Moving Forward with EMC
Co-founders Al Heartley, Tiffany Vega, and Leandro Zaneti gather to discuss current topics facing non-profit arts leaders and organizations.
Moving Forward with EMC
The Critterz Effect: How AI is Reshaping Animation and Theater
The lines between artificial intelligence and art are vanishing faster than expected. In this episode, Leandro discusses OpenAI’s bold new project Critterz—an animated feature film produced in just nine months, with a fraction of the usual budget and team size. By blending human creativity with AI-driven production, Critterz shows how technology is reshaping not just efficiency, but the very future of storytelling.
Welcome to Moving Forward with Evolution Management Consultants, the podcast where we dive deep into the dynamic world of nonprofit arts management. I'm your host, leandro Zanetti, and I'm thrilled to have you join us on this journey. In each episode, we'll explore the ever-evolving landscape of the nonprofit arts sector. We'll bring you thought-provoking discussions and innovative strategies to equip you with the knowledge and inspiration to take your organization to new heights. Let's get started. Hi everyone, I'm Leandra Zanetti, and this is Moving Forward with Evolution Management Consultants. Those of you who have been listening to the pod for a little while surely know that I am EMC's resident AI enthusiast, and so it should come as no surprise to you that today's solo show is going to focus on artificial intelligence. But today we're moving even closer to the boundaries between artificial intelligence and art. I want to dig into a story that broke this month that really caught my eye for this connection between art and artificial intelligence. Openai announced earlier in September that it's teaming up with two production companies, vertigo Films and Native Foreign to create Critters, a feature-length animated film that leans heavily on AI in its production. Now we'll get into what that means exactly, but before we dive into the technical of it, I'm interested in this story because I've often talked about how I believe that AI should be embraced for administrative work, things like budgeting and scheduling, and even marketing automation or segmentation. But I truly deeply believe that, particularly in the theater, we have to protect the human, artistic heart of what we do, and this movie Critters challenges that boundary in a really big way, and I think it can be a model for how we might approach these conversations as they move closer into our own realms in theater making and live performance. So let's start with the basic story. What's going on? As I mentioned, openai announced that it was working with these two production companies on a feature length animated movie called Critters. Now, the initial idea for Critters was created by Chad Nelson, who was an open AI creative specialist, about three years ago, and he used Sora to create these little animated figures called Critters while they were developing the image generating software. And then, in 2023, they released a short film using Sora just to demonstrate the capabilities of the technology.
Speaker 1:Now, in this feature length approach to this story or to this film, the creative foundation still comes from people. Human writers are still scripting the plot. Artists human artists, I should say will still draw the key sketches and the concept, art and actors are still going to record the voices. All of those elements remain in human hands, but where the process changes is everything that comes after those first drawings. So instead of building every background, background, movement and lighting effect by hand, the production will rely on AI tools that can turn sketches into fully colored, textured and shaded images almost instantly. Those same tools can generate different versions of a scene. They can fill in the motions between key poses. They can even suggest camera angles and combine all of those things into a finished shot. The scale is kind of amazing.
Speaker 1:The announcement says that OpenAI and these production companies are aiming to complete a full-length feature film in about nine months. Compare that to the two to three years that it usually takes an animated movie to go through a production process, and you can see how efficiency is really the name of the game here. In addition to that, this movie is boasting a budget of under $30 million. Now compare that to Elio, the Pixar film that came out earlier this year, which is reported to have cost $150 to $300 million. This allows an incredible efficiency in terms of how we use dollars. Now, some of that will come in the form of lost jobs. We have to name that, and that's what we'll talk a little bit about more later, but what we really are paying attention to here is how this project, this pilot, is targeting efficiency. It's not about replacing humans. It's actually about how can we make more, faster something that has happened with every industry and is being supercharged by things like artificial intelligence. Just to name here, too, that the other piece that will really help in terms of efficiency and scale is that Critters is looking to use a crew of about 30 people, and a typical animation process something like Elio took about 250 people in its crew. So by Hollywood standards, what they're trying to do is make fast, small production a thing of the future. Now, to see why this is unusual, it's helpful to know how most animated films are today.
