Joel Valdez was a student with us years ago and then became one of our instructors. He has since gone on to a successful career in many disciplines of art.
We’ve both been experimenting with AI for a while now and have been keeping abreast of its developments. One of the things that has particularly intrigued us is the possibility of using the technology to animate our own characters. Something I’ve termed as non-generative AI. In other words we use our own images and designs instead of generating them from an AI program and then animate them using AI as a motion medium.
That’s exactly what Joel has done here with his project called “Joey”.
Joel used AI to animate the first episode of his project. These are his characters. The background is designed from his concept sketch. He didn’t need to have AI generate images of the characters and the environment. He just used AI to make his own designs move.
This is copyright safe / copyrightable content. He’s already finished episode 2 and is creating a series with the greatest of ease and efficiency.
This is a whole new direction. Joel is utilizing and guiding AI to produce his original character based video content. He is keeping pace with the studios who are all developing AI based production pipelines with this rapidly advancing technology.
