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Comment by josh_carterPDX | Hacker News Reader

My first "startup" was cartoonlagoon.com. We were going to be a site for independent animators and artists with the draw being a showcase of more well-known artists releasing exclusive content you wouldn't see anywhere else.

We had some cool stuff from Kevin Eastman (Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles/Heavy Metal) and others, but it never really took off.

Hearing the news about Pixar and other studios letting people go, made me think that something like this could totally be done today. Maybe it doesn't need to be its own site, but could be a channel on YouTube or something. There's definitely a shift happening in the space and I'm so excited for what's going to happen next.

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All of the independent animators have their own IG/TikToks.

And they hate it. Patreon, too (particularly the ones with more risqué work). A dedicated platform would be a major boon in terms of community, reliability, and possibly remuneration.

I'd argue Patreon is dedicated enough.

If we're talking about remuneration, the audience/customer don't really want a "dedicated platform" since that's not the only thing they do, unlike the artists themselves. Or in other words, dedicated platform (like deviantart) is fine but it won't attract the largest audience.

The bar to create animation is going to be so incredibly low in just a few years time, that the skills to have will be writing, imagination, focus, clarity, cohesion, and taste making.

Katzenberg has had a lot of flops, but he's right about this [1]. I'd even wager costs will get cut by 99.9% in ten years time.

All this to say I think you're 100% correct. Now's the time to build platforms and tools for independent animators.

[1] https://www.cartoonbrew.com/ideas-commentary/jeffrey-katzenb...

Don’t get too drawn in by an ad. JK is pumping his AI startup here, he is intentionally exaggerating to generate surprise and interest to pitch to indies, knowing full well that high quality animated films that make a lot of money will continue to require large staffs and large budgets and take a long time to make.

If independent animation is super cheap and easy to produce, then how will indies make any money and support themselves? It’s already extremely difficult, and lowering the costs might only bring in more people with less skill and make that problem worse.

If you’re talking about a $200M Pixar film, on the other hand, cutting costs by 99.9% means a budget of ~$200K. Think about it: that would end up being a middling 1 year salary for a single person (especially if there’s any ancillary costs like benefits, software and equipment, office rent, etc..) They certainly can’t get any A-list Hollywood voice actors for that much. They can’t record the music for that much. Pixar will never be able to make a full length movie for a $200k budget, and they don’t actually want to, because that would signal low quality and low effort. Going too cheap would mean completely abandoning their aspirational status.

And don’t forget the marketing budgets are in the tens to hundreds of millions, which will not go down just because of better animation tools. It doesn’t make sense to dump that much marketing money into a product that only costs pennies to produce.

Animation production costs have gone down steadily over time, and animation is far more accessible to independent animators now than it was 20 years ago, and that will continue. Big Budget movie studios have historically used those savings to hire more people, increase the quality, and continued to spend more or less exactly the same amount of money (or more) per film. Budgets are higher now than they were on Toy Story, same goes for VFX, and I think it’d be quite safe to predict the general trend for movie budgets that has lasted around a hundred years to continue for the next ten, with or without AI.

Bill Watterson didn't need all these tools and platforms. Just paper and ink.

Right now we have content, info and tool overload and Layoffs are a sign of over production.

Plus people like Katzenberg love to jump around funding new stuff and telling/distracting/fomoing people more creative than them - hey you better learn this or be good at that, cause why else do people need him in the room?

Watterson needed Universal Press Syndicate to distribute his drawings to newspapers. And all the people involved in making, printing, and distributing those papers. There was a pretty long chain between his drawing table and you chuckling at Calvin's antics over your morning coffee.

But (and I say this as a huge Watterson fan and someone who kinda agrees with your crux) Watterson never animated anything. The single-strip format is far more fitting for a one-man shop than an animated film, at least at this point in time.

> The bar to create animation is going to be so incredibly low in just a few years time, that the skills to have will be writing, imagination,

O yes, and those 'creative writers' wouldn't be humans. At least at low level it can be easily automated. After human gives the main idea and story line. Actually this can be done automatically too, but human touch is important to claim 'human made'. I'm afraid there will be radical changes. Like those which happened to photography once everybody got a camera. Now AI changes the field again. For the best or worst depends how you look at it.