Speaker 1:I didn't know anything about it before starting this podcast and I did a little bit of research, so, from what I learned, modern animation already uses computers a lot. We know that, right, but people stay in charge of every creative step. Usually, design and modeling are done by artists, who draw and sculpt the characters and the environments. Then you've got rigging, where technicians build an internal digital skeleton so that every character can move naturally. Next you've got animation, where skilled animators create key poses and guide all the tiny in-between movements that make action feel real. And then, finally, you've got lighting and rendering, where computers have really been helping in this final push, where they polish shadows and reflections and the high-resolution images you see on your screens today, but human artists still decide the look and the mood. So in today's modern animation process, computers already do a lot of heavy lifting, but humans make the choices.
Speaker 1:Critters flips that balance. Human artists will still hand off initial sketches that's not changing but then AI systems are expected to create or automate whole stages that normally need large teams, things like painting textures and animating motion, even picking camera moves and lighting setups. Instead of software, following detailed instructions from animators, the AI will make many of those small creative decisions themselves. I think of this akin to replacing a props artisan or a set painter with artificial intelligence. Now, ai is not quite there yet, but in the future it might be, and so I don't think that the questions that Critters is posting will be all that different from the questions that we will face as an industry at one point or another. And for the animation studios, this is a significant shift from computer-assisted to AI-generated, and it raises questions about authorship and what it means for the people who traditionally bring these films to life.
Speaker 1:So what does Critters actually tell us about AI and the arts? Partially, to me. It's proof that human capacity is still essential. Like I said, the story's still written by people. The characters are starting as drawings made by human artists, and then human actors will give the voice and the emotions of each of these characters, but it also shows where AI is heading. Once those final sketches exist, the entire production pipeline will lean on AI.
Speaker 1:Think about what that means for the workforce. Animation isn't just about the big creative ideas. It's hundreds as I said, 250 for Elio hundreds of technicians and craftspeople, character riggers, lighting specialists, compositors, and that's just scratching the surface. These are skilled jobs, and that's where some of this machine learning and artificial intelligence will start to be the disruption. The creative spark will remain human, and I think we'll be there for a little while, though, as we talked about in an earlier episode, music is already moving in a direction where perhaps the creative spark isn't fully human, but still. In any case, many of the specialized hands-on roles that make film visually rich could be squeezed out and, as AI becomes more common in art making.
Speaker 1:Protecting those crafts and the people who do them is the challenge that we are going to face as much as any other industries. So what does that mean for us now? Like I said, we are not at the point where we can replace our crews with artificial intelligence. Now there are some ways, I think artificial intelligence may already be bleeding into our art making practices. I'd be really curious to talk to a designer about how they might be implementing AI in their processes. But we have not yet reached the point where AI is going to be replacing the jobs of creatives in our field, and, in fact, I think that that is exactly what we need to protect.
Speaker 1:As I said at the beginning, I really believe that the competitive advantage of what we do comes from being an art form that is uniquely human, comes from being an art form that has protected itself against technology, and up until now I mean up until AI I really thought about our aversion to allowing technology to infiltrate our art form as something that was holding us back. I truly used to believe that, but now, as I think about it and as I see the world shifting with something like artificial intelligence, I wonder if this is actually going to become our competitive advantage, because, unlike other art forms, theater is about being with other people, and I don't just mean being in the audiences. Those of us who participated in Zoom theater during the pandemic learned the unique value of being able to sit in an audience when it was taken away from us. So we know that sitting in a room and experiencing something together is key to our art form. In addition to that, I think it is key that we are watching live humans perform something live. We know that everything that we are seeing is a product of the human imagination and of human choices, and we're watching those choices play out in real time. There aren't many other art forms that can say the same.
Speaker 1:So what does Critters mean for some of the ways we might be thinking about, or what we could be thinking about as we think to the future, of what AI may do for theater? So what can we do right now? What can we be talking about? First, I would say name the vulnerable roles. Actually be specific. Don't just talk about artists in general. Identify where automation could replace actual jobs. You know things like lighting design modelers, I think, folks who are making renderings for set designers. These are folks who perhaps are facing the biggest threat from something like artificial intelligence. So name those vulnerable roles and track how AI tools might change those roles and where your line is in terms of where you think it may belong and where it may not. Like I said, I believe that all of it should be human, but that doesn't mean that I'm right community, both within our organizations and then as a field for how we approach what is being called one of the biggest societal shifts in recent memory. So naming those vulnerable roles so that we can be prepared or protect against those roles going away.
