On Animation: From to eew to aww. Part 2 - Discount Store dust bunnies versus Ai

There's a couple of species of 3D that come to mind when thinking about moving pictures. There's virtual 3D and real 3D. One involves lots of physical bits and the other is digital bits. Consider this by Wes Anderson - The Isle of Dogs

For stop-frame animation every frame has to be set up one at a time, 24 for each second of the film. It's a lengthy and fastidious process. The point being if they can animate scruffy hairy pooches, they could do the same for scruffy dust bunnies too.

The eyes have it for adding expression to animated characters. You can stick googly eyes on almost anything and we'll anthropomorphise it and endow it with life and feelings.

Adding non-googly eyes worked better for the villain of the piece. Stick a couple of cut-out paper eyes on the much-abhorred vacuum cleaner and suddenly the central vac looms over Rayon as if he's about to be inhaled into the belly of the beast.

Cute but disturbingly wrong.

Artificial intelligence is going to change the process of animation radically though. Here are a few samples of ai insisting that dust bunnies a) have something to do with rabbits and b) they have big kawaii puppy eyes.
Sooner or later ai'll get the eyes right and put a whole lot of character designers out of a job.

I'm going to stump up for some more ai time and that's what the next entry will be about. Proper scruffy fluffy dust bunnies without the Eye of Sauron thing happening.