LIAF 2022: UK Animation Industry Event Session 4 – Will the Bots take your job?: AI tools and their impact on Animation

Online book tickets (free or pay what you can)

LIAF presents the 2022 UK Animation Industry Event – seven panels giving insider access to some of the hottest topics of the year. We’ve gathered together some of the most passionate, honest and insightful experts from a wide range of different areas and backgrounds who are ready to cover all manner of vital topics to give you much food for thought.

Animation doesn’t stand still; and debates and discussions with animators and creative experts are the best way to get in touch with what’s happening, whether it’s a look into the minds of some of the most creative forces making music videos in the 2020’s, a discussion on the career paths of women in the industry over the last decades, where AI Generated Imagery might be going, whether animation can be a viable and satisfying career for people who are neurodiverse, what the Metaverse might offer animators and can animation be a business as well as an artform.

For anyone currently working in the film and animation industry, thinking of working in the industry or just plain curious, these seven talks are indispensable.

The panels will be chaired by Saint John Walker, Dean/Director of Industry Engagement at Escape Studios, Julian Scott, animation consultant at Film London and Dara McGarry, Director of Outreach at DNEG Animation.

LIAF 2022: UK Animation Industry Event Session 4 – Will the Bots take your job?: AI tools and their impact on Animation

You’ll have seen some of the curious yet stunning imagery created by programs like Dall E or Midjourney. Things are moving fast from stills to moving images and they are already being experimented with and adopted by artists. Where is AI generated imagery going- is it a useful tool for animators, or will they be ‘assimilated’ into creating pastiches from someone else’s database? Our panel of animators and developers discuss some of the issues regarding using AI creatively.

Panellists

Moderator: Saint John Walker, Dean/Director of Industry Engagement at Escape Studios

Saint is the author of the Core Skills of VFX Handbook and has designed and run VFX courses across the UK. He has been LIAF’s industry panel coordinator and chair for several years, as well as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. At Escape he has chaired panel discussions for the annual VFX Festival, and has taken part in many Access:VFX activities online and in person.

Pinar Seyhan Demirdag

Pinar is an A.I. director, multidisciplinary creator, and an outspoken advocate for the conscious use of technology. In 2020, Pinar co-founded the A.I. studio Seyhan Lee with her partner Gary Koepke. The firm has become the bridge between the cutting-edge science of generative A.I. and the world of entertainment. Pinar has always used creative storytelling to bring future technologies into the collective consciousness. She was one of the first creatives to use face-tracking technology for her Diplo music video in 2011. She created the world’s first X.R. catwalk for a virtual fashion line in 2016, and in 2018 she became one of the world’s first A.I. artists when Google made a unique tool for her to create with artificial intelligence. Pinar’s work resides in the permanent collections of the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, Museum für Gestaltung Zürich, the New Museum, New York, and the Museum of Contemporary Art Santa Barbara. She won D&AD in VFX Emerging Realities in 2021 for Seyhan Lee’s A.I. film Connections for Beko.

Andreas Maaninka

Andreas  is a multiple Academy Award® & Bafta winning team member for Avatar, Golden Compass and most recently Bladerunner 2049, a certified Emmy Award team member and VES nominated artist. He is originally from Sweden but moved to London and started his career at Pinewood Studios in the early 2000s. From there he’s lived and worked in New Zealand, Japan and is now in Canada where he is currently VFX Supervising. He’s most recently been exploring AiArt workflows in production specifically on the Visual Development side and integration of the tool into other aspects of production to help get artists more time and better direction to execute towards finals.

Luc Leclerc

Luc is the lead VFX artist at Above The Void, a digital imagery and AI video compositing agency from Montreal, Canada. His background as a visual artist spans multiple decades, having worked in illustration, animation, and video.

Simon Fenton

Simon is the Dean/Director of Interactive & Real Time at Escape Studios. He has over 23 years experience working in the industry and 10 years working in higher education and teaching. After graduating from a Fine Art background, Simon joined Bits Studios and later moved on to Sony Computer Entertainment Europe for 10 years, designing and creating environments, characters and leading teams at a senior level. He worked in senior lead roles on nine published titles including Total NBA ’97, This is Football, Getaway, Black Monday, Kinetic, Kinetic Combat and Sony Playstation Home. During his career he has also created bespoke courses for corporate clients in the video games and TV sectors such as Rare, Big Big Studios and the BBC.

Fabian Stelzer

Fabian is an entrepreneur, artist & experimenter working on a new venture in AI. Previously, he co-founded and led EyeQuant, an ML design startup serving customers like Google, Canon, Spotify and Ebay (acquired in 2018). His work has been featured in CNN, Forbes, WIRED, Futurism, FastCompany and VICE. Fabian’s latest work includes the world’s first fully AI-generated movie, a 70s sci-fi film adventure called SALT, and an experimental GPT-3 based Twitter game called BATTLEPROMPTS.