Nick Dorra, CEO and a producer at Helsinki-based studio Haruworks, started up a new consultancy called AI Animation three weeks ago to help media companies understand and use AI—and he’s already working with two first clients.
The company has signed deals with animation studio Dog Ears (Puffin Rock) in Northern Ireland and Finland’s public broadcaster YLE, which is working on a feature film.
There’s a lot of confusion, fear and uncertainty among producers about AI, what it can do, and its potential, says Dorra. He started the company with five colleagues, including animator/director Ryan Phillips (a BBC TV director), animator Jon Draper (whose company Stormy Studio has made explainer videos for Dentsu and Bristol Energy) and AI content creator Eric Solorio. Draper created an AIAnimation site a year ago offering cources and insights into AI, and the team rolled the consultancy into that.
Dorra’s goal is to help producers understand the capabilities of the technology and see how and where it can benefit their businesses. Part of this involves educating them about AI-enabled tools that aren’t designed to generate content, from open-source tech to products like Mootion (text to image) Adobe Firefly and Wonder Studio (translate live-action footage into animation), which don’t have the same copyright concerns as products such as OpenAI’s Sora (text to video generator) and Kling AI (an image and video generator).
According to Dorra, using these tools helps producers perform basic tasks more easily, such as managing continuity and controlling a character’s movements—and he predicts that in the near future, all animation pipelines will become hybrids that blend traditional production tools and AI.
When a new client starts to work with AI Animation, the company does an audit of their project and its pipeline to see what tools could be a fit and where AI might make processes more efficient. Then it creates a short 15-second animated proof-of-concept video in the style of the project in order to benchmark the quality of content that AI can produce. All of this costs a client less than US$10,000, says Dorra.
At that point, AI Animation provides the client with an estimate of potential budget savings, and a plan for how its teams can be trained on AI tools. Dorra explains that it’s essentially an outsourced R&D team that can bring a company up to speed on AI faster than hiring new talent or taking artists away from more critical work to spend months figuring these tools out.
The cost-savings will obviously differ from project to project, but it’s possible that integrating AI into a pipeline could save studios somewhere in the ballpark of 30% of budget, he says.
In a Future Unscripted report that CLVEconomics released in January, more than 90% of business leaders said they expect generative AI to play a much bigger role in the entertainment industry. But significantly, only 26% of these leaders feel their workforces are fully prepared to incorporate the tech into their workflows.
Dorra points to UK studio Pigeon Shrine’s AI-made animated feature film Where the Robots Grow (87 minutes), which launched on YouTube yesterday, costing US$8,000 per minute to complete in 90 days with a nine-person team. (AI Animation was not involved in this project),
“And it didn’t look like shit,” Dorra jokes. While it’s somewhat funny to think that’s been the bar for AI-generated content thus far, seeing a project like this—which had a quick-to-market journey and also looks good—is a posttive sign of AI’s animation potential, he adds.
Dorra is aware of the industry’s ongoing fears that the tech could eliminate jobs (especially for junior animators) and lead to copyright issues. But he feels that if companies don’t engage with it, they’re going to be missing out on a significant way to optimize their businesses at a time when it’s very difficult to get content financed.
“If we don’t understand what this is going to do to our industry, and if we choose to not engage with it or reap the advantages, there will be 15-year-olds in their bedrooms who are going to make more of these feature films,” he cautions.
Pictured clockwise from top left: Nick Dorra, Jon Draper, Eric Solorio and Ryan Philips.