If you’re looking to get into animation as a career, you have less than 5 years.

Thinking of animation as a career? You have less than half a decade to do something meaningful.

Why?

1. DALL-E 2 and other AI art models can now produce a near-infinite variety of illustrations using a simple text prompt. By 2025, they’ll outperform human artists on every metric.
2. AI animation models already exist that can take a static illustration and “imagine” different movements, poses, and frames. You can make the Mona Lisa smile, laugh, or cry — and there’s nothing stopping you from doing that to other images, too.
3. AI video models are right around the corner. Soon, studios will be able to create smooth videos of any framerate with nothing more than a text prompt. Short films will be next.

A startup called Respeecher recreated the actor’s voice as it was in 1977.

After 45 years of voicing one of the most iconic characters in cinema history, James Earl Jones has said goodbye to Darth Vader. At 91, the legendary actor recently told Disney he was “looking into winding down this particular character.” That forced the company to ask itself how do you even replace Jones? The answer Disney eventually settled on, with the actor’s consent, involved an AI program.

If you’ve seen any of the recent Star Wars shows, you’ve heard the work of Respeecher. It’s a Ukrainian startup that uses archival recordings and a “proprietary AI algorithm” to create new dialogue featuring the voices of “performers from long ago.” In the case of Jones, the company worked with Lucasfilm to recreate his voice as it had sounded when film audiences first heard Darth Vader in 1977. Read More

James Earl Jones is the voice behind legendary Star Wars’ villain Darth Vader, but it seems the 91-year-old has finally hung up his helmet.

In an interview with Vanity Fair, Star Wars sound supervising editor Matthew Wood said Jones “was looking into winding down this… character”.

Jones’s voice was remastered from the original Star Wars films for recent Disney+ series Obi-Wan Kenobi.

Some of Jones’s archival voice recordings were also used.

For future Star Wars projects, Jones has reportedly granted permission for Disney and Lucasfilm to use artificial intelligence and archival recordings to recreate his voice. Read More

CNN — “Salt” resembles many science-fiction films from the ’70s and early ‘80s, complete with 35mm footage of space freighters and moody alien landscapes. But while it looks like a throwback, the way it was created points to what could be a new frontier for making movies.

“Salt” is the brainchild of Fabian Stelzer. He’s not a filmmaker, but for the last few months he’s been largely relying on artificial intelligence tools to create this series of short films, which he releases roughly every few weeks on Twitter.

Stelzer creates images with image-generation tools such as Stable Diffusion, Midjourney and DALL-E 2. He makes voices mostly using AI voice generation tools such as Synthesia or Murf. And he uses GPT-3, a text-generator, to help with the script writing.

There’s an element of audience participation, too. After each new installment, viewers can vote on what should happen next. Stelzer takes the results of these polls and incorporates them into the plot of future films, which he can spin up more quickly than a traditional filmmaker might since he’s using these AI tools. Read More

Partners with Nicklaus Companies to launch inaugural Digital Twin of Jack Nicklaus to engage with fans and brands to bring interactive sporting and entertainment experiences online

Soul Machines, the groundbreaking company pioneering the creation of autonomously animated Digital People in the metaverse and the digital worlds of today, announced today the launch of a new Entertainment division with the goal of creating unique and highly personalized experiences redefining fan engagement and entertainment enterprise. On the heels of a recent US$70 million Series B1 round (led by new investor SoftBank Vision Fund 2), this new business division will launch its inaugural Digital Person – an avatar of legendary American professional golfer Jack Nicklaus through a partnership with the Nicklaus Companies. Read More