Though simply paying more sounds like it would fix the issue.
No, what you have is a shortage of people willing to fill your vacancy at those prices.
Particularly in Perth there is a whole shadow economy of people working remotely for overseas firms, because local positions don’t pay the bills. This doesn’t say “shortage” to me, it says “cheap”.
And in the UK most small/medium businesses seem stuck in a vicious cycle of low pay, low productivity and low expectations.
I think there are a lot of people who are going to school for animation, but maybe supply and demand are mismatched? But at the same time, a lot of VFX, animation and game studios are doing layoffs, so there probably shouldn't be that much a shortage of talent? I suspect GP comment may be right that the studios that are not able to find animation talent may just not be willing to compete on salaries.
I read this from Playstation before, but the quote makes 1% more sense when it's expanded to anime and films.
It's still stupid because they are doing the exact same thing in film as in games these days: relying on Spiderman (among other 3rd party franchises) to basically carry their portfolios with some of the best talent in the business. It seems like their narrative doesn't match their actions.
(I won't be too harsh on the anime sector, because being realistic: 90+% of anime are adaptations of something else and manga/ln properties do tend to actually stay in ownership of the author).
>with costs ballooning 40-60% due to growing budgets in Japan and a limited number of animators in the anime industry.
One look at the budget of an anime and the compensation of an animator and these claims instantly shift to "animators finally getting tired of being abused". Even the games industry can't compared to how utterly grinded the animators are, while paid even worse to boot. That's a very deep topic to go into itself so I'll just say that the structure of the anime committee needed to die yesterday. It's a borderline cabal.
Someone wanting a deeper dive into the structure can watch this video as an introduction: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iExwO1v_V-s
I think you're onto something with the idea of software that can automatically animate entire frames with tweening in between. This could potentially revolutionize the way we create animations, especially for tasks like data visualization, scientific simulations, or even video game cinematics.
There are already some tools that can generate animations using tweening, such as Blender's animation tools or even some proprietary software like Adobe After Effects. However, I'm not aware of any open-source tools that can do this on a large scale.
That being said, there are some interesting projects like OpenToonz, which is an open-source 2D animation software that uses a tweening-based approach. It's not exactly what you're looking for, but it's a good starting point.
I'd love to see more open-source tools that can automate the animation process using tweening. Do you think this could be achieved using machine learning algorithms, or would it require a more traditional programming approach?
Also, have you explored any of the newer animation tools like Houdini or Nuke, which have some impressive animation capabilities? Maybe we can learn from their approaches and apply them to open-source tools
I mean theres been a few articles on this very site that dispel the nonsense hyped up over the Thaler case.
Its really become a meme at this point to fud about AI copyright.
Edit: I forgot the important bit: why is animation any different.
Your point is valid even in the context of my humor actually. Many of these problems are highly local.
For example, the "shortage" of things in NYC are usually because people dont account for local constraints. My colleagues in NYC complain about a "shortage" of nannies, yet cant seem to see that the living wage in NYC is super-high. Why would a nanny work for below-living wages? I'm sure that with commensurate income, the shortage would disappear.
AI isn't simply a tool like Photoshop or Blender, which augment an artist's existing skill. AI is designed to simulate and replace human creativity in the same way automation replaced physical human labor elsewhere. That's a fundamental difference. Replace physical animation with cel animation and the skill and talent of the animators still matter, even translated to another paradigm. Replace a human artist with AI, and the value of their talent is just gone. Even if the AI is trained on that specific artist's work, it can't grow and expand its horizons the way that human artist can, it can only iterate on what data the model already makes available, and express generalities based on that.
And why bother have human beings involved at all when you can just train an AI to do the whole thing? The whole business case for AI is devaluing the market value of human creative/knowledge based labor or automating it away altogether.
None of that suggests using AI.