NO “Artificial Intelligence” (AKA “AI”) was compulsed, harmed, bothered or harrased for any of the articles below. All possible errors, inaccuracies and any bullshit contained herein are my own hand and sole and entirely my responsibility.
For the first time, a combined software and hardware technology like Generative AI aims not simply to support a human activity by making it more agile, faster, efficient, economical, as it happened in the past, but potentially to replace the human component of that activity itself.
How can we, as artists, face this last looming and most demanding challenge?
So far I have tried together with you to give an initial answer to this question, which lies first and foremost in recognising the technical, mental and creative foundations of our profession.
In the following chapters I will try to further explore, also from a practical point of view, the principles of animation as they have been transmitted to us by the tradition of the great studios and their subsequent developments.
“Genius” is the extreme manifestation of “talent”, and both have a fundamental and exclusive role in the arts, and in all creative activities. And both are exclusively human attributes and, by definition, totally unrelated to any interference by so-called generative AI.
The area of genius should not be our concern, since, by definition, either one has it or one does not have it, and the latter hypothesis is by far the most probable. Talent, on the other hand, concerns us all, because it is at the very foundation of our activity. We can’t help but think about it.
Unlike abilities or skills, talent is an attribute that belongs almost exclusively to the exercise of the arts and creative activities, whatever they may be.
No one is “born” a lawyer, or a surgeon, or a doctor, or an electrician, while some of us possess a special gift that has led them to “born” a musician, or a writer, or an actor… Or an animator.
Just as a witness in a trial is asked to tell “the truth, the whole truth, nothing but the truth”, the animator of a scene is asked to tell “the story, the whole story, nothing but the story”.
In the training of a character animator, but also in the course of his professional activity, a fact which in my opinion is of crucial importance is often overlooked: an animator does not necessarily have to be a draftsman – many animators, especially today, but also in the past, practice their craft brilliantly without touching any pencil – but he must certainly be – always – an actor.
How instinctive, innate is our vision of reality, and how much is instead learned, shaped by the encounter between our perceptive system and factual reality?
A crucial topic in the psychology of perception that can explain how and when the transition from movement to action, and then from action to acting occurs.
From vision to perception, from perception to illusion, from illusion to representation.