for training AI.
The earliest mention I could find for the page is from Feb 2022, which predates ChatGPT, so it wasn't made for that purpose.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Screenwriting/comments/slfb1q/disne...
That comment says the page was about Encanto. It’s now about Zootopia 2. Clearly they’re updating the page.
But I agree it’s absurd to claim Disney would be making pages like this as training material for LLMs.