I agree that writing is going to become more important. I do not think it'll be done by AI. Good stories come from quality character development, empathy, and the ability to tell a story that captures the imagination. Having an incredibly animated story is less important than the story.

The story is everything and AI writing is just not there nor do I think it ever will be.

Humans will be the soul, AI will be the mecha suit doing the heavy lifting.

Show me a great story that was written just by AI and I believe it (a story written by a good writer using AI as a tool to accelerate doesn’t count)

GPT-4 was introduced just less than a year ago. Development didn't stop. It doesn't mean that AI will invent something, but mimicking existing works is easy. After all most humans writing is just this. There are real works, while most is just a flood of some gray mass. These writers can use AI and there will be no difference. Another category is autobiographies written by celebrities with no writing skills. Today they use human coauthors, but soon AI will be doing text expansion and style correction just as well.

BTW, "good" is subjective metrics. As soon as it's known to be AI generated it becomes average at best. Just like with images today. Nobody is trying to find 'hidden depth' in them.

> These writers can use AI and there will be no difference. Another category is autobiographies written by celebrities with no writing skills

I would argue this is a common fallacy: I can't do something but I can use automation to do it. But chances are, being unable to do it also means you're unable to judge the result and understand what is right/wrong.

This is the standard thing if you try to put together a UI without any design skills, you will use existing components and styles, and it will still look crap.

AI will make it easier for people who know how to write to do automated ghost writing, but it won't allow people who can't to do it.

That kind of was my point as well. If you are a good author, sure you can probably write a book faster with AI - maybe even faster than without using it.

But this fantasy of “people will just dump a prompt into GPT and it will produce a masterpiece (or at least something that a reasonably big audience perceives as good)” is just that: a fantasy.

I am open to change my mind of course once I see a good story written mostly or completely by AI. Sure “good” is subjective but I think no one can argue that the stories produced by AI today are good by any measure - at best they are a passable mimicry of a story that already existed.

> I would argue this is a common fallacy: I can't do something but I can use automation to do it. But chances are, being unable to do it also means you're unable to judge the result and understand what is right/wrong

While in general it's true, reality can be different. I'm using GPT-4 for coding thing that I don't know much about. I have only ideas what I want, but not how exactly to code it. Simple offloading to AI works fine. I can learn libraries and APIs it's using, but that isn't my goal. I want the working product. This semi-automated approach saves a lot of time.

That was just a practical example. We can argue that in some cases it doesn't work. Yes, and may never work. But there is an area where it works. And this area at least is not going to shrink.

Animation is probably less capital-intensive than live-action film-making, but more labor-intensive given the need to care for each frame. But so long as you have an abundance of time, you can make a movie on your own.

Surprisingly, you also don't need to draw very well to animate. (But it will help a lot if you can.) There are crude works of animation that still found success (maybe more observable in the US than Japan), like South Park and Don Hertzfeldt's works. These examples might even illustrate that audiences care more about the writing than the drawings.

The tricky part may be finding an audience. There's so much content on the web, that it may still help to exhibit works in human-curated forums like film festivals. Somehow, then-student Don Hertzfeldt found his way into Cannes, where he probably gained much more exposure. Later, Don Hertzfeldt and Mike Judge (of Beavis and Butthead fame) supported other animators find exposure by hosting The Animation Show (last held in 2008).

There are plenty of film festivals showcasing animation today, shorts and feature-length, but I wonder which ones would be most effective. The dream of "breaking in" with a film festival screening has allured many aspiring film-makers, to the extent that scammers even start their own film festivals for the sake of collecting exorbitant entry fees (which doesn't guarantee being showcased at the festival). With film-makers having to pay entry fees for numerous festivals to increase chances of finding the right audience, the "marketing" fee can become more expensive than an indie production itself.

I wonder how solo or skeleton-crew animators would "break in" and find an audience today.

I wonder what he’s seen that makes him think that. I love playing with Midjourney, but if you want it to create a specific thing, you’re out of luck. I can see AI getting you somewhere, but I can’t see it coming up with a consistent, good quality result.

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