Speaker 1:Second, I think you could write a plan. If you use AI to speed up production tasks, can you pair it with commitments to retrain or reassign some of the affected staff? Or could you commit to investing those savings back into human creative work? I know that AI is going to eliminate some jobs. Now whether or not it will eliminate jobs in the theater is still up for debate, because I think that actually, what AI offers is a way for us to augment and improve our capacity, as opposed to limiting how much of that human capital, if you will I hate that term, but how many humans, we need to make a piece of art.
Speaker 1:I've heard a lot of critique of arts organizations from artists that feel that these institutions have ballooned their administrative costs so high that have now started taking away from the possibility of making those big artistic statements. Ai honestly does offer a path in order for us to right size how much is spent on the art, and so, while I think that it'll be a little ways off before we see some of that attrition because of artificial intelligence, I do think that eventually we will get to the point where we will be able to invest some of the money that we're saving back into the human creative work. And while I want to protect as many jobs in the arts as humanly possible, I also recognize that we live within an impossible problem in the business model of what we've made. What we can earn and what our expenses are are unbalanced, and so this offers a solution to that. It may not be a solution we like, but it does offer a potential solution, and so one of the ethical ways I can think about doing this is to commit to investing any savings that come from that back into the creation of art. That, to me, is maybe worth it, right.
Speaker 1:None of these conversations should be approached from the line of we don't want AI anywhere in our organizations. It's about having the conversation so that we can make deliberate choices, so that innovation doesn't come at the expense of crass people who bring stories to life. The more we can talk about it now, the more we can protect those folks who may be most affected by something like artificial intelligence taking their role within an organization. And how can we live up to our values of being community-centered when we are also facing these rising costs? And I think one way we can do that is talking about how to re-skill jobs, but also talk about job protections and how we might be able to retrain those affected staff in order to do something that will be required under a new artificial intelligence powered production process or administrative process.
Speaker 1:Now, to close out important to remember, critter's not a fully automated production. People will still write the story, they're still going to draw the first sketches and they're going to voice those characters, but AI is set to take over many of the hands-on production jobs that traditionally belong to animators and visual artists. And AI will not stop there. It will not only affect animators, it will come from for every industry and look for ways that we might be able to use this technology in support of the creations that we want to make. But this project Critters is a live case study in where folks might draw the line. Ai can absolutely help organizations run stronger and more efficiently, but if we let it replace the skilled makers behind our visual world, we risk losing the very thing that gives art its depth and texture and the exact reason why people come to see our art in the first place.
Speaker 1:So here's my challenge to you Start the conversation now inside your organization. Talk to your leadership about where they see artificial intelligence informing process in the future. Where can AI responsibly lighten the load and where will you or your organization defend the human roles that carry craft and culture and meaning? And that's what I think we need to be talking about in our staff meetings, at our board meetings. We have unbelievably immediate problems right now real risk to the very existence of a lot of nonprofit theaters and at the same time, I think that if we don't also pay attention to this changing world, we will be perpetually behind the eight ball. So start those conversations today.
Speaker 1:Thank you so much for listening to Moving Forward with Evolution Management Consultants. As a reminder, I'm Leandro. Anything you want to talk about related to AI, I'm your guy. Feel free to email me. My email is leandro at emcforwardcom. I'd love to hear about how you're thinking about the barriers between artificial intelligence and art and where you're seeing them being used in artistic processes. Again, I'm not saying that I'm 100% right. Particularly if you're a designer and you're using AI to supercharge your design work, let's chat. I'd love to hear how you're using that and how you are ensuring that those designs still remain uniquely you and uniquely human. So let's keep talking and let's keep an eye on this movie Critters as it moves into production. Thank you so much for listening. Have a great day, everybody. Bye, thank you.