Comment by Animats
12 hours ago
Now go watch "Kono Express". Disney laid off an animator from the Star Wars factory, and he's cranking out stuff about as good as Disney Animation all by himself. With Unreal Engine and AI tools, of course.
It's been a long time since there was an ink and paint department.
I opened this with an open mind, but it felt dead and AI immediately to me. Neural Viz, however, had succeeded in making things I find watchable all by himself[0] by working around some of the current weaknesses and by having stellar human writing. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it seems he got burnt out from doing it all alone so it's been a while since the last upload. The Remo Green one is my favorite[1].
[0]https://www.wired.com/story/the-future-of-ai-media-parody-of...
[1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5bYA2Rv2CQ8
> I opened this with an open mind, but it felt dead and AI immediately to me.
Episode 1 is. He's getting better at this. By episode 3, the characters have come alive and the scenery is really good.
Neural Viz had really good consistency and really good scripts, also importantly knew to write the story around the limitations in what AI could do, including using non-human characters to avoid that uncanny valley that I immediately see in the Kono Express video. Truly a master at his craft, it's a shame he hung it up!
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Seeing comments here arguing about the quality of this. To me it shows how much loss of love there is for the details in arts. Episode 1 for example immediately starts with jank when the camera shifts to the closeup of the guy packing the bag. Suddenly the woman in the background is in a position that should be impossible relative to where he was in the first shot. In any normal film it would be jarring. A 1st semester film student with a smartphone would know to setup the scene better than that.
Saw folks saying it improves in each episode. Skipped to chapter 6. First shot shows a disjointed stairway. And then a boy coming skating into view in a different spot and picking up the board which flips in an impossible way.
There's interesting stuff being experimented on in the AI video space that I keep an eye on. The Naruto "live action" is an interesting experiment that pushes the boundary on character + scene control. It's obvious copyright to me and probably gets far purely because of the source material it can reference. Which means artists have done a lot of the visual hard work already. But it's still a good example of where the frontier could be if piloted carefully. This kono express however, is in fact, slop.
> about as good as Disney Animation
I’ve never seen a Disney animation where they focus on the character’s shoes so they can magically tie a shoelace that is already tied, then put on a jacket through the sleeve, then walk a boring long time with bad cuts and choppy frames so the character can put on another jacket from the front which morphs into a onesie.
I disagree it gets much better after episode 3, as you claim in other comments. Gave episode 4 a shot and it’s still full of stiff movement, bad faces, bad pacing, bad dialogue.
That anyone thinks this looks like professional animation is the reason professionals are struggling. Let’s stop devaluing the craft and start paying attention to what goes into it. Details make the piece.
> he's cranking out stuff about as good as Disney Animation all by himself
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ikm5lP0zsi0
Yeah... no. Not at all. It's just classic AI slop.
The fact that someone can honestly say this is anywhere near the level of any professional animation is truly baffling.
Just the first two shots alone are full of horrible, stilted and morphing animation, no consistency between shots, no particular art style at all.
This is not a creative work or art in any form I recognise.
He didn't start getting it right until around episode 3, "The Reckless Newcomer".
> classic AI slop
A lot of AI content is better than human slop.
Gossip Goblin is fantastic.
Some people are making absolute banger content with AI. It's all in who's at the helm and what their storytelling capabilities and taste/aesthetics are.
I think another important point that AI is revealing is how diverse the population's preferences are. Legacy entertainment is nowhere as precisely tailored, because it tries to appeal to a wide audience.
Personally, all the Harry Potter AI shorts recently have been rather amusing, although they also vary significantly in detail and wit.
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>A lot of AI content is better than human slop.
Whether it's better is personal preference. And many find it so bad/soulless it makes anything around it impossible to enjoy.
Feels like going from artisanal sourdough bread to factory-made wonderbread. Sure it's "cleaner" looking... but that doesn't make it immediately better.
>A lot of AI content is better than human slop.
No, even one of the human worst human slop is still more enjoyable than whatever polished AI slop. In China the Niu Lai Film is way more successful than many AI slop.
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