It was close to 40 degrees inside the tent, and the heatwave outside was the worst France had experienced in years. Animators, producers and the executives who finance and sell their films had crowded in anyway, to talk about the thing reshaping their industry faster than anything in a generation: artificial intelligence.
Every June, this lakeside town of Annecy in the French Alps is the focus of the animation world. This year, the record temperatures were not the only thing people came away talking about. AI was everywhere, and almost nowhere on the record.
On stage: the optimists' case
The panel had a hopeful title, "Animation: More Human than Ever," and it was moderated by Mark Flanagan, a veteran computer-graphics educator and founder of the training platform VFX Jam. Around him sat Henry Daubrez, a filmmaker-in-residence at Google Labs; Jade Hautin, a producer at the Paris company Frogbox; the American technologist and filmmaker Benjamin Michel; and the producer Leo Neumann. The question under the title was the one everyone had come for: how human can animation remain when the tools that make it are increasingly automated?
Daubrez made the case for access: AI, he argued, could finally put a camera in the hands of creators in countries that never had studios or the software.
